Ink Inside: Review
Ink Inside is a stylized 2D hand-drawn action roguelite that takes place within the literal pages of a discarded sketchbook. You play as Stick, a simple doodle who awakens to find the sketchbook being attacked by a mysterious, oily sludge that is erasing the world and its inhabitants. You are on to a quest to save the world and its drawings from the sludge, across various biomes. What’s unique about this game is that it did not start as a game. It was a cartoon written for Nickelodeon - somehow the project did not end up being produced, and the devs turned to video games as a medium to continue their work. It’s supposed to be a story in three parts, and Ink Inside is the first episode while it’s a complete game in itself. You can expect about 10~12 hours of gameplay.
A living cartoon with Dodgeball
Since the game started off as a cartoon project, the roots are very visible: all characters are hand-drawn and well animated, and there is a strong focus on quality voice acting (not all conversations are voiced but quite a lot of it is). The game mixes cartoon scenes and full motion video to showcase the link between the toon world and what has happened outside leading to this situation.
You traverse pages like actual paper landscapes as you’d expect from something born from animation. It’s not always clear where you should be going, as there are multiple paths in some areas. Your enemy is the Sog, a living ink entity consuming drawings all over the place. This isn’t your typical cartoon villain. It represents something threatening art and imagination. Somewhat similar to The Nothing in the Neverending Story, in a way. You end up fighting the Sog in some kind of Dodgeball matches, as you encounter enemies across the levels. You can collect a bunch of items and equipment to give you some extra bonus or power along the way, as you can see from the inventory screen below.
You can throw a ball of energy towards the enemies, and you have to adjust the angle as you do, in real time, to ensure that you hit them. The controls are easy to learn, and the special moves are fun to use. Some powers let you break throught the invisible wall between you and the enemies at the center of the dodgeball space, and then let you finish them off with your fists. Learning curve is gentle but combat execution is inconsistent during tense moments. It’s not easy to tell if your angle is right because of the 2D view, making for frustrating no-hits at critical times.
A Peculiar Mix
As a literal doodle, your hero, Stick, has zero personality depth. It’s difficult to get attached to him. He has almost no back story and no clear motivation: he is enthusiastic but on the naive (i.e. stupid) side. The voice acting helps immensely but can’t compensate for the lack of substance, and the emptiness of most of the dialogues: it feels like some of these Japanese visual novels where characters talk for hours to say something that could be summed up in 1 minute.
Verbosity can have its place, but it’s too much in here. Apart from Stick, other characters are more interesting, like the Detective or Princess Traff (who likes to swear a lot). They have more background and more things to say about the world and what needs to be done to save it.
I’m not too fond of the art style of the game. It probably does not help that I have played Plucky Squire not too long ago, which follows a very similar concept (you playing characters from a book), and has a much stronger art direction (and cool ideas related to mixing 2D book world and real world). In Ink inside, the mix of colors and styles can be jarring and difficult to look at. It’s hardly beautiful, to say the least.
The game works perfectly fine on the Steam Deck (I played most of it on it) and the text and controls are well adapted. At this stage I would recommend to pick it up on sale if that’s in your alley. It got me intrigued but the execution is lacking. Here’s hoping they take in account some of pain points from the first opus as they work on the sequels.
Note: Ink Inside is available on Steam, and we were provided a key from the publisher for this review.