In Incoboto you play as Inco, and he’s all alone. Not just alone on his planet, but seemingly throughout the entire galaxy. Here and there suns have been burning out, no longer providing life-giving warmth and light to the planets orbiting them. Now, there’s only one sun remaining who goes by the name Helios. He’s come to have Inco track down and feed him stars to help him re-light the dead suns and bring life back to the galaxy. Why is a sun stopping by, talking to a boy and demanding to be fed? Dunno, but just go with it.
In Incoboto you play as Inco, and he’s all alone. Not just alone on his planet, but seemingly throughout the entire galaxy. Here and there suns have been burning out, no longer providing life-giving warmth and light to the planets orbiting them. Now, there’s only one sun remaining who goes by the name Helios. He’s come to have Inco track down and feed him stars to help him re-light the dead suns and bring life back to the galaxy. Why is a sun stopping by, talking to a boy and demanding to be fed? Dunno, but just go with it.
Incoboto is a side-scroller in the sense that it’s 2D and you run left or right. But instead of traversing across the landscape, you run around the edges of tiny planets. Sort of like a non-3D version of Super Mario Galaxy. You’ll control Inco and you run and jump in an effort to grab stars and solve puzzles to be able to travel between the planets so you can, you guessed it, find more stars to feed the sun that’s always hovering over you.
Oh, that sun. That blabbering, always smiling, always hovering sun. You feed it stars and it just says things like “Spoon” back to you. With its ability to just float wherever the heck it wants while spewing his nonsense, why do I even need to collect these stars? Can’t it get them itself? But I digress.
The camera is worth drawing attention too, as it sort of floats in the middle with the planets rotating around it. This always keeps Inco at the top of the screen and gives you a nice feeling of running around around the celestial bodies. You’re never caught off frame or have something important blocked from view; it’s a very well implemented camera.
The puzzles are introduced in a perfect order, giving you more and more things to try and tools at your disposal. The smart move was implementing them in a way where there’s no need for a tutorial – exploration and discovery rule the day. You experiment and figure out how to move electricity and open up anti-grav systems. Through the act of play, it all just makes sense.
I was surprised and happy to see how many of the puzzles incorporated physics into them. You’re pulling levers, swinging beams, triggering some pendulums, etc. Those elements have a nice weight to them and react the way you’d expect them too, which keeps those sorts of puzzles from being frustrating.
I’ve been reading a lot of people laud the default control scheme, which is setup to be one-handed, but to be honest, I don’t see it. On paper it sounds great; tap to the left of Inco to move him left, and vice versa. But I constantly found myself with my left hand covering half the screen when I needed to move right. Maybe the game was designed to favor righties, but I was glad to find an alternate joypad-like control scheme to use.
I’ll admit to not being sold on Incoboto at first. Not at all. It just felt a little too simple for me. Luckily I stuck it out, because a little ways in the game finally begins to reveal itself to the player through some pretty inventive and fun worlds filled with interesting puzzles to solve. It takes a little time to warm up, but once it does, Incoboto is well worth the trip.
