Inkbound is an addictive games with some really strong gameplay hooks. Sadly, the game also has a plethora of issues that really prevent Inkbound from shining.
The Good
Inkbound's combat feels unique yet familiar, and although some of the mechanics take some experience to truly understand their potential, the combat is engaging and deep. As you play through a game you will make choices based on some RNG items and abilities in terms of how you want to build your class (binder). There are some really fun combinations that can be very powerful into the run. The progression of a run feels good at lower and mid levels, and incredibly challenging at later levels. All the different classes feel really different and it's awesome to build them in different ways. For instance, one classes uses thread to tie enemies together-- gaining buffs for threading each of them and being able to deal lots of AOE damage. Another class specializes in defense gameplay which works well with items that allow you to return damage that is dealt to you. There is a ton of complexity and depth with the enemy types and you have an option to choose harder paths with better rewards. There are a lot of decisions to be made, yet none of them feel too overwhelming.
I really enjoyed the music and the art is not bad. I admit that some of the 3d models don't look the best, but all in all the character and set designs are fine. I really like the artwork on the cards.
There really didn't need to be a story for the game, but I actually found it to be pretty interesting. I found the development of the characters and their relationships to be engaging. So all in all I will say that I enjoyed the story, but how it was implemented is incredibly bad, which I will get into in the next session.
The Bad
There are some system level design choices made in Inkbound that really detract from the fun gameplay. The quest system feels so burdonsome and overwhelming. There are a lot of quests, way too many in my opinion. The way they are executed in Inkbound really disrupt the way you want to play the game. For me, a Roguelike is about getting into a new run and seeing what happens and trying out new item/abillity combinations. I want to load up this type of game and jump right in. But a lot of the games progression is actually locked behind quests. This is okay for some quests, such as win a run with X character, but really struggles with some quests that require you to use certain items or go down certain paths. The issue with this is that depending on RNG, those items may not drop, and those paths might not be what your build needs. So doing the quests makes the game really challenging because it forces weird decisions that just weren't necessary. I found that I couldn't do quests on the highest difficulty level, and had to go down to difficulty 10 to complete them with relative consitency. I didn't want to play at rank 10, I wouldn't to play at the highest rank but I wasn't able to do that because the quest system was preventing me from playing how I wanted to play-- that feels bad. Some of the quests also have you do the same book (levels) many times. It gets VERY repetitive.
In order to progress the story, you need to do a LOT of quests. It's wild that after completing one of the final story quests, I saw that the steam achievement for doing that was something around 3.5%. Less than 4% of people actually completed the story-- That is not good. The story needs to help hook the player into the world, and the endgame should be solely about winning higher difficulty runs. There is no reason that the story took me 120 hours to complete in a rouge-like. Admittedly, I wasn't just grinding quests, but again that's because many of them were annoying to do.
I also feel that the difficulty is way too steep a curve. I've played Inkbound for over 100 hours, and I feel like my ability to win at the highest difficulty is based on whether I get rare drops or certain abilities very early on. Some runs feel absolutely impossible. I've played ShinyShoe's Monster Train for over 1,000 hours and I feel like their difficulty feels a lot better in that game. Every run in Monster Train can be won at the highest level, but you really need to have good knowledge of the game. Maybe I'm just not good enough at Inkbound, but it feels more like imbalance and less like a skill level.
So all in all, I really loved playing the game despite some really huge problems with the game. I doubt it will get future support, so try out the game of you love complex, strategic gameplay, and infinite playability. If you are looking for an incredibly polished, well refined roguelike, you might consider passing.
