Reviews by Maustin66

Invasive Species is one of those very rare games that work equally well as a novel of ideas and as a playable game. The playable parts are a standalone game with a beginning, a middle, and an end. But it is also part of a larger game whose second part will be completed next year—more of a game that promises a sequel than an unfinished game. And I did find that I very much want to see how my character and my choices will play out in that sequel, which I look forward to playing.

My primary attraction was to the ideas of the story. It takes two big ideas—one from science fiction and one from contemporary religion—and joins them into a coherent story. It is significant, I think, that this game was a collaboration between a critically acclaimed novelist and an award-winning religious studies scholar. The game does a good job of taking a compelling idea from each of their two (a)vocations and merging them into a single, compelling, and game-defining idea.

The first idea, the science fiction one, is the idea of"uplift," or human genetic improvement driven and supervised by a more advanced species in a fairly crowded galaxy made up of uplifter and uplifted species. This idea can be found throughout science fiction but is probably most associated with David Brin's six Uplift novels, written between 1980 and 1998. The uplift tradition in science fiction is largely about technology transfer from aliens to humans, and human genetic manipulation of other species on Earth. For Brin, uplift is an instrument of intergalactic colonialism: uplifted species owe 100,000 years of servitude to their uplifters. Human beings cause a major disruption in this galactic economy because they appear to have uplifted themselves.

In the game Invasive Species, uplift serves a purpose closer to the one it serves in novels like Greg Bear's Queen of Angels. Rather than working at the species level and raising species to sentience, it works at the individual level and gives people personal physical and cognitive upgrades. It makes people better at math, better able to concentrate, and so on. It can also heal people of genetic defects, which introduces one of the primary conflicts of the game.

The second big idea in the game comes from religion, and is not obvious until the Second Act. This is the idea of corporeal resurrection—a traditional Christian belief and a core part of some contemporary Restorationist traditions.

This is a lot of big ideas hiding inside of a game, but, amazingly, the gameplay is fairly straightforward and enjoyable. The various actions that the player chooses have meaningful consequences, which the authors make visible at various points in the narrative. The writing is engaging, and the deep philosophical and theological pondering generally takes place offline, when the spontaneous overflow of powerful thought is recollected in tranquility.