- DEVELOPER: Yaza Games
- PUBLISHER: Daedalic Entertainment
- PLATFORMS: PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox Series X/S, Switch
- GENRE: Turn-based strategy
- RELEASE DATE: February 22, 2024
- STARTING PRICE: 24,99€
- REVIEWED VERSION: PC
Inkulinati is a turn-based strategy game that takes place in living medieval manuscripts. Draw up beasts with living ink and strategically use their abilities to take out your opponent. This is the only game you’ll see a snail eat Death or a a donkey with a trumpet in its butt. Don’t let the humor fool you though, this game takes some serious chess-brain thinking to win.
Visuals
The visuals of this game are simplistic yet impactful. I especially love how the background gets written as the battle progresses. Every creature is easily distinguishable at a glance, and creatures with similar classes are identifiable as such. Then when you as the Ink Master interact with the game board, you see a realistic hand pop up, which is nice attention to detail as the gameplay takes place on a piece of paper. The rest of the background, often forests or cities fill in what would otherwise be a boring blank piece of paper, giving it more life and more visual interest.
Music & Sound Design
The music in this game is stellar. It’s right on the theme the developers are going for. I actually listen to stuff like this when planning for or playing Dungeons and Dragons, and could easily see myself listening to the soundtrack to get into the proper historical fantasy mindset. The instruments in the scores sound super authentic. I’m no music professional, but I could close my eyes and picture Irish and Scottish landscapes, from what I know that I’ve seen on the internet anyway.
The sound effects are perfect too. The sounds splashing when you collect ink, the shifting sliding sound of moving creatures, fire roaring, and the sounds the individual creatures make like dogs barking and cats meowing are such good little touches. Everything that happens has a little sound tied to it, so you get auditory and visual confirmation of something happening when it happens. I don’t know what part of the human brain craves that, but those neurons are getting tickled for me.
Gameplay Mechanics
There’s a surprising amount of depth and a lot of nuance to understand how this game plays, so I’ll break down the basics some before getting to the boring stuff. Ultimately, your goal is to reduce your opponent to zero hit points, which can be accomplished in many ways. You will most often deal damage by attacking with creatures, but it’s also possible to push them off the stage or use other environmental hazards.
As an Ink Master, you are the artist who brings creatures to life with your pot of living ink. You only have so much, but you can gain more from ink blots on the stage by ending your turn or a creature’s turn on it, provided they don’t move by some means. Each time you collect ink from a blot you receive three, and the number of times you can extract ink is indicated by the number of drips, to a maximum of three. Your creatures have different costs, so you have to budget wisely.
You also have hand actions you can use. These contain but are not limited to: moving a creature, healing, dealing damage, and inflicting status effects. I think it’s really neat that you can affect the board in ways other than only summoning creatures, but that also means your opponent can too. You can hold only nine to swap between, and you can only use five in an encounter, so creatures of different species have different abilities at their disposal, separate from their class. For instance, rabbits automatically pray at the end of their turn, and foxes steal ink when they attack.
One ability they all share is the ability to shove, which normally would move a creature over one space. However, if that space is taken, it will move to the next available space, even if that’s 10 spaces away. If it hits a solid object it can’t pass through like a gate, it will take six damage and move back to where it was originally. This can put your creatures and your Ink Master in some sticky situations, so you have to be aware of the field and where you’re going to end up with your creatures. Sometimes they can be worth sacrificing if you have no other choice, but I’ve lost many to carelessness.
In the story mode, you will get to choose different paths to go down, which will determine the encounters you come across. Some encounters have different effects depending on how much renown you have, which measures how famous you are as an Ink Master. There are normal battles against other Ink Masters, beast battles where you get random beasts on the field and you can’t summon new ones, shops to increase your starting health and ink, shops to gain new beasts and hand actions, and elite battles that really challenge you but give you greater rewards.
Choose your path wisely, as you may be stuck with what you pick, they don’t always cross again to change direction. Thankfully you can hover over the future locations and read what you do there to help you better decide your path. At the end of each level is a boss fight, which you have to make sure you’re properly prepared for.
After each battle, you recover only some of your health, so you have to strategize well to take as little damage as possible to fully recover at the end, or survive long enough to make it to some sort of healer. You do get extra lives just in case, but not an unlimited amount.
Another interesting feature this game offers is the boredom mechanic. However many times you summon a beast is how much more expensive it becomes to create in the next encounter. So if you summon a creature twice, it costs two more ink next time. I like this mechanic because it forces you to change how you play. Every encounter is already unique in design, but this breaks up the monotony from your end, you can’t get too comfortable playing one way. Your boredom will go back down for each beast after every encounter, provided they were not involved in said encounter, you can get your old roster back, so it’s not too punishing.
Then there are the environmental elements. The pot of beans deals damage to all creatures within two spaces when it gets destroyed. The church bell awakens creatures. Tombstones deal damage to any creature next to it at the beginning of the round. Major rewards you can get for defeating bosses are passive bonuses. Things such as giving buffs to friendly creatures you use hand actions on, giving debuffs to enemy creatures, and healing. There are many to be found in the game, but you can only have so many at once, so choose wisely.
Story
The story is an interesting take. You play as the apprentice to an Inkulinati Master, who gets accidentally killed by Death at a party, so you go on a journey to become a good enough Ink Master to defeat Death so he’ll bring back your Master. You’ll battle some interesting characters along the way, and upon defeating Death, he delivers on his promise and brings master back. But wait, he knows about the resurrection already. Seems this isn’t the first time he’s been brought back. I won’t spoil it all, if you want to find out the rest of the mystery you’ll have to experience this game for yourself.
Verdict
All in all, this game is incredibly good. All the creatures you combat with and against feel balanced, I never felt at a significant disadvantage or advantage. But then again I never played on the harder difficulties, I’m not good enough at chess to want to play above normal. I especially love that they have Andreas from Pentiment in this game. The developers are different, but I love seeing little references and crossovers like this. Pentiment was such a good game too.
Review copy provided by the publisher
5
English (UK) 
Hrvatski