Incredipede Review

Physics puzzlers are nothing new. They've been around a while and generally seem to follow a trend. Incredipede changes that, bringing something fresh and inventive to the 2D physics puzzle genre while offering plenty of challenge and the opportunity to share creations with other players.

You can ignore the story here, as it's largely pointless. It doesn't try to be deep or confuse you; humans have invaded your island, you must get to the other side of it. What's important here is the puzzles, and in particular, the creature you'll use to navigate them.

You're given the option of playing on normal and hard difficulty. On normal, you're given pre-made creatures fit for the purpose of the short levels. Hard mode, however, sees more challenging levels and the creature you will be controlling is your own creation. This is done by clicking and dragging on individual limbs to stretch them, clicking on muscles to form entirely new limbs and stretching and twisting to your heart's content.

Normal mode will last you about an hour once you get the hang of it, then hard mode a couple more. Creating your creature is more fun than it has any right to be, however, so you may find yourself simply sitting pulling limbs and muscles seeing what you can come up with. For example, you may need to come up with something that will allow you to roll down a hill, but find yourself stuck half way down when your mess of limbs catch on each other and stop you dead. Thankfully there are community solutions for the trickier parts you can watch if you're truly stuck.

Once you've cleared these two modes, there's one more thing to add to the title's longevity; user created content. As you can create your own creature, so too can you create your own levels. You can then upload these for other players to try, as well as downloading other users levels for your own enjoyment. Some of these are wonderfully designed, while others, of course, are of the level of complexity you'll find on the popular flash game Happy Wheels.

It can be incredibly frustrating to begin with controlling the different limbs, which is QWOP-like in complexity but with simpler controls; you'll only be using either the A and D keys or the left and right arrows to control yourself. The limbs are what you control, so if your current creature is a limbless wheel, you won't move without a hill to give you some momentum; however, add a limb and it can be used to scrape yourself along the ground. Adding more limbs adds to the difficulty of movement, but also helps on obstacles. For example, if there's a large pillar you need to get by, a particularly long limb can be moved into it, hitting it from the top causing it to collapse, where a short limb hitting the bottom may only nudge it without knocking it over.

The user created levels come with samples of the user's fastest completion time and you are then free to try and beat the creator's own time. While it doesn't sound like a lot of content overall, and it's true it will only last you about four hours maximum, it fits perfectly with the budget price and is worth checking out for the unique nature of the creature and the complexity that it can bring to what should be a simple task.

More time can of course be garnered from going back to levels you completed and trying to improve on your old times. This can be very satisfying; starting a level, being terrible and scrabbling your way to the end, only to go back once you've got the hang of things and clear it in seconds.

The frustration may be intended until you've learned, but it's also the game's biggest problem. At first glance, given the simple but wonderful backdrops and the eerie beauty of the creature itself, you may think this is going to be a relatively peaceful experience, but you may just find yourself hitting your keyboard harder than you intended when you're playing. The difficulty scale can be roughly equated to that of walking up some steps then climbing a mountain. The graphics and sound hide a complex game that will challenge you, frustrate you, and ultimately satisfy you. I'll leave you with the perfect phrase to describe the experience: it's short, sweet and challenging.