Considering that this year’s The Game Awards was packed with announcements, I almost forgot about the Day of the Devs showcase that followed the official show. Traditionally, Day of the Devs focuses on independent developers who need the most help publicising their games. Arguably, this is where you’ll find the most interesting announcements – not the biggest, nor the most expensive to make, but the most innovative for sure.
Incolatus: Don’t Stop, Girlypop! has been in the works for a while – Editor-in-Chief Stacey Henley has even written about it – but the trailer at Day of the Devs was so eye-catching that my brain cells immediately kicked into overdrive as I watched it. It’s one of those games that’s so aesthetically striking it’s almost over stimulating.
Incolatus Is Aggressively Girly
Incolatus is a Y2K arena-style movement shooter. According to the game’s Steam page, the plot is that a mining company named Tigris Nix wants to “drain your world of The Love, a natural force keeping the planet alive”, and you have to destroy its robotic drones to heal the world. Every point of damage is a bit of Love released back into the environment. As game director Jane Fiona says cheerfully into a flip phone in the trailer, “Yeah, so you basically are the revolution.” Later, she says, “You are a girly-pop eco-warrior.”
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The faster you move around, the more damage you deal, and the more you heal. The movement looks frenetic and fluid, incorporating something called “wave hopping”, which is a combination of a “classic bunny hop with modern slam, dash and double jump mechanics”. As you go faster, your guns can expand, growing more barrels and scopes. Collecting Love from downed enemies can “supercharge your weapons”, allowing you to deal even more damage.
It’s also extremely pink. Playing it turns the screen into a blur of neon green, bright Barbie pink, and aquamarine. There’s a dress-up meta-game inspired by late ‘90s and early ‘00s that allows you to apply different fabrics and colours to your arms. Donating Love to fairies in the game will unlock more options for the dress-up and ornaments for your guns.
Girliness Can Be Powerful
It’s hard to deny the girliness of it all, which is rare in gaming but especially in the FPS genre. This is a type of game that, as it’s become increasingly multiplayer-focused, has driven women out of the space through harassment and hostility in online chat. Most – I dare say, all women – who play games like Call of Duty in online multiplayer have been screamed at, laughed at, or told to do some variation of ‘get back in the kitchen’.
In this way, Incolatus feels almost transgressive in its overwhelming girliness. It’s not feminine in the way that, say, Infinity Nikki is – that dress-up game might be obviously geared towards women, in its coziness (painting with a wide brush, perhaps, but casual female gamers have famously gravitated towards games in the ‘cozy’ genre), cuteness, and combat-lite mechanics, but it does actually have a lot of cross-gender appeal. After all, I seriously doubt that all of its 20 million downloads were women. The girliness is the point, but it’s not in your face.
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But Incolatus is in your face. That’s the whole point. It’s an aggressively hyper-feminine FPS that brings to mind the reactionary bimbo aesthetics that were popularised during the pandemic, with the ‘I’m just a girl’ slogans that adorned hats, t-shirts, and mugs. Because girls just love consumerism, right? These bimbo aesthetics, while often ironic, were also used by women to excuse anti-intellectualism – girl dinner and girl maths are good examples. Yeah, they’re jokes, but there’s also a real cultural movement towards rejecting critical thinking wrapped up in all of it.
Incolatus seems to be smarter than that. It uses similar aesthetics, but positions you as a revolutionary. You can be a girl who believes in love and still single-handedly saves the world. It’s proof that girly doesn’t have to mean cozy – it can mean violent, and fast, and deadly, and eco-consciousness, and anti-capitalism. Girls can do anything, and do it with rhinestones on their guns. Girls can have it all. Girls don’t have to settle for less.
Incolatus is a Y2K girly-pop arena-style movement shooter where standing still is not an option! This sh❤t is serious!!!!!!!!!! :3
❤ A mining company is attempting to destroy an ecosystem for profit. Shocker! Tigris Nix wants to drain your world of The Love, a natural force keeping the planet alive. Lay waste to its robotic Ormyk drones to heal the Oasis!
❤ Kill ‘em with kindness! Every point of damage dealt against a robot is one piece of The Love released back into the environment and one step closer to the end of Tigris Nix.
❤ The faster you go, the more damage you deal and the more you heal! Incolatus combines the ridiculous fun of janky old-school mechanics with contemporary innovations in advanced movement abilities.
❤ Wave hopping combines the feeling of a classic bunny hop with modern slam, dash and double jump mechanics to create a fast, fluid and precise flow state.
❤ Unleash the horrors <3 Guns with alt-fires combine symbiotically with each other and with magical abilities to create incredible moments of complex interplay
❤ Master a deep and flexible push-forward combat system to generate high Love scores and become the Cupid of death!