By Nathan Grayson on October 26th, 2012 at 10:00 am.
Incredipede is kind of disgusting. Not Human Centipede disgusting – or even normal centipede disgusting, for that matter – but still a little yucky. As you add writhing masses of legs and muscle clusters to your ‘pede’s eyeball body, it becomes all the more likely to flop and flail and squish and splorch in adorably grotesque fashions. Don’t get me wrong, though: it’s magical. I just messed around with the demo for about an hour, and I was transfixed. It’s an already interesting physics-based conceit wrapped in disarming amounts of charm. And spindly bone legs. And a hint of QWOP. I really, really hope the remainder of Incredipede keeps this up. In the meantime, view evidence of its delights after the break.
Isn’t that fun? So far, the puzzles I’ve encountered have been pretty easy, but otherwise, this one’s been haphazardly face-planting up and down in all the right places. Plus, later levels apparently add more variety in terms of both control options and limb types, so fingers/legs/antlers crossed that the complexity ratchets up before too long.
I’ve also been surprised by how much work clearly went into the eyeball itself. When it frantically paddles through lava, it flinches in palpably pitiable pain. And when I accidentally (I swear it was an accident; even the fifth time in a row) fling it off a cliff in the opposite direction of my goal, it goes all wide-eyed like Wile E. Coyote when he realizes he’s not actually standing on anything. It adds so much, though. I still don’t know what the hell a “Quozzle” is, but I’m pretty sure I adore it.
Incredipede’s available for purchase here now. It’s also attempting to do that whole Steam Greenlight thing, alongside its good friend The Whole Gaming Industry. I highly recommend giving the demo a try, as I’ve found it quite enjoyable so far. So yes, go do that.
26/10/2012 at 10:07 Preyer says:
Also on GOG: http://www.gog.com/en/gamecard/incredipede/
26/10/2012 at 10:17 RogB says:
interesting art style, i like it
26/10/2012 at 10:22 frightlever says:
There’s something very internet meme-y about that first picture, on the right…
26/10/2012 at 12:18 remoteDefecator says:
If goatse is a meme, then I agree.
26/10/2012 at 19:28 MikoSquiz says:
It puts me more in mind of a Sheela Na Gig.
26/10/2012 at 11:33 DaftPunk says:
This looks really cool :D
26/10/2012 at 11:44 phlebas says:
QWOP/Bob Came In Pieces/World of Goo/Woodcuts? Looks like fun!
26/10/2012 at 12:04 strange_headache says:
Fantastic Contraption with less gameplay but a better visual style?
27/10/2012 at 02:38 PleasingFungus says:
Fantastic Contraption and similar definitely come to mind. It looks lovely, though. Personality is worth a lot in a game!
26/10/2012 at 12:48 Nucleus says:
Looks like artsy version of Edmund McMillen’s Triachnid…
26/10/2012 at 14:47 Tacroy says:
That’s pretty much exactly what I was going to say, except I was going to put in a link.
26/10/2012 at 15:15 Hairball says:
It’s a completely different looking game about building creatures, did you not watch the video?
26/10/2012 at 14:15 twig_reads says:
This is cool, I remember the first aritcle here about the tech demo of Incredipede, over a year ago, and now to see how that bare-bones tech demo has grown into games. One of the most fascinating things is creation of a game, too bad only so few developers (and then mostly indie only) show their works in progress. But I guess that’s the price we have to pay because some people wouldn’t understand what a work in progress is about and start whining about grahics and half-baked game mechanics and whatnot. That makes me sad. :(
26/10/2012 at 15:23 Hairball says:
Whenever I see these sort of things I always wish that there would be some sort of way to speed up the simulation and feed in a bunch of parameters so you could apply genetic algorithms to them like this.
27/10/2012 at 00:38 zhanba6 says:
http://pp。cc/6o1x
27/10/2012 at 02:40 The Random One says:
Sweet Mother of Foddy, that was a gruesome back story.
I’m not especially pleased that the game drags on for so long before it gives you access to all of its tools and that the demo seems to end just as the game proper was about to begin. I may just be petty enough to not buy it over that.