Invasive Species

In high school, I attended an assembly I remember vividly. Some biologist or researcher came in front of us to talk about ethics in science, and she brought up the fact that in Iceland, almost every fetus found to have Down's syndrome is aborted. I looked up the latest stats, and as of 2026, only 2-3 babies with Down's syndrome are born annually. Iceland has one of the lowest rates of Down's syndrome in the world.

The guy next to me, who always wore a cross on his neck, whispered, "That's so fucked up."

I like science, science fiction and thorny philosophical questions surrounding transhumanism, and Invasive Species offers some interesting questions to chew on. The game is set in an Earth 20 Minutes into the Future, where AI assistants are commonplace and an alien empire has come to Earth promising to uplift humans (biologically modify them into their desired forms) as long as the humans promise to (Spoiler - click to show)incubate the eggs of the alien species, and raise them when they hatch, in return. Also, it may or may not be an imperialist scheme to make the uplifted humans more politically and personally dependent on the alien species, extracting reproductive value from them while offering resources that are easily provided by the alien species but difficult for humans to accomplish (i.e. the alien capability to genetically modify and uplift human beings).

The bit I played was alright, so I was disappointed when it ended abruptly by saying that Interlude II and Act III are currently unfinished, and you should join a mailing list for updates. I would've vastly preferred to play through the whole game in one sitting, especially since I played on mobile. Which, due to how Twine saves work, erased all my progress the moment I fully closed and reopened Safari.

The game suffers from the lack of ending, because it means the story's toughest questions have no resolution. What ultimately happens to the people who are uplifted? What are the full moral complexities of the situation and how each faction perceives it? What are the eventual political consequences? We don't have the full story, so it's hard to write a full response.

Due to this, it also feels like the toughest questions aren't explored as much as they could be. The game cites Octavia Butler as an inspiration; the first Octavia Butler story I read was Bloodchild, and it's an unapologetically vicious story, no holds barred, exploring the full implications of alien imperialism in a way that parallels human imperialism. Invasive Species feels tame in comparison. The writing is a little rough, with some errors here and there. The style wasn't much to my taste because it was rather plain. I chose to get all the cognitive upgrades, which should theoretically have a great effect on how a person thinks and perceives the world, but it felt like my decisions on that front didn't really add anything besides some throwaway paragraphs here and there.

Back to the topic of human imperialism. There's another situation I thought of while playing this game: the famous North Sentinel Island, home to the uncontacted tribe of the Sentinelese, who have solidly resisted any attempt at contact. Some people online are horrified by their situation: "You mean that if I'd been born here, I'd be stuck in a primitive hunter-gatherer lifestyle with no internet access?"

But if some enterprising explorer were to assimilate North Sentinelese Island into modern society, the Sentinelese wouldn't instantly become rich white-collar workers enjoying the full benefits of technology. Historically, the neighboring Andaman peoples experienced mass epidemics and population loss from British colonialism; the Great Andamanese suffered extreme demographic collapse and only a few dozen remain. If contacted, there's a significant chance that the Sentinelese would die from epidemics, their land would be taken, and their culture and traditions would be wiped away as they are forced to participate in wage labor.

The Sentinelese have been historically kidnapped by passing seafarers and taken as slaves, and captured and killed by the British, so this wouldn't be outside the realm of their expectations. It happened to the tribes nearby who got contacted, after all, and to indigenous peoples across the world, including in the US. (We can assume this story takes place in the US, since The Johns Hopkins Comprehensive Uplift Center Informed Consent Form mentions US law.)

Should the Sentinelese remain uncontacted? A lot of Sentinelese might die desperate and hungry anyway. Modern medicine could help them, if the proper precautions were taken. Science and technology could do wonders if they were applied with safeguards. But this assumes a perfect world where said safeguards exist. As things currently stand, contact is likely to just make things worse. The Sentinelese remain isolated, and this won't change anytime soon. From the late astrophysicist Stephen Hawking: "If aliens visit us, the outcome would be much as when Columbus landed in America, which didn't turn out well for the Native Americans."

I'm surprised this story didn't delve more into the implications of an alien empire visiting our species. It didn't mention any indigenous groups or any real-world colonialism or imperialism. It takes place on an Earth quite close to our own, but in a distant, hazy way that steers clear of explicitly discussing real ideologies or history, and I think that makes the story weaker. Isn't it incredibly ominous that the aliens call themselves an "empire", given what real empires have done? But the only meaningful resistance to the empire's activities so far comes from other aliens, not from humans themselves. I want more news articles about the aliens and their "uplift" scheme from various groups with various political leanings. I want snippets of philosophical articles and journal articles set in this world, from a variety of academic disciplines. I'd take long essays on disability rights and how the idea of "disability" is conceptualized in our world, and how that ties into the aliens claiming to cure human imperfections. Actually, what is life like for aliens in the space empire? What kind of society do they inhabit? I want to know all these things and more. I want more.

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.