What is it?
In Ink Inside you play as a Stick, a guy in a hand-drawn world. This world exists on paper in the real world, but now leaking water is seeping into the pages. It’s up to Stick and friends, including fighting partner Traff and Detective Fuzz, who acts as a guide throughout the game, to fix things, explore and battle enemies. The battles are done dodgeball-style, where you and your fellow player (computer or human) throw “cores” at the enemies and use various abilites. There are plenty of different cores with different abilites which you will also need to progress. I guess you you could decribe the game as a lighthearted action RPG with beat em up elements. An obvious comparison is Dodgeball Academia, which is a cartoony and silly RPG-like with dodgeball battles.
Is it player-friendly?
Regarding difficulty, the game does not have a full-blown invincibility mode, but it does have some excellent difficulty options including sliders that let you adjust various stats and things in the game. The map which allows fast travel is also a good player-friendly feature.
The menus, however, are not without their faults. Sub-menus are sometimes shown semitransparent on top of other menus making things hard to read, and for some reason one cannot use the D-pad to navigate the menus. The whole cores and upgrading things and the different abilities during battle are a bit more more complicated than one could wish, but it’s OK.
How long it will take to finish the game depends on the number of times you will have to restart from the beginning (see the next paragraph).
Is it any good?
I usually only review games that I have been able to finish, but I have not been able to play Ink Inside to the end. The reason: jankiness and bugs. The first issue occurred early in the game when you are supposed to find and meet a certain character, but the game wouldn’t register this properly, meaning I had to restart from the beginning. Then, much later, with the majority of the game completed, all my progress was suddenly gone, for some reason, meaning I would have to restart again. As the expression goes, this was the straw that broke the camel’s back. Maybe other players won’t have the same experience; who knows. If everything had been working as it should, this would be fun, colourful, action-packed kind-of-RPG, but right now there are too many problems with the game.
Peter Öberg
A review copy was provided.