Video Game / Incision

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No Bullshit.
Lots of blood & gore.
Old-school.

Incision is an old-school retraux First-Person Shooter with an Industrial Body Horror aesthethic developed by one-man indie studio SmoothBrainDev and published by Hyperstrange. It was released in early access in September 2022, which was then followed by a full release in August 2025.

The entire ordeal starts with you - an archeologist and military scientist - uncovering a suspicious artifact in the ruins, getting "rebranded" in the process. Soon after, a mysterious substance called the "Growth" transforms the nearby industrial city into a nightmarish world full of symbiosis of flesh and machine, wiping out the population. After six months of studying the newly emerged creatures, the transformed man squares 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.
• Airborne Mook: The Sympath that are introduced in Episode 2. They are the only mook with a borderline hitscan attack while still being susceptible to Hero-Tracking Failure.
• 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.
• The Assimilator: The Growth has been described as this.
  Loading screen for Rust Organs: From its barren corridors, dark shadows, and countless holding cages, the beasts toil endlessly to pursue their one true goal. To gather more victims so their numbers may grow evermore - to spread their rust ograns throughout the entire planet.
• Bag of Spilling: Each of the episodes begin with Healer only starting out with the sawspear and magnum, with Episode 2 giving him Kitty soon after start. Furthermore, the extra lives are not carried over to the next level.
• 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. The last stretch of Oblivion Treshold has you traverse through a church's catacombs in the dark as your flashlight malfunctions.
• Boss in Mook Clothing: The Sentinels have more health than even Behemoths and Ancient ones and their bell weapons allow them to cast smokey projectiles that can potentially slow down Healer's movements on hit. The Unknown level from Episode 2 climaxes with pitting Healer against two of these guys at once.
• Chainsaw Good: Your starting melee weapon is a powerful chainsaw/spear hybrid (imaginatively named Sawspear) 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: The Conservators can launch fiery, burning discs at Healer's direction that are also a Homing Projectile to boot, which coupled with the mechanical spider legs of the enemy type in question makes them analogous to the Vores from Quake I.
• 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.
• Elite Mook: Episode 3 begins with Healer getting his Artery of power extracted out of him while unconscious and the power from such was used to make enhanced versions of The Growth mooks that come with more health and stronger attacks, like an Enhanced Sycophants throwing multiple sawblades at once.
• Everything Trying to Kill You: If it's alive and it's not named Kitty nor is the first Malichant, 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 and the loading screens do write up the protagonist's thoughts, but they don't really have any impact on gameplay.
• Fat Bastard: Terminators are Mancubi-inspired stout bipedal tanks wielding a rocket launcher.
• Gatling Good: The Chaingun is a harder-hitting rapid-fire weapon than the Submachine Gun, and fitting is only acquired either later in the game or by discovering well-hidden secret caches. It's the only gun without a Secondary Fire feature, instead using the alt-fire button to spin the barrel without firing. This lets a player keep it primed to fire in case of ambushes.
• God Save Us from the Queen!: The Matriarch is the leader of the Malichant, outright worshipped as a godess by the more loyal parts of her race, and it was her idea to conquer planets through the (mis)use of The Grafting Throne to turn inhabitants into Growth, to be later "purified" for the substance that would prolong the lifespan of her specimen, nevermind that she tends to hoard all of that "medicine" for herself and her favourite Cherished, leaving the male Malichant old and frail.
• Gun Twirling: The secondary fire of the revolver makes you twirl it as long as you hold it. Firing during 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.
• Homing Projectile: The Conservators' Deadly Disc projectiles mentioned above. The enhanced variants of Clinkers encountered in Episode 3 also have these.
• I Call It "Vera": You call your eldritch living sticky grenade launcher "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
  • SmoothBrain Mode
• Kill It with Fire:
  • The Submachine Gun's alt-fire is bouncing incendiary grenades, which set targets on fire if they survive the original explosion.
  • If you hold down the primary fire on the Submachine Gun long enough, its bullets light on fire, hitting harder and setting targets on fire.
  • There's an actual flamethrower as part of the Healer's arsenal. It can spray enemies with flames, or you can detach fuel tanks to create improvised fire-bomb traps that detonate when you shoot them.
• 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".
• Ludicrous Gibs: Wouldn't be an old school FPS if you couldn't turn your enemies into chunky salsa. In fact, you're encouraged to do this, since it's the only way to replenish ammo for your "Kitty".
