Inkulinati

"Liber scriptus proferetur

In quo totum continetur"

- one of the world's most endlessly sampled tunes

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It's a meandering monastic menagerie mêlée! 

How the hell has Daedalic Entertainment stayed in business so long? Well, I guess their development studio actually hasn't, and my various complaints about Blackguards 2 might points to reasons why. Even as publishers though, they seem to work with tiny start-ups with big dreams but little expertise or inspiration. To be fair, I haven't outright hated the likes of Iratus or, say, Valhalla Hills, but they've tended to desperately imitate bigwigs' industry standards and end up cluttering their gameplay with pointless "features" until it all washes out to mediocre offerings. (Lending the skeleton's catchphrase from Iratus a bit of meta-humour.)

 

So Inkulinati proved a pleasant surprise. (And I could do with a couple of those after Bloodlines 2's shit-show.) Budget TBS. The basic mechanics are nothing new: squad management with individual combats placed on a lattice of possible encounters inspired by roguelikes and the like-like. It relies on its artwork for most of its appeal, imitating medieval illustrations. Though resigned to cheap two-dimensional, 2FPS animations, it manages to own their goofy, awkward, primitive yet expressive (dare one say "iconic") antics. So if besting St. Frankie in a scribble contest with the power of bean gas and bunny butts is one of your life's dreams, well, have at it. The basic pretext is that you're medieval scribes battling it out on paper using the resource of "living ink" to summon armies of beasties. I do think they took it one step too far by having a human hand interpose to do the actual drawing.

I am so gonna knock Hilda's holy pussy!

Nothing so human should taint my alternate reality. But maybe that's just my lingering FMV trauma talking. It also falls prey to so many designers' impulse to stick some twitch-gaming element into everything (cf. Gemini Rue's gunfights or the old Oregon Trail rapids sequence) by making you click to time your attacks as the pointer oscillates among damage numbers.

Thankfully it's not too overwhelmingly twitchy, but still interferes nonsensically into an otherwise completely turn-based system. The writing, ironically for a game played on manuscripts, is barely there, just a bit of random nonsense. And it's not like FTL didn't demonstrate such a game can benefit from flavor text. 

 

Aside from that though, Inkulinati takes some of its best cues from the previous decade's good surprises like Darkest Dungeon or Into the Breach. Combat is linear with extra levels thrown in connected by ladders, and force-moving units offers both collision damage and one-shot kills if tossed off the page. Hazards are plentiful and varied, status effects deceptively difficult to work around (I just lost a match against monkeys because the headaches they caused prevented my melee-heavy team from moving and attacking in the same round) and resource scarcity weighted just enough to make you value an extra drop here and there. A fatigue mechanic encourages you to switch things up without completely blocking you from favoring your favorites. Minor differences between the various beast squads combine into new experiences.

 

Look, I'm not praising this thing just because they made the wolf a support caster! It's basically what Iratus or Darkest Dungeon 2 could've been without the tacked-on timesinks and other filler. Though limited in scope, this brand of thoughtfully interweaving mechanics and honest charm are exactly why we keep holding out hope for indie gaming.

 

 

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P.S.: Why the infernus did it take me four tries to find even a half-decent English translation of Dies Irae of all things, one of history's most famous pieces of music? Can't you just hum along if you don't know the Latin? Why do "conservative" segments of society feel the need to reinvent their own supposedly sacred culture until its texts are unrecognizable? I may be an atheist but it's my cultural heritage too; quit fuckethin' with it, William Josiah Irons!

 

P.P.S.: And if you think the fart jokes are a bit much, no, they are perfectly apt, you've obviously just never run across that wagon wheel thing in The Canterbury Tales.