Inkslinger

Forgotten indie game of the week (12/04/21)

Last week 169 games were released on Steam. And even though this might seem like a lot, it’s actually considerably less than previous weeks. Though that doesn’t necessarily mean that the general quality of games has to be lower, as I came across several interesting looking games that piqued my interest this week as well.

But alas, with my limited time I can only choose one indie game each week that I think deserves more attention. And this week the game that fascinated me the most with it’s rather unique graphical style and gameplay, was ‘Inkslinger’.

About the game:

Inkslinger is made by Gateway, a Copenhagen-based indie duo and was released to Steam on April 8th 2021 as their first commercial game. The price for the game at the time of writing is 3.99€ ($4.99).

Official website: https://inkslingergame.com/
Steam link: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1510410/Inkslinger/

Story:

The game starts with the player working in a wordshop as a so-called inkslinger. Your job is to write letters for clients and to try and convey their feelings as best as possible on paper. Slowly but steadily you learn more about the tragic world around you, and how you fit in the story yourself.

You experience the world mostly through the personal interaction with the clientele who ask you to write letters for them, giving only small glimpses into the industrial setting of the fictional country of Nomania and its inhabitants. Telling the story this way reveals just enough about the world that the player can vividly imagine it, without having to resort to walls of text that would potentially scare people away.

The backstory of the player is mostly told through small flashbacks in between writing letters. At first these flashbacks don’t make a lot of sense, but as the story progresses you start to puzzle the story together all leading to the big reveal at the end of the game.

Personally I really enjoyed the story and how it’s told. Even though the game is set in a dark and grim setting, something that the graphical style compliments wonderfully, you still have a lot of romantic undertones that give a lot of life to the story. These in turn also give the story depth and a touch of realism.

After finishing the story for the first time, I jumped right back in for a second run. And even though the story is completely linear, I still learned a lot of small details that I had originally missed or misunderstood.

Gameplay:

Inkslinger is easy to play, even for people who have never played a game before and doesn’t require anything more than a keyboard.

The game is played by writing letters that best describe the feelings of your client. You of course don’t have to type entire letters yourself, but you choose between a few options of words that you find best fitting to each client. Using the selected word, the game will type out a fitting response.

Each letter consists of several different sections, which together decide how well you did when you finish writing it. This will result in 3 possible scenarios of bad, mediocre or good, and will each give their own response.

At first it might seem easy to figure out what the right choice is, but once the game gets going it throws you some curveballs that even the best linguists might start to second doubt themselves.

I also really enjoyed seeing the different letters being written depending on my choices, and I often reversed my answers just to see what the other replies would be.

The only pet peeve that I had with the gameplay, was that except for a small disapproving message of the client at the end of a letter, the storyline of the game wasn’t altered by your performance. You do get one of the 4 different end cards, based on your scores. But even small changes would have already made replaying the game a lot more enjoyable.

Graphics:

In the graphics department, Inkslinger truly stands out from the rest of the games. And it was also mainly because of this reason that I decided to give it a go.

The game uses old pieces of art that are freely available in the common domain, to puzzle together an unique and very fitting atmosphere for the story to take place in. And even though it’s a rather simple style, it works so well.

It’s impossible to tell from just screenshots, but the game also uses a lot of simple effects such as dust particles floating in the wind, soft fades and typewriter-like movements to break the monotone and otherwise lifeless canvas. And make it feel like the game is alive and breathing, without being too distracting.

Bugs:

Similar to the art style, the game is very polished and I didn’t bump into any major issues. The only thing that was a bit of a shame, was that the steam achievements didn’t seem to work when I was playing. But I’m confident that this will be fixed very soon by the developers.

Conclusion:

I really had a lot of fun while playing Inkslinger. You don’t often see a game which not only has an interesting story, but also a great graphical style and unique gameplay. It is really a hidden diamond amongst indie games. Though I’m fully aware that this game will not be a good fit for the average gamer, if you don’t mind a slower paced story-driven game, definitely give it a try.

The only downside of the game is that it’s very short. For my first playthrough it took me only about 50 minutes to complete the entire game, and that was with carefully reading everything and trying out different options as answers. The game does encourage you to play through it multiple times, but it would have been nice to see the story being altered a bit depending on the choices the player makes.

My opinion as a game developer:

Inkslinger is a very nifty game, and you can feel the passion of the developers throughout the entire game. So it’s a real shame to see that it hasn’t reached a wide audience yet. I do believe that the game has the potential to be loved by a small but devoted community, though I can’t imagine that it will ever become a common name in the gaming scene, as it’s more an experience rather than an actual game.

The main problem I think that the game currently has, is that a lot of people are being scared away by the complicated sounding grammar and sentence structure that the game uses, and even partly relies on for the gameplay to work. When I did start playing the game, I quickly noticed that it’s not as intimidating as I initially believed. But unfortunately I don’t think most people will give it a go simply for this reason.

Localization would partially solve this problem and reach people who aren’t necessarily fluent in English. Though I can imagine that for a project like this, that is so reliant on text, there’s no easy or cheap way to translate this game into many different languages.

So what can you do as a gamer?:

If Inkslinger seems like a game you would like to play, and if you haven’t already, go and buy it. Support the developers by writing a review and talk about it with friends or other people who you think might be interested.

This of course doesn’t only apply to Inkslinger, but every game you have enjoyed and want to support and encourage the developers of. The harsh reality is that there are thousands of forgotten indie games out there, waiting to be discovered by the right people.

And even though it’s not easy, it is very rewarding finding unique and cool games that didn’t get a chance to shine yet.

Good luck, and thank you for reading.

~Vincent