Invasive Species

I haven’t gone back and checked, but it feels like there are more explicitly-incomplete games in this year’s Comp than usual. For the most part, I was fine writing reviews of Postgrad and Gambler’s Quest because even if I didn’t know exactly how all the twists of turns of their final plots would play out, the excerpt on offer was able to establish a clear sense of how the game works and what it was about. Invasive Species is another creature entirely, though. It’s only about 60% of the full game – we get Act I, an interlude, and Act II, with a promised second interlude and Act III still to come – but that 60% manages to cram in at least two and a half distinct games, and damned if I can guess whether the final two fifths manages to wrangle that number back down to one, or if things are going to get more unruly.

This is going to be a heavily spoiler-filled review, because I can’t talk about my response to the places the game winds up going without talking about said places, and since the biggest of those twists happens at the end of Act I, I’m not going to use blurry-text as the shift is big enough, and early enough, that dealing with blurry-text feels unnecessary and awkward. So if you’re spoiler-averse this might be a good time to bail – I’ll say that while I don’t think Invasive Species is generally successful, at least in its current form, I did find it engaging.

OK, we’ll pad out this next paragraph with a description of the opening before getting to the twist. Invasive Species initially presents itself as domestic sci-fi: you’re a grandmother helping her daughter take care of her autistic son during a big event her company is putting on to tout the benefits of a new body- and brain-modification technology. The event is targeted to social-media influencers, which makes sense given their focus on novelty and appearances, and their ability to set a trend, but the game’s broader concern with bioethics takes precedence: obviously given the context of your grandson’s condition, questions about the possibility of this modification to mitigate some of his most challenging symptoms come up, and in between making choices to try to keep him happy and out of trouble, you’re given a lot of background information, encounter examples of the kinds of results the company is getting, and are prompted for your opinions about disability and body- and behavior-modification generally.

This works … fine, I’d say. The subject matter definitely feels compelling and timely, and in theory making the player the caregiver for a vulnerable tyke gives them a stake in these debates. I found the implementation slightly less effective than I wanted it to be, however. In part this is because the game progresses from the abstract to the concrete, rather than vice versa. You’re prompted to fill out a checkbox questionnaire on disability treatment before you even meet Weston, your grandkid, and you also need to decide on whether to opt for body-modification for yourself as almost one of the first choices you’re offered (albeit you can revisit it later). As a result, rather than experiencing a story with living, breathing characters working through some thorny problems about autonomy and dignity, and then being given an opportunity to reflect on how that’s impacted the player’s beliefs, instead you get what’s in effect a series of policy quizzes before the narrative has a chance to get off the starting blocks. And this pattern happens several other times, where the game puts the story on hold to engage in high-level (often stilted) conversation about high-level issues before they have a chance to play out on screen. Midway through the second act, there’s a throwaway line about how you used to work in hospital administration, which is maybe meant to justify why you’re engaging with these questions as if you had a Masters in these topics, but regardless it still feels clumsy and out of character.

The core interpersonal dynamics of the game, those between the main character and her daughter and grandson, are also sometimes given short shrift. I was anticipating the opening section would have many scenes involving helping Weston through what’s clearly going to be a tough day, but in the event there’s really only short scene squarely about this; Invasive Species is too busy providing color on the influencers, going into lots of detail on the sales pitch for the “Uplift” procedure, showing how it’s been used to give animals advanced intelligence (and shoehorning in an awkward “dilemma” that echoes argument about reparations), plus all the aforementioned social-science-paper stuff. So that’s at least one and a half games by my count.

Then you hit the interlude and shit blows up even bigger. See, throughout Act I you’re getting more and more hints that the modification technology has some squirrely aspects to it – it’s a gift being provided by the benevolent Zydon space empire, and you don’t need to have seen a lot of Twilight Zone episodes to find that ominous. Every detail is more suspicious than the last, and since one of the early ones is the revelation that part of the process involves an egg being implanted in your body, it didn’t take long for my Luddite instincts to take over. Still, Act I ends with Weston’s parents deciding to send him off to get de-autism-ized by the bug aliens, and I figured I’d play along by signing up for a small modification myself so I could go with him (I think you wind up accompanying him regardless, for what it’s worth).