• Macross Missile Massacre:
  • The Rocket Launcher's alt-fire is a rapid-fire spam of four rockets. These are less accurate than the single-shot rockets, but can blanket an area in high explosives, wiping out groups of weaker enemies and chewing through the health of tougher ones.
  • The Feral Armament is a boss monster with twin multi-missile dispensers on its shoulders, which it uses to rain missiles down on the Healer.
• 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.
• Mirror Boss: Rustborn Messiah - the first boss of Episode 3 - is a perfect copy of Healer and the fight with him is styled a bit after an Arena Shooter deathmatch, albeit the boss has more health and one more life compared to Healer, using a different weapon in each of its "lives".
• Monster Compendium: Beating all three episodes unlocks a Bestiary, which provides lore on the game's various creatures and factions, as well as Healer and Kitty.
• More Dakka: The Submachine Gun is a dual-barreled rapid-fire weapon and is typically the second gun to pick up after the Quad Shotgun. Its primary fire is, obviously, spewing bullets at targets, but it also has a unique "Overheat" mechanic that will upgrade its bullets into incendiary harder-hitting shots after you've been firing continuously for long enough. It also doubles as a grenade launcher.
• The Needless: Healer's "rebranding" gave him a body that allowed him to never tire, never feel fear, hunger, thirst nor pain. With Episode 3 involving his power getting extracted, the loading screens have Healer complain about his human needs gradually coming back.
• Only Known by Their Nickname: Your character is identified either as "Healer" or "Key-wielder", both times by The Pilot.
• Pinball Projectile: Part of why the Sychopants are intimidating to fight even as an early mook stem from their thrown Sawblades that bounce around surfaces.
• 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.
• Secondary Fire: The signature of the game's arsenal is that, except for the Chaingun, every single weapon has a secondary fire feature — the Submachine Gun and the Rocket Launcher technically have tertiary fire options as well!
  • The Sawspear can either by swung at enemies like a giant scalpel, or held straight out while the circle of blades rotates like a buzzsaw, functioning in the classic Doom chainsaw manner. Only the primary fire can be used to "parry" the bell-wielding mini-bosses aboard the Malichant ship.
  • Holding the alt-fire button when equipped with the Revolver causes the Healer to spin it around their hand; on certain frames, during which the gun glows bright white, the player can tap the fire button to launch a bullet that does quadruple damage if it hits. However, this gives the gun a much slower rate of fire than its fan-triggered primary fire, and requires the player to keep track of the timing to work.
  • The Quad Shotgun unleashes a burst-fire of four sequential shots when alt-fire is triggered.
  • The Submachine Gun launches bouncing fire grenades. Additionally, if the player holds the primary fire button, the barrels will eventually heat up, lighting the bullets on fire and causing them to hit harder and set enemies on fire.
  • The Rocket Launcher can launch a burst-fire of four missiles when alt-fire is pressed. The player can also discover rare Mini-Nukes, which can be selectively triggered; as you might expect, these are the game's BFG equivalent, and do massive damage over a huge area of effect.
  • Kitty spits a cluster of bouncing sticky acid bombs as its primary fire, and with its secondary fire unleashes a whirlwind of spinning blades that hits a single target and shreds them to pieces, doing damage over time.
  • The flamethrower detaches its fuel tank, which can be kicked to launch it forward and shot to go up in a massive explosion comparable to (if not better than) a hit from a rocket.
  • The Jawbreaker's alt-fire causes it to unleash a bouncing flurry of energized pellets that ricochet off of the walls and shred enemies to pieces. In tightly confined areas, they can make mincemeat out of even the toughest enemies.
  • The Omenstrike unleashes a slow-moving energy ball that doesn't directly hurt anything, but which explodes if shot with the Omenstrike's primary fire.
• Short-Range Shotgun:
  • Zigzagged with the Quad Shotgun. The primary fire is definitely more accurate up close, but can hit with decent accuracy from a distance. The burst-fire alternative mode is much less accurate when shooting at a distance.
  • Played straight with The Jawbreaker; a triple-barreled breach-loading shotgun, introduced in Episode 2.^note It can be also found early in the penultimate level of Episode 1. 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.
• Shotguns Are Just Better:
  • The Quad Shotgun is one of the earliest games in the arsenal, and will probably be the Healer's workhorse gun. The primary fire is surprisingly accurate at distances and hits hard, the less accurate alt-fire can chew through enemy health at close range, it has a solid ammo capacity of 50 shells, and ammo is plentiful.
