INCISION

My first hour with INCISION ended with a level restart, a muttered expletive, and the immediate urge to go again. That cycle, gut-punch then compulsion, is the whole heartbeat of this thing. SmoothBrainDev is a one-person studio, and the full release that landed in August 2025 carries three years of early access refinement in every corridor. The world the game builds, rust-thick industrial mazes where flesh and pipework fuse into a single living organism called the Growth, has a body-horror coherence that most indie shooters of this type never bother to achieve. Corridors feel like organs. Enemy design extends the metaphor: Sycophants hurl ricocheting sawblades, machine spider-priests tagged Spiderpopes rain homing missiles, and augmented soldiers carry burst-firing energy rifles. No enemy in the roster uses hitscan, which means every projectile thrown at you is in principle avoidable, a philosophy that makes death feel like a lesson rather than a lottery. The ten weapons each carry an alternate fire mode, and learning when to use them is where the real skill ceiling lives. The Quad Shotgun lobs bouncing incendiary bombs on alt-fire. The heavy machine gun's secondary converts to a grenade launcher. A spinning revolver trick shot amplifies damage if you time the input. The saw-spear functions as a long-range slash or a close-quarters buzzsaw depending on range. Combat at its best becomes a kind of frantic instrument-switching, reading the room and cycling through options before the room kills you. The double jump adds just enough vertical expressiveness without turning the game into a platformer, and three movement speeds give the moment-to-moment flow a rhythm that feels earned rather than scripted. The mode INCISION is best known for dividing players on is its save structure. There are no quicksaves and no checkpoints inside a level. A lives system scatters 1-ups across each map, and running dry means the whole level restarts. Levels run roughly twenty to forty minutes each, so a careless death near the end stings hard. The community reception reflects this honestly: the overall Steam score sits at Very Positive, but the loudest friction point in nearly every negative review is this exact system. The developer has been responsive, adding difficulty sliders that control enemy projectile speed and damage output, which softens the edge without removing the arcade-style backbone. If you are the type of player who saves constantly out of habit, prepare for a readjustment period. If you can wire yourself into the arcade mindset, that moment when you finally clear a level clean is the kind of payoff that lingers. The atmosphere and soundtrack deserve their own sentence. Composer Frederic Chicoine, credited as iNi, built a full album's worth of material for the game, mixing industrial metal aggression with genuinely unsettling ambient passages. The low-fi cutscenes between episodes, crunchy and deliberately cheap-looking, add to the alien texture rather than undermining it. Lore is entirely optional, delivered through green-lit points of interest you choose to linger at, which is exactly the right call for this kind of game. Players who want to understand what the Growth is and who the protagonist called Healer actually is will find enough to piece together a story. Everyone else can just shoot the Spiderpopes. INCISION is not trying to expand or reinvent the boomer shooter. It is trying to be a very specific, very deliberate version of one, and in that narrower goal it succeeds with uncomfortable conviction. The rough edges are real: switch puzzles can be unclear about what they unlocked, and some later bottomless-pit sections drew enough criticism that the developer actively patched them. But the art direction, the sound design, and the pure tactile weight of the weapons are the work of someone who has thought hard about what makes this genre worth preserving. It runs around five to six hours for a clean playthrough, which is the right length for something this intense.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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