Playing A Game Inked PC

These days, I think the phrase "art game" could mean one of two things. You could use it to describe games that focus on visual spectacle, like Journey or Epistory; you could also, snidely, use it to describe avant-garde "games" like Dear Esther that slog their way through a story about The Human Condition.

Inked is both. ... And it's also a fidgety physics-puzzle game, but not a very good one.

The puzzling is fairly basic, revolving around a limited number of different physics objects you can place ("draw") in the world. Use bridges and ramps to cross obstacles, use blocks to weigh down switches, use spheres to roll into holes. Resource management - you can only place a certain number of objects simultaneously - tends to be the challenging aspect of these puzzles, and toward the end of the demo, the puzzles were at least moderately complicated.

What made me hate those more-complex puzzles was how flakey the objects could be. Despite its isometric camera and hard angles, Inked's world isn't grid-based: placed objects can, and often do, move just a few pixels off-track when you walk into them, or when another object moves due to gravity or whatever else. Inked's uncertain physics aren't as bad as, say, World of Goo, but they do feel inappropriate for solving what are otherwise deterministic puzzles.

But I probably could've put up with more sketchy physics if the game wasn't so slow. Many puzzles felt held up by the slow walking speed. The totally empty sections of levels, inbetween puzzles, especially highlighted this. I guess the level design is paced out to let you admire the scenery (a'la Desert Bus), but I was over that pretty quickly.

And the storytelling, that felt excruciatingly slow. Occasionally the game dropped a fourth-wall-breaking story beat, alluding to traumatic events in the artist's past; these beats were heavy-handed with foreshadowing - gee, do you think there was a bus accident? - and got borderline repetitive, hammering on their implications over and over to really make sure I got the point, before they felt comfortable moving on to new information.

I don't know how Inked's story ends, but I could tell right away that it'd take a long time to get there.

Honestly, Inked doesn't even look that great in motion. The screenshots are gorgeous; I'd recommend just looking at those, and forgetting about the rest of this game.

Progress: Finished the demo.