INK

[Kong Wen]

INK is a game that just came out on Steam this week. It's currently selling at a launch discount for $4.94 until Wednesday, 12 August.

The game basically looks like someone took Super Meat Boy's blood splashing feature and turned it into a central game mechanic à la The Unfinished Swan. It plays like quick/tight Super Meat Boy style platformer where the player runs and jumps (and wall jumps, etc.) to get to a goal at the end of the stage. Most stages appear to be quite small.

The catch is that you can't see anything. You have to splash paint/ink around the map in order to reveal the floors and walls (and thus, pits and obstacles). You can run over or bump into terrain to leave an ink mark, spatter ink by (double-)jumping, etc. You also leave some ink when you die, which is a nice twist because it turns death into a progress mechanic in addition to a challenge/gating mechanic.

[Spore]

Alright, bought it and beat it in a comfortable single sitting. The game is very short. It will probably take an hour and a half to beat even with finding most of the collectibles. The game controls fairly close to Super Meat Boy with double jumps and wall clinging, except in this game your character has a bit less inertia/accelerates quicker and ungrips walls faster if you hold off of them. The jumping is also a bit quicker. Meat Boy gets lots of air time but ink-square falls pretty quickly. Ink also has a double jump which allows you to change your velocity much more than just holding a direction. It's all a bit less easy to control than Meat Boy, but it is serviceable. The visuals were nice. All very clean and colorful, and it is fun to see layers and layers of ink cover the environment. All the characters are basic geometric shapes such as square, triangles, and circles, but they fit the aesthetic fine. The sound is super basic, and the soundtrack wasn't memorable, but I didn't tire of it (or notice it at all really).

For me the biggest issue of the game is that the whole paint the level mechanic really doesn't matter very much. Every double jump makes Ink-square "spit" ink drops all around him, blotting bits of obstacles all around him. I feel this mechanic is supposed to be more interesting than it actually is. Each level you can't see any ground except what you're standing on and areas with enemies (which also leak ink onto the environment), but after a few double jumps your path is clear. When I got to a new level I would just try to complete it blind which do to the predictable placement of ground isn't very difficult to do. As I went through I'd cover large swaths of the stage in one life so by the time I died it pretty much became just another platformer. Your paint stays after each death (in fact, dying makes a huge splatter all around you to cover objects) so just throwing yourself around a few lives will almost completely paint the level. Sadly, by the third act of the game, the developer also started running out of ideas it seemed. Most levels at that point put the whole challenge on dodging little homing projectiles like those annoying homing monsters in the Hell part of Super Meat Boy. They weren't fun in that game either. All stages are relatively small, either confined to a small square space or presented in a line. I think this is what made the ink mechanic fall apart a bit. Even without being able to see anything you know where you're supposed to go. Being able to grip walls makes it even easier to blindly barrel through levels since if you don't make a jump (because you can't see it!) you'll probably just stick to the wall of the platform anyway.

There's also collectibles you can find by squirting ink in inconspicuous and out of the way portions of some levels. I got around 12 out of 20 on my first run, so they are at least decently hidden and some require you to go off the main path to find them. The other part of the game were the 3 boss fights. They kind of reminded me of Super Mario Brothers boss fights where they basically amount to dodging an attack and jumping on its head a few times, but they were at least well designed. They are all kind of pretty looking and the last one was particularly cool (he's in the trailer if you look).

Overall, it was okay. It's a platformer.

[Kong Wen]

For me the biggest issue of the game is that the whole paint the level mechanic really doesn't matter very much. Every double jump makes Ink-square "spit" ink drops all around him, blotting bits of obstacles all around him. I feel this mechanic is supposed to be more interesting than it actually is. Each level you can't see any ground except what you're standing on and areas with enemies (which also leak ink onto the environment), but after a few double jumps your path is clear.

Ah, it's disappointing that the developer couldn't have made more interesting use of this mechanic, because it's a good design conceit. Perhaps more larger and/or more dynamic levels would have mitigated this a bit. I also think the enemies shouldn't really help you out. They could be improved in two ways: 1. Make them completely invisible until you ink them, and 2. Maybe give them some kind of ink-cleaning ability, so instead of painting the terrain, they actually undo some of your inking, or use attacks/projectiles that clear the terrain you've already inked. This would hopefully go a long way to making the the game less about splattering the whole map before "really" playing.

I'm planning on buying it this afternoon and then probably playing it early this week. I'll post my impressions as well.

[pdSlooper]

It sounds interesting enough to me, and I like the look of it. Maybe I'll pick it up, too.