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Inkbound is already changing the way I think about roguelikes
08.04.2024 - 17:21 / digitaltrends.com / Giovanni Colantonio
I don’t envy anyone who sets out to make a roguelike. The genre presents a wide range of challenges that can make or break a game. How long should a run take? What’s the right amount of challenge? How do you keep people coming back for one more run? The answer to one of those questions could be the wrong solution for the others. It’s the most delicate of digital balancing acts that only a handful of studios have down to a science.
Judging by Inkbound, developer Shiny Shoe might be close to joining that list. The studio already cracked the roguelike genre in 2020 with its excellentMonster Train, a deckbuilding riff on Slay the Spire with a tower defense twist. With Inkbound, which hits its 1.0 launch on April 9, takes several great ideas from that title and infuses them into something totally different. It’s a totally unique turn-based tactics game using some visual cues you’d usually see in MMORPGs.
Though Inkbound has some balance issues that may hold it back from being one of the genre’s greats, Shiny Shoe gets one important aspect right here. It has found a great way to give players a difficult mountain to climb but puts enough footholds along the way to make each failed run feel worthwhile.
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The roguelike quest
Inkbound takes place in a fantasy setting where books are portals to other worlds. Players set out on a quest to hunt down some nefarious villains that are sapping those books of their ink. That narrative isn’t just a loose setup to motivate its roguelike structure. Inkbound is loaded with lore, taking notes from Hades as its story unfolds over time through chats with NPCs. It’s perhaps a little too wrapped up in its mess of proper nouns to make much sense, but it’s a respectable commitment to penning a proper universe, and the 1.0 update takes that even further.
What interests me more is Inkbound’s unique approach to combat. Rather than dealing out hack-and-slash action, each battle is a turn-based tactics encounter set in a round arena. The basic idea is that players get a certain amount of action points to spend each turn, which can be used on a bar full of abilities. The Magma Miner smashes its foes with a hammer and can leap onto enemies. My favorite class, the Weaver, attaches threads to enemies and can yank them to deal damage to everyone they’re connected to at once. Abilities sit at the bottom of the screen on a bar and operate on a cooldown.
The execution isn’t too far off from what you’d see in an MMORPG. Each attack has a specific damage
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