“It’s been six months since the relocation. Six months of watching it all change. I’m leaving today.”
I’ve been taking the ability to save anywhere in a lot of games for granted, admittedly. Life’s pretty busy. Sometimes I have to drop whatever I’m doing at the moment to take care of other things, or I only want to play for a few minutes at a time as opposed to a few hours. It’s something that I’m glad to have, sure. But there’s something that you lose in being able to just pick up and play wherever you left off last. I was reminded of that recently when I went to play INCISION, a retro horror-themed shooter that asks one dangerous question: Can you make a fun boomer shooter without one of the subgenre’s most prominent features? As in, being able to save whenever and wherever you want?
Developed by SmoothBrainDev and published by Hyperstrange, INCISION is as brutal and punishing as it is drenched in dried blood and crusty rust, exchanging mid-mission saves for a traditional lives system alongside a bevy of hard-hitting weapons and grotesque monsters. It’s crunchy, caustic, and downright callous. But is it fun? Absolutely. Let’s talk about why that is.
Blood and Bone, Rust and Metal
INCISION sets its tone almost immediately with a crude, but beautiful intro cinematic. You — an archeologist with military training — find yourself accidentally stumbling across a cosmic evil during a routine expedition into a set of ancient ruins, leaving you ripped asunder and left to die in a puddle of your own viscera. At first, that is. Soon enough, your body is given new life via this mysterious force, though you’ll wish you’d have been left to die once you see the world as it is now.
The city you once called home has changed. Flesh has seeped into every open pore of concrete, the people have changed into strange amalgamations of bone and metal, and a stench of rot and rust has filled the air, choking the sky with a deep red tinge. But you’re not going to take this sitting down. With your newly-granted strength, and your brain still mostly intact, you fashion a deadly arsenal out of loose scrap and a lone revolver, desperate to understand the madness that surrounds you — and a means to put an end to it, once and for all.
INCISION, much like the many other games it commonly gets paired with, doesn’t necessarily force its story upon you. You’re more than free to just go guns blazing without thinking of the greater implications of what’s going on, which is commonly doled out through interstitial level text or through small, interactive lore dumps found throughout each level. Cutscenes before and after each episode give you an additional amount of context for everything that’s going on too, and they’re an absolute treat to experience. They’re crunchy, low-fi, and occasionally cheap-looking, but it’s done so in a way that still feels pleasing to the senses. They’re a step above the cutscenes found in Blood, for instance, where the protagonist looked like a clay model stiffly moving from one keyframe to another. Here, the visual fidelity and limited movement add to the alien atmosphere of everything around you.
The soundtrack is decidedly less alien. Primarily composed by iNi (aka Frédérick Chicoine), you get a decent mix of beating drums, chugging guitars, screeching synths, and the occasional bout of atmospheric ambience that perfectly accompanies the madness going on in the world you’re exploring. “Incision’s Theme,” “Meatpaint,” “The Throne,” and “Fiery Regutsination” are some of my favorite tracks on offer here. You can find the official soundtrack on iNi’s Bandcamp page.
There’s No Going Back (Or Loading a Save)
INCISION isn’t your average throwback shooter. That much has already been established. I almost want to say it was deliberately designed with arcade-oriented sensibilities in mind, albeit without a dedicated scoring system. The game is split into three episodes with around six levels each, give or take, with each level being freely replayable once you complete the entire episode. However, there’s one big caveat. Well, several caveats. You can’t save your game mid-level, you’ll need to collect extra lives to survive dying, and should you die without any extra lives, you’re going back. All the way back to the beginning of the level.
It’s an interesting approach to take. In an era where mapping tools and source ports allow you to make gargantuan, almost monolithic levels that really showcase a creator’s talents, how do you go about taking the opposite approach? How do you make a level that teeters a fine line between frustration and genuine challenge? Even in games I love, like CULTIC or Ion Fury, I’d be lying if I said that the prevalence of quick saves didn’t make some of their more elaborate challenges much easier. You could even argue that the enforcement of no quicksaves in certain areas in the former encouraged the abuse of quicksaves in other areas.
It’s what made INCISION so challenging but so rewarding. You’re taking the secret hunting of a regular retro shooter and essentially rewarding it tenfold through memorization and repetition. If you keep dying at a certain area, maybe you should look around more for hidden lives or extra resources. After every attempt, you have a better understanding of where enemies are coming from, or how to best tackle them with a specific weapon or how you can efficiently approach every encounter. It also demands that the levels you explore be more approachable and conducive to constant replays. Compared to something like WRATH: Aeon of Ruin, the highest number of monsters you’ll find in a single level peaks at just over 200 or so instead of approaching the 1000s, meaning that restarting just about any level really doesn’t take all that much time. Comparatively, at least.
