Lady Boy Love Collection

Fifth release on increpare.com, four 1-bit pixel-styled games bundled together. This is the first one that feels like a recognizable increpare game to me, with some of the notes that show up again and again in future releases. Abrasive chiptune, low-res sprites, aloof obscenity, cryptic/self-indulgent presentation in parts alongside tightly-tuned high-difficulty gameplay in others.

The first game Lady Million seems like the most developed of the four, and the most 'conventional'. (The remaining three are firmly in 'art game' territory.) A 2-button (jump, shoot) timing-based vertical shooter with four short stages each ending with a boss: Idol Lady, Hair Lady, Bag Lady, Birth Lady. The protagonist is introduced as some kind of sci-fi lesbian assassin. The narrative/symbolic level seems to be preoccupied with various qualities of womanhood (Idol Lady looks a bit like the Venus de Milo, Birth Lady is depicted vulva-forward in the process of giving birth), but most of the thought here seems to have gone into the gameplay/level design.

The second is called Biocollect, aka Specimen Collect. I don't think this one is very good, or I didn't understand it. You pilot a little claw-equipped vehicle and pick up sheep to return via tractor beam presumably to your ufo mothership type thing, to get points. After you pick up a few, there's a sudden twist and everything including you starts floating upwards (accumulating a large number of points). Similar to Sick Panda it seems to be playing a fairly straight subverting-gameplay-expectations gag (you lose control of your on-screen avatar; the points counter starts rapidly going up and therefore shifts from a 'ludic' meaning to I guess a 'narrative' one), but that seems to be all there is to it. The fact that the game ends with a vibrating text banner saying "I LIKE CHEESE" reads like a kind of 'admission of failure' / disavowal to me. In the game notes increpare talks about the game containing some tigsource in-jokes so maybe that's part of it too.

The third is called Zeppelin and is the most interesting to me. The game starts static with a few 'A' characters scattered randomly around the screen, and one 'Z'. Each time you press an arrow key, it seems to cycle to the next character in the alphabet, re-scattering characters across a grid. Your arrow keys control the position of something like a 'player character' on the grid, who usually appears as a letter, though sometimes isn't visible at all. Sometimes whole words or fragments of words appear on screen, sometimes alone, or sometimes repeating staggered across and down the screen. Sometimes the entire screen is replaced by a single letter or an image. There is a sense that the random/generative dynamics are fairly intricate/varied, it's hard to really map out what exactly is going on. I think of something like "Zorn's Lemma", for the obvious alphabet association, but also the feeling of having taken the 'basic elements' of the medium and repurposed them towards something abstract, or concrete, in the sense of concrete music. Bordering on a kind of 'software art' aesthetics (with only loose and minor interactivity) which I don't think was common on tigsource or anywhere in video games at the time. Some of the later increpare games I remember share this feeling of being preoccupied with formal dynamics/structure but also with the English language, or language in general.

The fourth is called Sick Panda. Like Biocollect it feels sort of typical of the self-conscious 'art game' approach of the era, taking 'conventional game mechanics' (in this case, top-down 4-directional movement and a health bar) and repurposing those towards non-ludic 'narrative'/'expressive' aims. You can move around as the panda as your health bar gradually depletes, until you die. It's still a one-joke thing but this one is better than Biocollect; less dependent on twist/subversion and feels more self-contained and thoughtful. The fence that surrounds the panda looks nice, and there's a nice handcrafted sense to the way that the health goes down in random bursts rather than a steady pace.

It's pleasing that these four games appear together because they seem to pre-empt the breadth of work that increpare has released over the ~20 years following this one - tight genre gameplay, dumb jokes, formally intricate experimentation, sadness. The experimental/expressive stuff is what always attracted me when I was younger but one of the things about increpare (aside from his extreme prolificacy) is that he seems to be one of a very small number of gamedevs who has a strong (and not shallow) 'avant-garde'/'experimental' bent, but also a deep interest in / mastery of certain conventional game design techniques/genres - most obviously puzzle games, which don't appear in this collection, but still.