It’s been a while since Inkulinati dropped in early access/game preview. The turn-based strategy game is set all around drawings and using ink to battle against your opponents. There was a lot of things that you couldn’t expect from how the game actually worked upon release, but almost entirely for the good. For instance, who could have expected for there to be full on live action cutscenes where a knight walks into a room and starts drawing randomly? You also couldn’t expect the dry humour that the game brings. Did you expect there to essentially be three separate campaigns? Draw yourself a seat because Inkulinati brings a lot to the table.

I think I downloaded the wrong version of Monty Python and The Holy Grail.

To start off, let’s talk about the actual gameplay. Inkulinati is essentially, at its core, a hero vs. hero turn-based strategy game. The entire game is played on a 2D plain where there may or may not be random obstacles, like wagons, or there may be multiple levels. Your hero will collect ink each turn, which allows you to draw new minions. Minions are generally some animal with a given class. For instance, if you decide you want an army of foxes, you could have a fox knight, archer, spear user, ect. If you want a whole zoo, you could have a fox archer, a dog spearman, and a donkey bard.

It’s really up to you at the end of the day, but different animals do have different strengths, like foxes can move further, but dogs are stronger. One thing to pay attention to is that your troops will gather fatigue the more you use them, I mean I wouldn’t want to draw the same thing over and over again either. This means they’ll begin to cost more and more to summon, so you’ll want to collect what you can and switch them out as you go, give everyone some rest. Besides yourself of course.

Just like other roguelikes, there are a lot of pictures to learn.

Your hero has a lot more to do than just summon troops though. The aim of Inkulinati is to, of course, defeat the opposition champion. This can be done a couple of ways. The first is the obvious, use your troops, get over to them, and simply beat them until they’re done. When you attack, you’ll have a timing system in place that dictates how much damage you’ll do. It’s simply a bar that goes up and down and you just hit the command button at the right time. It’s nice and simple, but it adds some extra interactivity to the combat.

Now then, the other way is to knock them off the edge. While the battleground may be crudely drawn, you can use this to your advantage to use your troops ability to push the opposition off the edge of any platform. Even if there is another level below, it’s an instakill. The last, significantly less easy way, is that your hero also has hand abilities. Not that kind, pervert. With this you can do many things, it just depends on what you pick, this includes pushing things, straight up smacking them to do damage to them, or healing them. The reason this is harder is the range it has, it’s very unlikely your hero will be in range of another one to do any of this.

Since it’s all picture/book based, turns are chapters.

I mentioned the crudely drawn battleground for a reason, that is the fact that everything in Inkulinati genuinely feels like something you could draw at home. Now if only you didn’t need magic to make things move on the paper. It’s simplicity is actually it’s charm though, because if we were meant to believe that these random people were drawing super detailed landscapes, it might take you a bit out of it. Unlike something like Paper Mario where we are to believe the whole world is just paper, Inkulinati shows in its cutscenes that these are real people drawing these animals and battlegrounds.

Every single animal is given a name, but also a cat bishop makes no sense, they only care about themselves!

One of the most fascinating parts of Inkulinati is the fact that it’s roguelite-ish. You pick the path you follow through the journey, and after you win you unlock a longer journey. If you lose, your journey restarts. Much like something like Slay The Spire there are different heroes you can opt to use with different amounts of health and different abilities. If you lose, or your build just isn’t coming along, you can reset your journey pretty easily. There’s a lot going on that you won’t take in all at once, but you don’t need to because Inkulinati does a good job at gradually adding new mechanics over the course of your playtime.

There are lots of little dialogue exchanges.

Overall, Inkulinati is a really unique strategy title that’s also tons of fun to play. There are lots of games out there trying copy the successful formula from other roguelikes, but thankfully enough, this one goes for a different route. It might borrow some elements from other games that preceded it, but Inkulinati plots its own path. There’s nothing like it out there. Not to mention the fantastic and entirely unexpected inclusion of fully acted, live cutscenes. If nothing else, they pulled me into the game even more than just what the gameplay had already managed to achieve.

Inkulinati is available now on Nintendo Switch, PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X|S.

Reviewed on Nintendo Switch.

A copy of Inkulinati was provided by the publisher.