  • The Jawbreaker is Incision's answer to the classic Doom Super Shotgun. It has lousy range, but can one-shot most enemies in the game, and its Secondary Fire is absolutely devastating in a tight environment where it can put its ricocheting and enemy-piercing bullets to best use.
• 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.
• Shout-Out: The game does have a few easter eggs:
  • A secret area within Nerve-End contains a grave inscribed to Caleb - "May He Live Again".
  • A hidden area within Harvest Vivarium contains a corpse of The Nameless Doll from Texnoplazm, who apparently died attempting to parry a speeding truck.
  • A secret switch in Parasitic Relations reveals a locked store with Jarmo from White Hell snoozing off after a drunk party with few other creatures.
  • Also in Parasitc Relations there is a room, with a typewriter, examining which notes being able to save if you only had an ink ribbon. An actual Ink Ribbon pickup can be found somewhere within the level, but returning to the typewriter with the Ink Ribbon only results in the typewriter floating up into the ceiling and exploding, causing the Healer to lament about being unable to save.
  • The Jawbreaker's Secondary Fire, a ricocheting storm of energized pellets, is very similar to the Shredder from Turok 2: Seeds of Evil.
  • The Omenstrike's Secondary Fire, a slow moving orb that can be detonated by the primary attack for a powerful explosion takes a lot after the ASMD/Shock Rifle from the Unreal series.
• Silent Credits: While the credits for the first two episode feature an acoustic song, the the credits for Episode 3 only has the gusting wind and droning noises. The song instead is relegated to The Stinger just after these credits.
• Standard FPS Guns:
  • Funnily, the game technically has four Knife equivalents. A separate "kick" function acts as your typical Knife, but you also have the Sawspear as a default melee weapon, which can either be swung back and forth like a sword, or continuously "bite" into whatever it touches like a chainsaw, and either way does more damage than the Kick. Finally, if the player holds the Kick button, they'll do a powerful horizontal slash with the Sawspear that does massive damage and will even oneshot most enemies in the game, though after this "power swing" is used, it takes several seconds of recharging before it can be used again.
  • Pistol: Specifically called the Magnum Revolver, it's your default starting ranged weapon. It has good accuracy over a fairly long range, a pretty decent rate of fire, and does surprising damage; the basic enemy will fall in two shots on Standard difficulty, and it has a Secondary Fire that quadruples the damage. However, it must be reloaded after every 6 shots, and is the only gun in the game with this drawback.
  • Shotgun: The "standard" Shotgun of the game is the Quad Shotgun; basically Doom's shotgun with a 4-shot burst-fire Secondary Fire. There's also the Super Shotgun in the Jawbreaker; a triple-barreled breach-loader with a range hardly better than the Sawspear's and requiring a separate pool of ammo, but which hits as hard as a rocket.
  • Automatic Weapon: You have the Submachine Gun as the "low-tier" equivalent, and a Chaingun for the "high tier" equivalent.
  • Explosives: The Submachine Gun launches bouncing Grenades, whilst the Flamethrower can drop fiery Mines.
  • Rocket Launcher: Standard, apart from its burst fire and Mini-Nuke features.
  • Grenade Launcher: The Submachine Gun's Secondary Fire and Kitty both share this role.
  • Flamethrower: Again, standard.
  • Energy Gun: The Omenstrike, also known as the Rail Gun; a very late-game high-powered weapon that fires a single target-piercing beam of energy, or a slow-moving energy sphere that doesn't directly damage foes, but can be detonated by shooting it.
• Suspiciously Cracked Wall: If a wall is dented, chances are there's a secret room behind it — especially if there are fleshy worms writhing across 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.
• Super Not-Drowning Skills: A perk of Healer's "rebranding" allows him to stay underwater indefinitely, as long as the pool in question isn't contaminated.
• Unusable Enemy Equipment: The laser rifles of the Rustborn mooks cannot be used by Healer, something which is noted in a chalkboard within Healer's own appartment.
• Villain: Exit, Stage Left: The Death-Rot Child flees after defeat in middle of Episode 2 and Healer has to track it down in another level. He eventually stumbles upon the boss's maimed remains two levels later.
• Voice with an Internet Connection: Episode 2 has Healer getting guided by a voice inside his head, which turns out to be The Pilot, the first of the Malichant who opposed the Matriarch's rule. Healer eventually physically meets up with The Pilot - his upper torso at least - just before the confrontation with The Matriarch, asking him to put him out of his misery.