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When you’re going off to battle, you want to bring your best and strongest warriors with you. In most games, these fighters come in the form of muscle-bound, gun-toting avatars of destruction. In Yaza Games’ Inkulinati, your champions are the odd animals that litter the pages of medieval manuscripts, led across the battlefield by the hand of an easily distracted artist.
That is the crux of what makes Inkulinati unique and clever – you are not playing as any of the creatures on the field of battle. Instead, you are playing as the person drawing them, whether they are a knight engaging in scholarly pursuits or a monk spending their days painstakingly recreating a single copy of an important tome. Each of the units you spawn is scribbled into existence by this unseen person, something that, for better or worse, drives every gameplay mechanic you encounter.
The main gameplay mode of Inkulinati is the Journey Mode, which sees you going on an adventure to raise your master from the dead, which snowballs into battling Death itself along with its deadly band of skeletal fighters. Battles are fought by summoning creatures that you’ve unlocked, which costs Ink. Ink is recovered each round or can be recovered by ending your turn at certain parts of the battlefield. These creatures fight on your behalf, protecting your Tiny, which is the drawn representation of your character, while cutting down enemy creatures. The plot here is as thin as the paper the battles take place on, but its simplicity once again reinforces the concept that this is a story being etched into the margins of a more important manuscript.
The real charm of this game is the variety of creatures you can add to your arsenal. Each one feels inspired by the actual doodles that bored medieval monks added to the margins of books they were copying by hand, complete with a healthy dose of absurdity. A quick Google of ‘medieval manuscript animals’ will give you a good idea of what to expect – basically, there are a lot of butt gags thrown around because people have always loved a good fart joke. The Rabbit Swordsman can put enemies to sleep by mooning them and the Donkey Bard blows a trumpet (but not with its mouth) to force the opposing armies to skip a turn.
Inkulinati does a great job of recreating the general weirdness of these drawings, but that doesn’t come at the expense of the gameplay itself. There are some really clever tactical moves you can make as you go along and the game does a good job of introducing them to you at a sensible pace as you play through the short story. Moves like pushing characters off the edge of the page or into the deadly fire that springs up several turns into a fight can be used in conjunction with simply having your animal companions beat the enemy into submission. Our favourite move was using a series of obstacles and creatures to push an unsuspecting creature into oblivion. The little yelp they gave as they plummeted to their doom was incredibly satisfying.
Between each battle, you can change out these Hand Moves along with choosing which drawings to have at your disposal. This deckbuilding mechanic becomes even more useful when you take into account the Boredom factor that each creature has. The more your character draws a specific unit, the more bored they get with doing so, which increases their Ink cost to spawn. So it benefits you to have a regular rotation of creatures at your disposal even if you develop a fondness for a particular build. It is a small touch that forces you to change your strategy periodically and keeps the game feeling fresh.
There are some roguelite elements to Inkulinati. Health for your Tiny carries over at the end of each fight, which means that you need to protect them at all costs. Each time you play, you’ll get a different set of perks and have a different set of creatures to choose from, making playthroughs feel unique each time. However, the game was surprisingly easy – we were able to beat the story mode in just seven hours on our first run. It is possible that we got lucky with the perks we received, but we never felt like the game was meant to challenge us in a way we expected from the roguelite genre. If you want a real challenge, you’re probably better off inviting a friend over to play in the game’s Duel Mode, which lets you set up individual battles with custom decks and battlefields.
There are some small issues we encountered while playing Inkulinati. The tutorial is excessively long, taking us around four hours to complete. It goes into far more detail than you’d need at the start of the game and you’re probably better off just jumping into Journey Mode to save yourself some time. Each turn also played out very slowly, with deliberate, almost lackadaisical animations. None of these issues were enough to hurt our enjoyment of the game, though they might frustrate players looking for a faster-paced experience. The sole bug we found, which prevented us from scrolling through the Help Tools menu, has already been acknowledged by the developers and should be patched out by the time the game is released.
It isn’t the deepest or most difficult tactical strategy game, but the charming character designs and the unique framing device of Inkulinati made for an enjoyable experience. The gameplay is simple but fun and we loved the dedication to the ‘player as the artist’ gimmick. If you’ve ever wondered what those characters in the margins of medieval manuscripts were doing (and who hasn’t?), then this is as good an explanation as any.
Conclusion
Are there better, more complicated tactical strategy games out there for the Switch? Absolutely, but few of them are quite as entertaining as Inkulinati. In fact, none of them let you use a creature’s butt quite as frequently or as effectively. The absurd humour doesn’t stop the game from offering some unique tactical options, even if it errs on the easy side for our liking.