Great that it's here, but I'm waiting for a 65% discount; there are simply more important games here for me, and I'm not Rockefeller. :)

He isn't capable of doing any of those.
But he would have added at least checkpoints, if he could.
So the difficulty would have been lowered, but it's not doable for technical reasons.

Btw the game does have multiple difficulty modes and also allows you to adjust the speed and damage of enemy projectiles (see attached screenshot). So it's not that things are completely unfair and you could only beat INCISION if you where a ultra pro gamer with godlike aim.

Yeah, this game definitely is not for me, I don't care for being punished just for playing a game, and the bloody “lives” mechanic can fuck right off, I detested it back then, as I do now, plus the dreadful dark reds and browns and over pixelisation is really hard on the eyes, as in it was pretty ugly even back in the 32 bit era.

And by 32 bit era, I'm not talking about PlayStation's 32-bit games, more on the lines of Atari jaguar/3DO…

But it's all about the gameplay, and it seems as though it's catered to adrenalin-fuelled gamers that want a relentless challenge at all times, which is fair, as they deserve their games as much as I do.

But for me, that's too much work, I'd rather play a game, not go to a second job, games with the “lives mechanic” were custom-made for arcades where the asshole owner could up the difficulty in order to get more quarters!

Which had the added benefit of driving your players away, I know it did for me…

the walktrough looks good. so i bought the game and the cool soundtrack. Sounds like from Quake/NIN.

Given that it's a solo dev's first project, I fully understand the difficulty of a saving system. People often forget it's not nearly as simple as it might seem. And why many games, if at all, opt for checkpoints only.

Because with free saving, you have to save everything into the save, including information about enemies, their positions, projectiles in the air, AI states, pathfinding, current health, spawn logic, level triggers etc. On top of the usual stuff like the player's position, state, level state and more. And restoring it all properly after loading. If you essentially break the game by loading a save (á la the quick save "mod" for Far Cry 1), it really is better to skip it. Easily could have delayed release time by months if not longer and from the attached screens, sounds like it was too late in the development to consider putting that in retroactively.

Inspired by banner art:

INCISION: Eye sees no hope

Sure, I get all that... But does it matter, really? To me as a customer? Should it? I mean... look, I'm not sure how to put it without being an asshole when someone probably busted their ass to make it, but in the end doesn't it really only matter what the game is, not the excuses that can be made for it? I mean, the fact we can understand the why of it won't make it more fun. Why would I spend money on it and not one of the many other games that don't require the "it's a solo dev making first-time mistakes" defense? If someone was selling you food that tastes bad, would you buy and eat it because they are a poor beginner cook, when you can get a perfectly good meal for that money too?

Edit: Just to be clear, I'm not trying to convince you or anyone else not to buy the game, I'm talking in a more general way, because I think it's a genuinely interesting question that has come up - should we hold games to different standards depending on the causes on their flaws, when they compete for the same money and time of ours? Why are lack of experience/manpower/means of a solo dev "good" extenuating circumstances but hardly anyone would treat mismanagement of a project by big publisher so, even though it's just as good an explanation of a poor result?

Don't forget that there's the risk that the player might save themself into a corner. If the player is at low health and is about to be hit by a bullet that will finish them off, then the save will be useless.

In fact, I think it's often better to save only some things and not others. For example, maybe don't save the exact state of enemies (but be careful on reload; some games (Final Fantasy Adventure, Ys 3) make it possible to save in a spot where an enemy spawns right on top of you on reload. (I found this out the hard way in Ys 3; fortunately, I was able to get out by opening the menu before getting hit (which may have been frame perfect or close to it) and equipping the shield ring, allowing me to survive the hit.)

Perfectly reasonable stance. The same way I am not convincing anyone to buy it.

If lack of saving is a hard no for anybody, they should probably skip something like this. Just trying to explain why proper save systems are actually not that easy to implement. And can perfectly understand the reason given by the dev. In the case of this game, sounds a lot like the Dark Forces system with 1 Ups.

Still, that being said, I always give games bonus points for properly implemented manual saving.

That is why one should always maintain multiple save slots and cycle through them when saving.

Not always an option.

Using Final Fantasy Adventure as an option, there's only 2 save slots, and if you're sharing the cartridge with someone else, you don't get to make a backup copy of your save.

There's also many games that don't let you save in a different slot, including way too many that will forcibly save over your only save at certain points (it's a major issue I have with many modern Metroidvanias such as Hollow Knight), I've even heard there exist games with auto-saving chackpoints, no manual saves, the autosaves save the full state of the game (including remaining healith), and therefore the game can autosave you into a corner. (Hollow Knight at least avoids that issue by putting benches away from enemies and making the bench full heal you.)

Edit: There's also some games, like some WRPGs, where it's quite possible to make the game unwinnable in a way that's not immediately obvious, so one might not maintain a save that far back. (This is one drawback of the simulationist complexity of WRPGs; this issue simply doesn't come up in most JRPGs. It also leads to a bigger bug surface, so it's more likely that the game will become unwinnable due to a bug that's preserved in the save file.)

Ah, someone I can trust

"Story will never get in the way of Gameplay"

Imo, the dev should be more honest on the store pages, maybe the game should have been in Early Access longer (I assume it was in E.A.), maybe it should be cheaper or just worth waiting for a sale. But others may be okay with what there is, a challenge. And I think it's okay to try to have empathy for people / special empathy for an underdog / the "little guy" who are trying their best, even if they make mistakes along the way. (Is Poland / Eastern Europe too historically jaded to have empathy? ;)

A big publisher has big money and can afford more people to (hopefully) make a better product than a one man team. So we hold them to a higher standard. And they're generally priced in accordance. Maybe hype gets too big sometimes and reviews suffer as a result, but devs and pubs should be reeling that in.

This food might be liked by a certain kind/niche of person. Maybe it's not the best but still acceptably tasty.

Yes, games using only a single un-manageable save slot (other than manually copying it somewhere else as back up) is also far from optimal. This form of save format saw a massive spread during the console boom and sadly stuck around pretty hard.