It gets a little bloody sometimes.
- No Bullshit.
Lots of blood & gore.
Old-school.
Incision is an old-school retraux First-Person Shooter developed by one-man indie studio SmoothBrainDev and published by Hyperstrange. It was released in early access in September 2022.
You awaken in a cell of an unnamed, industrial city, six months after a viral outbreak from a mysterious substance called the "Growth" wipes out the population of surrounding urban areas. Relocated to the outskirts, you square off against legions and legions of monsters in an ultraviolent, merciless, retro-style action game that pays homage to old-school classics of the late '90s.
It's been six months since the relocation. I'm leaving today.
- 1-Up: In the form of floating, glowing green skulls.
- All Animals Are Dogs: Your eldritch tentacled slug-monster companion, Kitty, despite the name, behaves like a dog when you have it unleash hell on your enemies. After Kitty wipes out enough enemies, occasionally you'll pet Kitty for a job well done.
- Blackout Basement: The interior corridors of some buildings and literal basements, which are often pitch black. You do have a torch that allows a small circle of light as illumination.
- Chainsaw Good: Your starting melee weapon is a powerful chainsaw/spear hybrid (imaginatively named Chainspear) which makes short work of enemy monsters.
- Checkpoint Starvation: Incision features an extra life system that lets you revive right away if you're killed as long as you have spare extra lives, but this is at the cost of not being able to quicksave during a level. Lose all lives, and you have to start the current level from the start.
- Deadly Disc: One early enemy type can launch fiery, burning discs at your direction as an attack.
- A Dog Named "Cat": Or the eldritch, multi-tentacled, acid-spitting slug monster named "Kitty".
- Double Jump: You can jump twice, even in mid-air, to reach otherwise inaccessible areas.
- Everything Trying to Kill You: If it's alive and it's not named Kitty, it's an enemy.
- Excuse Plot: There's hardly a backstory leading to the game's events, you just start the levels kicking ass without a second question. You might find leftover notes from survivors detailing what leads to the Growth outbreak taking over the city, but they don't really have any impact on gameplay.
- Gatling Good: You can obtain a minigun rather early in the game, to chew up hordes and hordes of enemies easily.
- Gun Twirling: The secondary fire of the revolver makes you twirl it as long as you hold it. Firing when the frames where the revolver "shines" while twirling will fire a critical shot that deals increased damage and can gib smaller enemies in just one hit.
- I Call It "Vera": You call your eldritch living plasma-gun "Kitty".
- Idiosyncratic Difficulty Levels: No retraux-style FPS games would be complete without them:
- Barely Scratched
- Fearless in the Face of Death
- Overkill Through Overconfidence
- Asking For It
- Living Weapon: The bio-energy launcher you obtain for blasting enemies is a living, multi-tentacled, eldritch slug-like creature where you hold its body while it spits projectiles on mooks. And you name it "Kitty".
- Meat Moss: One of the recurring scenery you come across, walls, corridors and ceilings coated with red, flesh-like growth. The game even throws a squishy sound as you navigate your way across, like walking on raw flesh.
- Scenery Gorn: The city in ruins after the outbreak isn't a pretty sight. The very first area contains dissected cadavers buzzing with flies in the same room you're in, and outside the city ruins you'll frequently encounter skinless corpses, corridors coated in blood, and bloodied puddles.
- Short-Range Shotgun: The Jawbreaker triple barrelled shotgun, introduced in Episode 2. It can't hit the broad side of a barn at medium or long ranges, but anything standing in point blank range will most likely be splattered across the room in one shot.
- Shoulder Cannon: Feral Armament is a demon-zombie-robot with twin missile dispensers on both of its shoulders, which it uses to unleash a Macross Missile Massacre at you.
- Suspiciously Cracked Wall: If a wall is dented, chances are there's a secret room behind it. To access it, you need to kick down the wall by pressing the action button while standing beside it. Sometimes, the only way out of an area is looking for the dents in walls.
- To Be Continued: The game ends with a "To be Continued in Episode 2" as a Sequel Hook. As of February 2024, the first three levels of the second episode are available to play.