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You’ll absolutely die a handful of times at the beginning. Episode One is definitely the weakest of the three, with cramped hallways and highly aggressive enemy spawns not playing well with your lack of available weapons. These early levels seem to rely more on just shocking you instead of providing a more conventional challenge, often throwing deathtraps your way or waves of charging Blood-Addled that dash out from dark corners. It gets easier as you acquire more weapons. But the difficulty curve here definitely shoots straight up before gradually mellowing out in the following episodes.
I’ll admit that there’s an adjustment period here — I considered bumping the difficulty down from the third preset setting just because I felt like I was being overwhelmed in every battle. But once you get a handle on things, you’ll be able to adapt. A pair of difficulty sliders that adjust enemy attack speed and damage are your only means of adjusting this, which I’m admittedly not a huge fan of in theory, but I do appreciate being able to fine tune things.
The weapons you can find are thankfully pretty useful. You start out with a revolver, a decent workhorse weapon with great accuracy, and a “saw spear” that has several special functions. Beyond just having two distinct melee attacks, a special charge attack that can be activated even without the saw spear being equipped, and the ability to be charged up with ludicrous damage for an entire level if you find the right power-up, it also has a hidden function that will become incredibly useful as you play. You can actually parry certain enemy attacks with it. The timing is a little tricky, but a successful parry will slow down time, deal massive damage, and give you an opportunity to break away from larger, more dangerous foes that can outrun you.
Other weapons evoke some familiar vibes if you’ve played a ton of other fast-paced FPS games. The shotgun and appropriately named “Jawbreaker” carry distinct Shadow Warrior and Serious Sam vibes for how fast it fires and how effectively it vaporizes whatever is in front of you, respectively. The machine gun, beyond just resembling Duke Nukem 3D’s Ripper, gradually overheats the longer you fire it, turning your shots into explosive fireballs that deal lingering damage. The railgun is, well, a railgun, one that’s sure to remind you of Doom 2016’s Gauss Cannon. Even the rocket launcher has its own unique quirks, allowing you to fire one rocket or several in a wide spread. In another fun nod to Shadow Warrior, you can also fire a deadly nuclear warhead from it, which absolutely decimates bosses if you position yourself properly. Just don’t be too reckless with it. You only get one at a time. There’s also Kitty. Kitty is best left as a surprise, frankly.
A good shooter has a good enemy roster, and I’m happy to say that INCISION certainly isn’t lacking in this department. They throw the book at you almost immediately. Gun-toting Rustborn appear in groups of three to five, Sycophants either rush you with sweeping attacks from their giant saw staves or fling bouncing saw blades at you from a distance, and stationary Pustules spit hot rounds at you that have a delayed explosion. Later on, foes like The Cherished actively avoid your attacks and deal massive damage up close, whereas hulking Heralds put a deadly spin on Doom‘s Arch-vile by forcing you to constantly move around, even if you break its line of sight.
Bosses, meanwhile, are fine, often being sequestered into their own condensed levels due to their immense challenge. Some are pretty straightforward but fun enough, and others — well, one, specifically — can be pretty obnoxious. The Rustborn Messiah especially comes to mind. No, the Rustborn Messiah isn’t necessarily bad, but the fact that his rockets home in on you does make that fight a particular sore spot for me. The final battle is thankfully pretty climactic to make up for this.
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There’s a fun flow state to everything once you really get a handle on how to play effectively. Parrying melee attackers with your saw spear before peeling back and lighting them up with a flamethrower, only to take out distant foes with your revolver and rocket launcher and quickly closing the gap to take out giant, lumbering monsters with your Jawbreaker, it’s the kind of fun and frenetic pacing you’d come to expect from a retro shooter. However, there’s a genuine tension here that you don’t really get in other games like it. Having to rely on your extra lives instead of infinite saves gave me that familiar tightness in my chest that I loved in games like Resident Evil, where one fatal mistake would be enough to put an end to everything.
Should You Play INCISION?
In spite of a rough first impression, I found myself growing to love INCISION throughout all three of its grimdark episodes. One small change in how the game handled the ability to save your progress made for a shooter that hooked me in a way that I haven’t felt in a while, at least when it comes to shooters like this. It reminded me of Viscerafest in the best kind of way — it’s one design philosophy followed through to its unhampered conclusion, making for a game that does more than just borrow from and improve upon what came before. Is it perfect? No. But it’s unique. And I’d say that’s worth so much more.
Would I recommend INCISION to everyone? Absolutely not. It’s definitely something that plays by its own rules instead of those that have already been preestablished by other games, and if you can’t really get a handle of what it’s demanding of you, you’re going to have a bad time. However, if you’re looking to challenge your twitch reflexes with some genuine challenge and tense odds, I’d say that it’s worth checking out. SmoothBrainDev has even been receptive to some of the more common critiques of INCISION, and they’re in the process of adding adjustable crosshairs and tweaking bottomless bits to be a bit more reasonable.
INCISION is currently available on Steam and GOG.
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