Increbraintal is certainly an incremental of all time. I have played a great deal of incrementals over the years, and few have had such polarizing differences in quality between different parts of the game as this one has. It is quite ironic that a game based around the brain would have such thoughtless design.
Lets start with the good part of the game: the graphics and sound design. Increbraintal is a very pretty game, I would say that it is firmly and significantly above average when it comes to how it looks and sounds, and it pulls off that indie short incremental pixel aesthetic flawlessly. The artstyle is very cute and pleasant on the eyes, and it goes a long way to making the game tolerable to play. The sound effects are also pretty satisfying, and the music while basic, is very appropriate for the game and is nice and relaxing. The presentation is just great all around, and the developers clearly have some talent in this area.
Now moving onto the bad parts of the game, which is just about everything else. As far as actually being an incremental goes, this was a pretty atrocious one. It misses just about every mark there is to miss when it comes to core tenets of good incremental design, and as far as gameplay is concerned, I found there to be little to no redeeming qualities. Everything is completely superficial underneath the admittedly very shiny paintjob, and in this way the game is kind of like children's plastic jewelry.
The pacing is easily the worst in the entire genre. Unlike in other incrementals, there is no good starting upgrade in this game. You start out weak, and you will remain that way for another 7-12 rounds, depending on what you buy first. The gameplay is completely automatic, and there is nothing that you can do to speed this up. You just have to suffer through the early rounds before you can stop having to pretend that you are actually playing an incremental. It is a shame that there is no payoff to the suffering. The game is over in a flash, being barely over an hour long, and beaten out by a great many incremental demos in length.
Probably the most egregious part of the game is the skilltree, with Increbraintal being a serious contender for worst incremental skiltree ever. It is filled to the brim with an overwhelming amount of near or outright useless upgrades, with little rhyme or reason to how they are distributed. Sprinkled throughout the sea of slop are a few decent upgrades, and fewer still REALLY good upgrades. Since there is very little organization, with only one proper branch to follow, its basically gambling on if an upgrade will lead to something good, or if you will run into a wall and get ♥♥♥♥♥♥. A completely useless upgrade could be the prerequisite for another upgrade that straight up doubles your damage, and it is impossible for you to be able to tell.
The upgrades themselves are also often misleading in how awful they really are. For example, there is an upgrade that claims it makes a currency 50% more valuable, but this is not actually the case. Instead, it makes enemies drop 50% more of that currency, [b]ROUNDED DOWN.[/b] Since at the time you will buy it, enemies are either dropping 1 or 3 currency upon death, in practice, this "50%" increase is actually less than 25% since you kill more 1 value enemies than 3 value ones. There are many other such cases of poor upgrade clarity. Damage and health upgrades display percentage increases, with nothing to base it on. Some upgrades just claim to give a "chance of X effect happening" without specifying what that chance even is, and there were a few upgrades that felt like they were doing way more than just a "5%" difference would imply.
Lastly, there is the mechanic that the game supposedly builds itself off of: The Deck System. Despite the name, it isn't a deck, and is hardly really a system either. It works pretty much exactly how you would expect it to when you see it in the preview images. You get a few squares of land, and in theory you are able to mix and match a variety of turrets and support towers. Unfortunately, it really is just "in theory", and there is no real variety in mixing and matching. Besides the starting brain, there are a grand total of 4 different towers to work with. Except, 2 of those towers are glorified passives out of the skill tree, and the other 2 towers are a basic shooting tower that deals pitiful damage, and a near copy of that as an upgraded version. You don't ever get enough space to really strategize, and the towers themselves are literally as basic as they could possibly come. Games made back in the Flash game era had better variety than this. It is a very sad experience to get your first shooting tower, only to realize it doesn't have the damage to actually kill any enemies, and basically just functions as an extra health upgrade through tanking a few shots.
To compare it to another incremental that has functionally the same mechanic but actually pulls it off properly, in Trainatic you have both much more variety, which helps, but far more importantly you actually have to pick and choose what towers you want to bring with you, and you don't just get to mindlessly bring everything. Each tower has different, and impactful upgrades to buy, and you are allowed to properly specialize into whatever you want. Here, the pinnacle of strategy pretty much just boils down to "put damage boosting tower near the highest damaging tower (the brain)"
While I did ultimately glean some enjoyment out of the game, it was certainly not from the gameplay itself. Instead it was from an almost morbid curiosity to see all of the "eccentric" design choices that went into the game. Coming from someone who could be considered a diehard incremental fan, playing this was kind of like dissecting a frog.
If nothing else, the game is pretty cheap, but you would still be better off putting that money into some of the really heavy hitters of the genre, or if not that, almost anything else. While there are still a few incrementals worse than this, right now it is at the bottom of a very packed barrel.
