Back in early 2023, when Inkulinati appeared in early access, it stood out from other games. There’s not even anything to compare it with, and it’s difficult to classify it as a genre. It seems like a roguelike in which you decide which path to take, but the runs here are longer than in other games of the genre. It seems to be a turn-based strategy, but you rarely see a side view and control of individual units in such projects. A little over a year later, the final version was released – the idea remained the same, the balance was corrected, enough new content was added, and the gameplay is still a very funny and unusual adventure.
Bigger and better
If usually in roguelikes we control people or animals traveling around the world, then in Inkulinati everything happens on the pages of medieval manuscripts. Master inculinates (some kind of bored sectarians) fight with each other by drawing creatures: they depict self-portraits – mini-inculinates and add assistants next to their characters, who will fight to the bitter end. The goal of the fight is to defeat the enemy mini-inculinate, breaking through the defenses it has built.
At the early access stage in Inkulinati there was a training mode with basic lessons. Over the past year, the “tutorial” has grown greatly – now it is a whole “Academy” with three dozen tests, as well as intermediate lessons, where there are about fifty more “challenges”. That is, if previously you had to get acquainted with many mechanics during the passage, now everything is explained in detail in this training. The tasks and conditions in the lessons can be tricky, and “Academy” can be considered a full-fledged mode, albeit a drawn-out one – many of the features of the game could be explained briefly.
It’s difficult to convey the essence of the game in words, but you can try. Our drawn mini-inculinate is a kind of commander who, although he can move somewhat, mostly sits in one place. When he appears on the map, he has several units of ink in stock – this is the currency with which you buy (and immediately draw) creatures. Swordsmen, archers, bards – you name it!. The opponent does everything the same, and we are required to both defend our mini-inculinate and attack the enemy.
Battles are turn-based – first one of the duelist’s creatures moves, then it’s the opponent’s creature’s turn. The player is free to choose who exactly he wants to play – this is very important in situations where you need to protect someone or urgently defeat. Then, when all the characters have done their best and have fallen asleep, the turn ends and the process repeats. It is undesirable to delay games, since after a few turns the apocalypse usually begins – either hellfire will appear along the edges of the map, or a flying hellmouth will begin to devour those who find themselves in it at the end of the turn.
At some point Andreas from Pentiment appeared here – the visual styles of the games are similar, so collaboration was only a matter of time.
U Inkulinati there will be something to https://eurokingcasino.uk/withdrawal/ surprise you, because bored sectarians have a rich imagination. War hares put their enemies to sleep by showing them their butts. Donkey bards play bagpipes, causing headaches for opponents – and they don’t use their mouths to do it. Demons create sparks using flammable gases. Fortunately, not all abilities are related to gases – there are also Cerberus, who spit fireballs, and bishop cats, who improve the characteristics of allies. Creatures who are anointed deal double damage to devils and heretics – the latter can be done if you damage a holy character. Demons, in turn, ignore sparks and hellmouths – what other creatures get injured from.
Each new location becomes an interesting puzzle – using the available resources, you need to defeat the enemy as quickly and efficiently as possible. Special gameplay mechanics help with this. For example, you can push the enemy to the side with any character. Firstly, it allows you to move the enemy to your ally so that it is easier for him to fight. Secondly, sometimes it is possible to push an enemy towards an exploding object in order to inflict more damage on him. Well, thirdly, the target can be thrown off the cliff altogether – there are no walls here, so bring the poor fellow to the edge and push him off so as not to bother with him for a long time. What’s interesting is that you can do this even with mini-inculinates – if you’re lucky, the duel will end quickly.
It is important to remember about the abilities of the mini-inculinate. He not only draws creatures next to him, but can also influence the course of the battle using gestures. The simplest gesture is to push the character in the chosen direction, which can even be used on oneself. Most of the time you use this to push someone onto an inkblot – the main source of ink. Spots appear randomly, and they are also left behind by killed creatures, and if at the beginning of the next turn someone is standing on the spot, then in the next round the player will receive bonus ink. Other gestures include healing teammates, erasing negative effects like bleeding, turning enemies in a radius into heretics, and so on. There are also talents, the number of which has grown significantly since Early Access. These are “passives” that allow you to earn additional ink, give bonus protection to creatures, and so on – very useful and powerful modifiers.
