When I visited Skybound Entertainment to get my hands on Invincible VS ahead of its June reveal, I emerged impressed by the technical proficiency and over-the-top action the 3v3 fighter delivers within a product that feels genuine to the source material. And it makes sense, seeing as how the team is made up of writers, artists, and talent involved with the show and comic, as well as developers who previously worked on the Killer Instinct reboot. As the roster continues to build out, with the director of the Global Defense Agency, Cecil Stedman, this tag-team fighting game is looking to be more and more of a dream project for fans of the series like myself.
Though I didn’t get my hands on Cecil’s gameplay like I did with Invincible, Atom Eve, Bulletproof, and Thula back in May, I was given an advance screening of a gameplay trailer. Cecil looks surprisingly technical, with a lot of devices, teleportation, and even summoned ReAnimen mixed into his gameplay style.
“It would have been really easy for us to just have him be a ‘Man in the Ear,’ but we wanted to do something more than that,” narrative director Michael Rogers says. “Cecil is a fan favorite of a lot of people on the team, myself included, and the way we figured it out was just being inventive. I had a wishlist of things that I wanted in the game from a story perspective, and that was teleportation, the White Room, ReAnimen, and all of those things were things that our combat designers already had on their brain.”
Cecil joins a roster that already includes Invincible, Omni-Man, Atom Eve, Bulletproof, Thula, Rex Splode, and Battle Beast. If you’re a fan of Invincible, you’ll pretty quickly realize that Cecil is the first character without superpowers. “If you look at it from a gameplay perspective, you have all these different archetypes from grapplers to strikers to rush-down powerhouse characters that push you to corners, and then you have mid- and long-range characters,” executive producer Mike Willette says. “The concept of Cecil, what he does is he manipulates and he can stay on the outside. So, in his kit, we have a lot of long-range weaponry, from his GDA tech, like his sonic mine, to the ReAnimen that he can call in, to the White Room, the orbital strike, the Flaxan weapons; he has all this stuff available to him. So, for him, he’s just setting up the battlefield. He’s setting up traps and things that you have to get around. […] He can’t fly, he doesn’t have a double-jump, so he takes advantage of his GDA tech and costing the taxpayers all that money by teleporting all around the stage.”
The Mysterious Story Mode
In the Invincible series on Amazon’s Prime Video service, Cecil is voiced by actor Walton Goggins. While J.K. Simmons has been confirmed to reprise his role as Omni-Man in the game, Quarter Up hesitates to confirm anyone else in the cast. However, voice acting plays a prominent role before, during, and after the fights, as characters exchange quips, but it will, in theory, play an even bigger role in the story mode, about which, to this point, Quarter Up has not revealed many details.
Though we’ve known the game will have a story mode for quite some time, details have been extraordinarily scarce, with the team declining to discuss much about it during my initial interaction with them. That’s why, when I spoke with the developers again last week, I used it as an opportunity to ask them for everything they could tell me.
“The idea is that it’s a standalone narrative set in the Invincible universe,” Rogers says. “We wanted story mode to feel like an episode of the show that you would play; that was our approach with it. I was lucky enough to work with Helen Leigh, who’s one of the writers from the show, and a close collaboration with [co-creator] Robert Kirkman. […] We wanted to create this sort of specialized, specific, standalone piece of story that also feels like it fits and is right at home in the universe.”
Rogers also hints that there’s a very specific reason tied to the story regarding why Cecil is playable. “I felt like it was a good time to bring up story mode again because being able to bring him out of the ‘Guy in the Ear’ and put him actually on the fight line, it gave us a lot more to play with in the story,” he says. “I don’t want to spoil too much because we love our surprises in the Invincible IP, but there’s a reason why he’s playable. In fact, every playable character that we’ve revealed thus far has a role of some sort in the story.”
Though Quarter Up stops short of confirming what era of the Invincible show this playable “episode” known as Invincible VS takes place quite yet, the team did write with a specific era in mind, which is perhaps best reflected in the character Invincible, Mark Grayson. “I think that definitely informs how we write a character and what sort of aspects we bring, especially to Mark, a character that’s evolving constantly across the IP,” Rogers says. “We wanted to make sure that Mark felt like the right Mark, and in the right time and space. You can see from the gameplay we’ve released for him, he’s got some of that whimsy that you see in a younger Mark space, but he’s also got a little more of that seriousness that you sometimes see in Mark as he’s growing as a superhero and learning.”
A New Hero (or Villain) Emerges
Before I leave the call, Willette goads Rogers to “tell him about the super secret thing.” That super secret thing is that Quarter Up worked in close collaboration with Skybound Entertainment to create a completely new character for Invincible VS. “We’re going to have a brand-new character who has not appeared anywhere in the Invincible VS universe, in story and in the game,” Rogers says with a smile. “Honestly, it was so exciting to be able to bring someone brand new and bring them into this, into the story, and into the universe. I’m bursting to tell you more, but I will be in so much trouble.”
Though Rogers couldn’t talk much more about the original character that will appear in Invincible VS, he does share that the team worked closely with the team behind the other parts of the IP to ensure it feels like an authentic inclusion. However, art director Dan Eder was able to speak a bit more about the surprise inclusion of this character and the team’s overall approach to authenticity.
“Across the board, the creators are heavily involved in this project, and I think that’s one of the privileges of being first-party [to Skybound],” Eder says. “We’re a part of Skybound, so we have the right access to them, and they are super hyped about the game; they were involved from day one. A lot of the major decisions, we brainstorm with them, with the new character, with some of our existing characters, or certain story elements, and so we want to get their first impression and first reactions, and then we go from there. Who knows these characters better than the people who created them? We want to make sure that it’s an authentic experience, but also that we’re able to have our own special footprint when it comes to the game and how we show another side of the characters that you wouldn’t have been able to see in other media.”
Invincible VS arrives on PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC in 2026. For a more in-depth overview with hands-on impressions, check out our deep-dive hands-on preview here.