And then in the interlude your daughter forwards you a bunch of emails so you can help her with the paperwork, and mixed in with the official contract email (which is a nicely-mocked-up seven page pdf that feels cribbed from real-world medical forms) is one from a whistleblower who describes what the aliens are actually up to. Sure, there’s another email where the reporter is smeared in an attempt to discredit her, but 1) this is a transparent hack job, and 2) even if you think there’s only a 1% chance that you and your grandchild were going to be devoured by one of the pustule-maws of Zxxy’asdfs the All-Engendering, there to be reborn in the fecund matrix of His million wombs and recreated from the cells up as a wetnurse to His insectile progeny, you’re clicking on PASS.

So yeah, there’s an abrupt pivot into Lovecraftian conspiracy horror, and maddeningly, the only dialogue options you’ve got with your daughter are “good news, it looks like they don’t need a copy of Weston’s immunization records.” The game’s bizarre refusal to engage with this shift in premise made Act II the stuff of black comedy, as you and Weston are secluded in a camp with a cohort of other saps, recovering from the procedure as you’re press-ganged into parenting vile alien pupae that you’ve been re-engineered to think of as cute. There are opportunities to voice displeasure with the company and the procedure, and a few places where the dangerous nature of your charges breaks through, but there’s also a sequence where you talk to a disgruntled peer and decide whether to sign on to their open letter calling for independent review of the company’s informed consent policies. AN ALIEN CULT HAS FED OUR BODIES TO THE SLUG-GOD SLUMBERING BENEATH THE ICE AND IS USING THE TWISTED MOCKERIES THAT HAVE REPLACED US TO REAR A GENERATION OF HORRORS, VICTORIA, EYES ON THE FUCKING PRIZE!

The thing is, there are still glimmers of the game Invasive Species first seemed to be in here, and they continue to mostly work fine. While you can’t react with nearly the vehemence that the situation requires, there are some interesting choices where you have to balance your distrust of the company and the aliens with the fact that you’re under their control and protection, such as it is. The policy debates also come back in, and sure, they continue to be poorly integrated, but they are kind of interesting to think about. There’s a lot more of Weston here, as he becomes verbal and much more social, and witnessing his development alongside the growth of his preternatural bond with the larval monstrosity born from his flesh is an exercise in ambivalence. But – to put it gently – the bioethics-focused domestic drama sits uneasily with the conspiracy thriller about the cyclopean uterus-monster hidden under an Antarctic lake

There are some other places where the game could be tightened up a bit: there’s an assistance mode, on by default, that tells you exactly what impact your choices will have, and while it’s nice to know when you’re picking which options you want to do first, but you’ll have a chance to do all of them eventually, vs. where a choice might have short- or long-term consequences, it’s currently tuned to provide way too much information (it states that some choices don’t have a mechanical impact, for example, and at least once spoiled information that hadn’t yet come out in the narrative), so this should probably be dialed back and maybe default to being inactive. And beyond the big twist, the game is way too blasé about providing some context, like the fact that the “Conrad” who you blandly mention as your daughter’s boss is also Weston’s father (Conrad gives big Elon Musk vibes, there’s one person I wouldn’t mind being fed to a slug-monster).

Overall, though, this is an ambiguous game that has so many irons in the fire that I really have no idea how the Act II cliffhanger will be resolved, or what the conclusion will reveal the game to have notionally been about all along. There’s something exciting about that, I suppose, but it’s also a sign of a game that would really benefit from more focus: whether from an overabundance of ambition or having two authors working somewhat at cross-purposes, Invasive Species is at war with itself. Personally I’m most interested in the human-level drama, so a version of the game that gave Weston’s arc room to breathe and presented the technology more neutrally has the most appeal. But it could also be fun to let Victoria inhabit her inner badass and commit to bringing the whole operation down from the inside, and in a pinch the version where interactive policy quizzes provide an introduction to the work of Martha Nussbaum could be an interesting diversion too, I suppose. It’s just that they can’t all share the same body.