Dangerous road to success
Dozens of creatures, gestures, talents – it seems easy to get confused in all of this. However, structurally Inkulinati – more precisely, its main mode “Journey” is a roguelike, and therefore you start the passage with only four creatures, three gestures and one talent. The rest is collected as you travel from one boss to another, earning gold and visiting shops. Or not visiting – it all depends on which path you choose. After most stages you have a choice – either start the next battle for gold, or visit the chapel to replenish the health of the mini-inculinate, or increase the amount of starting ink in the scriptorium.
Battles are divided into three types. In “Animal Fights” the mini-inculinat does not take part at all – only creatures fight there. In the "Lair of Beasts" you need to destroy not only enemies, but also the places where they endlessly respawn – in the battle with bees, for example, these are hives. And in “Clash of Inculinate with Wild Beasts” only the player has a mini-inculinate – he fights only with creatures, and it is enough to defeat them to complete the battle. If you complete the difficult version of Clash, where there are usually more enemies and they are stronger, you will receive a new beast as a reward. Increasing your bestiary will make the journey much easier, as it will give you more options – you can only take five creatures into battle and always know what enemies will be in the next challenge, which allows you to prepare.
Over the past year, many new creatures have been added to the game. Hares, dogs, foxes and other animals that were in early access remained in place, and, for example, monkeys appeared – each of them improves its attack at the end of the turn with a random effect. Or take pigeons – not only do they move around levels without using stairs, but they also have the passive skill “Dove”, which grants increased damage and health restoration when landing next to a relative. Even a dragon appeared here – the most expensive creature, immune to several negative effects, infecting enemies with bites and pouring fire on them. You will unlock these fighters gradually by completing the Journey and earning prestige points.
In last year’s preview Inkulinati I complained about broken balance, due to which some creatures turned out to be too strong, and the stages with their participation were impassable. In the full version, nothing caused me any complaints – perhaps due to the appearance of a bunch of new talents and types of creatures. I specifically looked through the descriptions of patches over the past months and several times came across huge lists of fixes – and the health of many was increased or decreased, and some abilities were reworked. Hares, for example, previously did not pray at the end of their turn themselves – they had a corresponding skill that had to be activated manually. In Journey, the rewards have also changed – now there are more opportunities to restore health in between battles.
But some shortcomings still remain. In particular, there is a huge amount of text in the descriptions of creatures – next to each skill there is a whole paragraph explaining the mechanics, and decoding of keywords appears in the right corner of the screen. Over time, you will have to refer to these texts less and less, but for an unprepared player there is a lot of information – and it is not always clear which part of it is valuable. I also don’t really like the fact that you can’t quit a race halfway without losing the earned prestige – the currency needed to unlock new creatures. Sometimes it is obvious that the strength of the unit is not high enough for a long passage, and feathers that save in case of death will not help much. Or you want to try a higher difficulty because the race seems easy. But if you give up, you’ll lose everything.
At any time, you can turn on the hint mode and point the cursor at any object to read its description.
Inkulinati is a very unusual game in both gameplay and visuals, which will surely appeal to fans of turn-based strategies and roguelikes. The early version was promising, but there was not enough content, the balance was poor, and the interface looked sloppy. Over the course of a year, they fixed all this, at the same time adding a lengthy “tutorial” with a bunch of challenges and offering players even more reasons to replay the “Journey” mode. They weren’t able to make online multiplayer for release, but even without it you’d want to spend more than one evening here, pushing opponents into abysses and stunning them with gas clouds.
Pros: an unusual mixture of genres that works surprisingly well; funny graphics; original gameplay mechanics that turn each battle into a puzzle; a challenge-filled tutorial mode that explains every element of the game; many creatures, talents and gestures – much more than in the earlier version.
Cons: the training tells a lot of interesting things, but it is very drawn out; descriptions of characters and their abilities are still walls of text.
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