A Casual-RPG That’s So Messy It Eventually Drops The ‘Casual’
Steven Universe: Unleash the Light is a gem on Apple Arcade. It’s a lightweight RPG in the vein of Costume Quest and Adventure Time: Pirates of the Enchiridion. And it was my personal gateway to Steven Universe as a thing. I hadn’t watched the series before playing the game, but it gave me that push.
When I heard that the team behind Unleash the Light was basically the team working on Ink Inside, I jumped at the chance of a review. Reading a synopsis, it felt like a spiritual sequel sans Steven Universe. An insecure warrior leading princesses through a casual RPG, collecting crystals on the way? Yeah, there were definite echoes.
Stick It To The Man
More specifically, Ink Inside is about a one-armed drawing named Stick (as in stickman) who materialises in a world of sketchbook drawings. The world has existed for some time, but recently it’s been tormented by the Sog. Whole Queendoms have been flooded and its citizens have been infested by polluted water. Now they’re roaming the forests, attacking anyone they find.
The source of the Sog isn’t a secret. Through live-action cutaways, we’re shown that the world is a box of sketchbooks, created by a young girl called Hannah, that have been abandoned in a leaking cupboard. Drips have been ‘sogging’ the sketchbooks, and the forgotten box is at risk of being destroyed.
Ink Inside is a hero’s journey through the Sog to answer several questions. Who is Stick? Why does he have a yellow arm that materialises in battle? Who is Hannah? And what happened to the Hero who held back the Sog several years ago?
An Unexpected Combat System
All of this is told through the medium of a casual RPG. And dodgeball. Which isn’t necessarily the most unusual combo: we’ve seen something similar in Dodgeball Academia. Instead of combat in the traditional JRPG sense, you throw balls (or, in this case, Cores) back and forth with the enemy.
These dodgeball battles feed the RPG side of Ink Inside. Experience is gained, Stick levels up, and new warriors join the party. The Cores can be upgraded with the loot you gain from battle. Plus support mechanics, in the form of Agility Items and Tech Items, can be upgraded too. There’s even a neat Job system, where you can complete feats in battle for perk-like benefits.
It’s a substantial amount of stuff for – checks the Store – only £8.39. Scratch that: it’s a ridiculous amount of gameplay for less than a tenner. Particularly if you’re in it for the sweet completionism, this can be a twenty, thirty hour game.
Not Everything Is Ink-Redible
What saddens us deeply is that we think there’s a reason why it’s lowballed in price. As huge fans of Steven Universe: Unleash the Light, it rankles in our gut that Ink Inside is a bit of a mess. It’s an endearing, full-hearted and even occasionally inspired mess, but a mess nonetheless.
The dodgeball battles feel like a good place to start. It’s refreshing to resolve grievances through something other than a JRPG UI. They play out in realtime, and you’re picking up and tossing Cores with a free-aim system. LB uses your ‘tech’ – a shield or parry – and LT uses a dash or blink, depending on what you have socketed. You can melee with X if the enemies ‘break the rules’ and come over to your side of the court, while you are also capable of building up a special bar and then expending it to bash through their side.
It is chaos, and not in a predictable, masterable way. Ink Inside dearly wants you to dodge and counter, but the enemy cues are particularly bad: it’s not clear when you are being targeted. The game also dearly wants you to uppercut enemies and juggle them with various finishing moves and something called Hangtime, but the uppercut takes an age to wind up and the enemies have often buggered off by then. There’s minimal visual feedback that these attacks have even been initiated, and frequently Ink Inside doesn’t recognise the input. One boss demanded that we solely use Hangtime, a sequence of melee combos, and we could only pull it off on a 1 out of 4 basis, before it would heal up again. It was a real low point.
We ended up dreading these frantic battles, and we’d often refuse to use our special bar, simply because it was more useful after a battle to spend on healing up. It’s not good when you’re neglecting entire systems deliberately.
But you can’t avoid these battles. They’re frequent, not only because they’re overused, but because they refresh when you return to an area. Backtracking is punished in this way, but so, so many of Ink Inside’s puzzles require backtracking. The mid-section, where levers need to be found and pulled to navigate four corners of a skeleton dungeon, is the absolute worst for this. If not for reviewing, we think we might have given up on Ink Inside at this point.
A Map To Nowhere In Particular
Which leads us to the Map, an unusual focus for ire. For reasons that are inexplicable and seemingly misanthropic, it opens to a black screen. You have to search around in the darkness for something that looks like your location, presumably because it’s a large image and the relevant bits only take up a small portion of it. But even if it did default to a ‘You Are Here’, it’s not fit for purpose. Locations are inconsistently included (several tears, or portals, aren’t featured), and there are precious few labels to help you identify what you’re looking at. It’s precariously close to useless, yet the game is a maze of portals that demand you use it. At least there is a fast-travel system, I suppose.
The rest of Ink Inside is like its sketchbooks: half-artful and a sign of what could have been, and half sogged with issues.
We really cared for the story and its mixed media, moving from different styles of sketchbook to the home video footage of Hannah. Those home videos are a little on the amateur side but they perk you up, make you pay attention. The characters in the sketchworld are generally brilliant too. We had a soft spot for Traff, the cussing fairy, who bleeped every other word but dearly wanted to do better.
It just introduced itself poorly, with an opening that was so distracted by setting up its own mysteries that it forgot to include some clarity. And there’s a frustrating habit of using a hundred chat lines when only a few would do. We love story in our video games, but Ink Inside could really have done with some self-editing.
The progression systems are so deep and involved, giving you plenty to aim for as you wade through dodgeball fights. The Jobs are a fine idea, allowing you to set personal tasks for yourself. Can I uppercut straight out of a dash? I’m not sure, but I’m willing to give it a go. The idea of using single slots for multiple effects and forcing the player to choose, is also a winner. We couldn’t decide how best to use our Tech slot, and switched it up on the regular.
Now for the counter-blow. Why is progression gated by items that are randomly given in loot? You might need a specific Core or gem to be able to access a critical portal, but you’ve not gained it yet or – worse – you’ve used it as collateral in crafting. At several points, we were farming dozens of dodgeball battles in the hope of getting what we needed.
The Stink Inside
There are so many of these niggles. Bugs caused us to restart on three separate occasions. Graphical glitches caused pink billboards to appear behind characters. Level-ups are near invisible, making you feel like your progress is static. Bosses were stalagmite-sized difficulty spikes.
Such are the issues that I wondered if there were development troubles behind the scenes. Did time or money run out? Did someone dismiss the idea of user-testing? Did ideas become unviable but they were too far along to stop? Oh, to be a fly on the wall of Ink Inside’s development.
A Struggling Quest for Sketchbook Glory
We dearly wanted to love Ink Inside. Steven Universe: Unleash the Light was one of our honorable mentions when it launched, and so much of the team responsible are back for this. It seemed like an open goal: a return to past casual-RPG glories.
Too many bugs, messes and faulty design decisions effectively scratch off the ‘casual’ from casual-RPG. It’s a game at war with its own combat system, map and navigation. There are so, so many good things here – not least the story and progression systems – but Ink Inside struggles to stay enjoyable for more than a few minutes at a time.
Important Links
Buy Ink Inside from the Xbox Store – https://www.xbox.com/en-gb/games/store/ink-inside/9nhxjgm1wgf5
