There is something special about a short game that delivers an excellent gameplay experience, without overstaying its welcome. The new title from Indie developer/publisher Draknek and Friends, and the next game in their “A Monster Mini-Expedition” series, The Electrifying Incident, is one such game. It is a concise puzzle game that demands no more than 30 to 90 minutes of your time, and has just the right amount of challenge to give puzzle fans a fun mental workout.
Check out the demo for The Electrifying Incident in the GSC Demo Disc #3; a great chance to try before you buy!
You play as the Monster protagonist from the team’s previous game, this time with a swanky new suit and extendable claw arm. Your goal is to navigate a series of clean, futuristic-looking rooms to fix the malfunctioning generator that powers the facility. Unfortunately, your path is strewn with obstacles and safety hazards like locked doors, exposed electricity, and giant holes in the floor. Still, we’ve got a job to do, and we came here to do some puzzling!
The Monster can move up, down, left, and right on a grid, neatly visualised by the lab’s tiled floor. Your only other action is to use the extendable claw to pick up, move, and drop purple cubes. These cubes are essentially batteries that can power certain parts of the rooms, opening locked doors or creating light bridges, often accompanied by more electricity to avoid.
The Electrifying Incident gives you plenty of time to get acquainted with the game’s fundamental mechanics, like how you cannot turn whilst carrying a cube, or that you move holding them at the distance you grabbed it originally. Did I mention the cubes are conductive? Maybe don’t stand too close to them. And just like any good puzzle game, it builds on its mechanics in ways that at first might break your brain, but you learn are just new rules to be understood, then mastered.
This is done in two ways. The first is that when the arm of the extendable claw meets an obstacle, such as a wall or another purple cube, it will bend against it and hold that new position! It took a bit of getting used to, but once I had gotten to grips with this revelation, I started to look at each puzzle with this new ruleset in mind. How could I bend my claw arm to get the purple block onto a switch on the other side of a gaping pit, but two squares to he right of me? Maybe I would have to walk up against a wall to create the right shape, or reposition another cube somewhere in the room to use in a similar fashion.
The second way this is done is by having each puzzle confined to a room, but also having them linked to each other, creating larger, more complex puzzles. There are occasions where you need to bring a purple cube from a previous room to progress in the current one, or even use the level layout to maneuver your extendable claw into a certain position. Combining these two aspects of The Electrifying Incident’s game and level design elevates these block-moving puzzles to another level, blending environmental elements into each puzzle’s structure, making you think about the space as well as the objects in it.
It’s the way these mechanics are introduced to you at a reasonable pace, allowing players to learn through experimentation, that is The Electrifying Incident’s greatest strength. Other than a single text window to tell players about the game’s quickload options (great for making mistakes or being electrocuted), there are no other prompts in the game. With all the tools at your disposal, whatever the conundrum, it is up to the player to work out what to do, finding their own “eureka!” moments.
I had the chance to chat with one of the members of the Draknek and Friends team while at the New Game Plus event, part of the London Games Festival. I asked whether they ever considered having more narrative elements in the game, such as an unfeeling, Machiavellian voice deriding your attempts at solving each puzzle, or environmental details that imply a larger story/world. As much as I appreciate the team’s choice to focus on the gameplay and optimisation of the player experience, I can’t help missing just that extra dash of zest.
Honestly, there is very little criticism I could levy against The Electrifying Incident; it is a concise, polished experience that delivers on its promise of a satisfying hour or so of puzzling fun. All I can really say is that I wish there were more! But that would defeat the point of creating this shorter game, and surely it is better to be left wanting more rather than drowning in too much?
With its smart sci-fi aesthetic, charming sound design and music, excellent puzzle design, and intuitive controls, The Electrifying Incident is a short, satisfying puzzle game. It may not blow your mind, but it just might shock you!
The Electrifying Incident was reviewed on PC and is available on Steam and itch.io.
We would like to thank Draknek and Friends for providing a code for this review.
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