Inkulinati

Inkulinati is impressive in its ability to marry theme, mechanics, and presentation. The ink-driven combat is exciting and tense, rewarding experimentation and good use of gestures and abilities. The world, inspired by the marginalia of Medieval manuscripts, is beautiful and immersive. The campaign is strong but playing against another human, in local multiplayer, is even more fun, especially if both involved players have learned a few tricks while facing the computer. Inkulinati is incredibly inventive visually and features engaging combat mechanics.

I didn’t know if I would recommend Inkulinati when I was first playing it. But it grew on me. You will quickly see a lot of what the game has to offer. There aren’t that many things to unlock. There’s not really a campaign. You can do a one on one battle or a roguelike tower a la classic arcade fighting games. You will see all that the game has to offer pretty quickly. But I wasn’t counting on how strong the actual strategy game is. This is the first release from Yaza Games, but they seem like a team with some fresh ideas and the vision to implement them. Daedalic Entertainment publishes a lot of novel strategy titles that fail to hold your attention for long. Inkulinati earns its place in your library with its depth.

We know that early access is a great way to guarantee good progress to the development of video games that require accurate balance of mechanics and the broadest possible feedback from the public. This technique has done wonders for the likes of Hades, and turned out to be an absolute wonder for Inkulinati too: Yaza Games has greatly expanded the space of possibility available to players, enriching the game content and reviewing in a meticulous way some elements potentially capable of breaking the delicate balance of the game. Too bad for the permanence of some rather unfair situations and for an excessively long tutorial, which runs the risk of alienating players.

Inkulinati presents an incredibly fresh game theme with tried and true mechanics. While the gameplay isn’t anything incredibly new or exciting, the game’s unique art, animation, and overall silliness, paired with an engaging roguelike campaign system, should keep aspiring Inkmasters from suffering from boredom.

Inkulinati is a wonderfully quirky strategy game with a great sense of humour and plenty of room to grow. Yaza Games have certainly done something interesting with medieval manuscripts.

Overall, Inkulinati can be a fun experience for anyone willing to give it a shot. The art style is incredibly charming, the gameplay is surprisingly deep, and its roguelite Journey Mode can be pretty engaging. However, the game also spends too much time telling players how to play it rather than letting them learn at their own pace. Additionally, the humor, lack of an online mode, and the fact it does not do anything truly groundbreaking with the concept may push some players away. But even with all of that, fans of the genre may still find something to love here.

After being in early access on multiple platforms, Inkulinati delivers a satisfying game with an original art style in its full release. The colorful, humorous character art and animations are impressive and entertaining. A lot of effort went into creating a dense and intense combat system. However, Journey Mode becomes predictable within a few runs and could have been more innovative. The lack of online multiplayer is unfortunate too, especially for a game based on dueling. Inkulinati is a fun page-turner, but it’s still in need of several revisions.

The game feels way too tough. There are just so many gameplay elements and when you combine the falling off the ledge, the growing fire, the mouth shutter it's more of pushing enemies into traps and avoiding traps. It's more like a chess game rather than a casual puzzle game. Just felt like its way too tough.

From critic reviews, you can gather the gameplay is not that special. I'll point out a few aspects that annoy me: 1) They advise to do the tutorial before the campaign. But they put the same tutorial messages in the campaign. 2) Every fight feels the same. Although they try to spice things up, the core battle system is not that deep. 3) The game changes your build from battle to battle. So you have to continuously change it back. 4) The fatigue system makes your most used troops cost more, so you have to rotate them between fights. But troops are too similar to each other for this system to have any real effect.