Incredipede Review

Lego Technic held a strong —fascination for me as a child, as I'm sure it did for many others. Assembling intricate combinations of rods, gears and blocks then connecting them to a motor, was the closest a 12 year-old could come to becoming their own Doctor Frankenstein. It was all you could do not to scream 'It's alive! when you first flicked the switch, and your creation lurched uncertainly across the dining room floor.

Northway Games' Incredipede effortlessly evokes those memories of small-scale amateur engineering. The game's focus is the Quozzle, a strange green spheroid with a single eye and the somewhat disturbing ability to sprout new limbs at any point of its body. All it takes is a simple click and drag of your mouse. A couple of clicks later, muscles are added and your creation is ready to take its first faltering steps.


And make no mistake, those first steps will be faltering. While mechanics are laid bare right from the start (quite literally too - each muscle is plainly, and somewhat grotesquely, visible) parsing these basic systems in a manner that translates to the intended form of movement is not as simple as it would seem.

Incredipede trailer


And it is this unpredictability that drives the majority of the game's enjoyment. Each level's goal is clear - take your Quozzle from one end of the map to the other. A moment's consideration, and the answer feels obvious.

Yet, no matter how well you think you have planned, inevitably your creation moves in the wrong direction or stumbles into some environmental hazard.

Successfully traversing the requirements of each level inevitably becomes an iterative process - fail, adjust, fail, adjust, succeed. The levels are less of a puzzle to be solved, and more a series of lessons to be learned. The game encourages experimentation. There is no single solution, and even when you get the design right on your first go, you always feel that there may have been a better, more efficient path to success.

Level design is clever, and the art is surprisingly beautiful, given its basic wood-cut presentation. But it is how much the idea of creating the perfect Quozzle for a given situation appeals that will determine how much enjoyment you get out of the game. If you take this as a puzzle game to be completed, you will breeze through the levels and be done with it in relatively short time.

If, on the other hand, you view each level and its assortment of challenges as a kind of testing ground for your intelligent design, then you will find significant long term value from this game. Especially thanks to well integrated social tools that allow easy sharing of level solutions and creature designs.

It can be tough to come to grips with, but even taking into account the inherent unpredictability of your creations, lncredipede is a fine game. After all, who doesn't like playing God?

Developer: Northway Games
Publisher: Northway Games
Genre: adventure / building / puzzle
Compatible with: Windows (XP, Vista, 7, 8) and Mac OS X (10.6.8 or newer)
Game modes: single-player
Price: $14.99
Web: incredipede.com