

The game manual suggests banking these points until late in the game when the difficulty is harder although I think the every-three-stage award policy is quite generous and provides more points than anyone should ever really need. This pretty much guarantees that anyone can just skip past those few pesky stages you just don't feel like trying to solve. The points can then be used at any time on any future puzzles to see a pre-recorded solution played back and then advance automatically to next stage. To deal with this, The Incident implements a kind of neat feature where the player is awarded an unlock point for every three puzzles solved. This type of quagmire could easily prove fatal to anyone's interest in the game causing it to be quickly abandoned but the developer obviously anticipated this and didn't want a single disagreeable puzzle to ruin anyone's fun. A very small handful of the levels do break with this convention though and you can see the depth of the search tree right from the start and know that the puzzle will be absolutely no fun the try and solve.


Perhaps this is intentional or perhaps it's a result of the limited screen space provided by the NES but the vast majority of the stages keep the number of possible permutations of moves within a reasonable limit so that you don't go crazy trying to work through them and remembering what you've previously tried. Overall, the number of possible moves is kept manageable even on the more difficult puzzles which keeps the game from becoming overwhelmingly difficult. The difficultly of each puzzle fluctuates somewhat when advancing from one puzzle to the next but the game mostly tries to arrange them in order of increasing difficulty in a very broad sense although the difficultly does seem to peak before the last twenty or thirty puzzles. This is actually the first and only Sokoban style game that I've played but I found that the majority of the puzzles in the game struck a good balance between being too easy and too hard. While easily considered a clone, all 120 individual puzzles in the game are original and created specifically for The Incident and so if nothing else provides never-before-seen content for any Sokoban fans/junkies out there. Obviously, certain players will enjoy working through this type of problem and others will not and this is probably the single largest factor that would determine whether you like or dislike the title. Solving an individual puzzle involves not only finding the correct moves but also the correct sequence and so reasoning through this can be rewarding but it can also be really tricky especially when a box ultimately needs to be moved multiple times but those moves can't always be done all at once. Generally, the player probably solves each puzzle using a combination of reasoning, intuition, and trail-and-error. The puzzle mechanic is the same as Sokoban and so The Incident can be considered a Sokoban clone in terms of game play. Certain open cells in the grid are designated as goal cells by each puzzle where the number of goal cells always equals the number of boxes and so the object is to move the boxes so that each goal cell is occupied by a movable box (it doesn't matter which box is paired with which goal). The player character is present in the grid as well and is capable of moving to adjacent open cells (excluding diagonals) or can push any of the boxes between cells as long as the cell being pushed into is open space. Also arranged somewhere within the open spaces are two or more movable objects (“boxes”) that start at predetermined locations in the puzzle. This style of game is a type of sliding puzzle played on a grid where each cell of the grid is either open space or a wall. This provides the premises for the Sokoban style game play and for the storyline which unfolds as the player completes puzzles. The player assumes the identity of a box-pushing robot that is reactivated 400 years after the unspecified “incident” and resumes its original purpose of moving boxes. This game can be considered “homebrew” being self-published by the developer and distributed directly to customers on new cartridges compatible with original Nintendo hardware (NTSC at least not sure about PAL) as well as certain NES clone systems. The Incident is a 2015, sci-fi themed, sliding-puzzle game by independent NES developer KHAN Games. Views: 8787 Screenshots Review by BootSector ()
