Inkbound

A turn-based tactical roguelike from the creators of Monster Train. Play solo or co-op, create powerful builds, and save the Atheneum.

Inkbound is a tactical rpg, turn-based tactics and rogue-lite game developed and published by Shiny Shoe.
Released on April 09th 2024 is available only on Windows in 5 languages: English, French, German, Japanese and Simplified Chinese.

It has received 3,413 reviews of which 3,059 were positive and 354 were negative resulting in a rating of 8.6 out of 10. 😎

The game is currently priced at 14.49€ on Steam and has a 50% discount.

The Steam community has classified Inkbound into these genres:

Tactical RPG Turn-Based Tactics Rogue-lite PvE Rogue-like Strategy RPG Turn-Based Strategy RPG Online Co-Op Character Customization Strategy Third Person Lore-Rich Turn-Based Combat Choices Matter Procedural Generation Colorful Loot 3D Fantasy

Media & Screenshots

Get an in-depth look at Inkbound through various videos and screenshots.

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Requirements

These are the minimum specifications needed to play the game. For the best experience, we recommend that you verify them.

Windows

Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system
OS: Windows 10
Processor: Core i3
Memory: 4 GB RAM
Graphics: IGP or better - 2 GB of VRAM
DirectX: Version 11
Network: Broadband Internet connection
Storage: 3 GB available space

Reviews

Explore reviews from Steam users sharing their experiences and what they love about the game.

Nov. 2024

I really like the game, the story is messy for me since I've played the game since a very early version and I should maybe have restarted just to follow it. But I assume that if you start it now and go through it it's way easier to follow =) I haven't tried the coop yet since I don't have anyone on my friendslist that has the game and I don't like joining randoms in gaming cause more often than not you end up meeting people that aren't like yourself at all in the way they communicte or play.

Oct. 2024

Inkbound is another roguelite from the developers of Monster Train. Its not a deckbuilder, but it has a similar focus on turn based combat. Unfortunately, while Monster Train is one of my top three favourite roguelites (alongside Slay The Spire and Balatro), Inkbound doesn’t come close to that high quality level. Gameplay (average quality) • During combat, enemies will spawn over a few turns, within a small circular arena. Some enemies have area of effect attacks which you can move to avoid, while others have attacks which are unavoidable because they’ll follow you anywhere in the arena like a heat seeking missile. Some enemies also have special effects, such as redirecting their attack to your current location when you hit them. • There are eight playable characters who each have three unique starting abilities, and you’ll be able to select two more abilities during a run. These abilities can be direct attacks, area of effect attacks, or defensive abilities such as healing, gaining shield, or teleporting to another location within the combat arena. • You have a limited number of action points to spend each turn, and each ability costs action points to use, while some abilities take multiple turns to cooldown between uses. Abilities can be upgraded during a run to deal extra damage, be cheaper or quicker to activate, or apply extra status effects either to the player or an enemy. • Each turn during combat, an orb will spawn somewhere in the arena, which gives you an extra action point and reduces ability cooldowns when collected. Orbs also restore some of your limited movement points for the current turn. • Over time, the combat arena will shrink, as a circle of ink gradually closes in each turn. You’ll lose health if you activate an ability or end your turn while standing in the ink, so ideally you need to win each combat encounter quickly. Each turn feels a bit like a puzzle, as you try to figure out how to deal as much damage as possible to enemies, while moving to a safe location to avoid losing health. • The UI is quite helpful and clearly shows how much health you’ll lose if you end the turn standing in your current position without killing any more enemies. • Each run follows a node structure similar to other roguelites, including normal and elite fights, random events, shops, upgrades, and locations where you can visit NPCs to progress story quests. • The other type of upgrade you can acquire are vestiges, which provide passive bonuses that can synergise with your abilities, similar to relics in other roguelites. You have a limited number of vestige slots, but at certain nodes you’ll have the option to destroy an equipped vestige, which lets you upgrade a different type of bonuses, while freeing up space to equip another vestige. This does provide a lot of options for how to build your character during each run. • A full run should take around an hour. There are two acts which end with a boss fight, followed by a final boss fight. The first two acts have five different bosses, depending on which zones you choose to visit, and there are three final bosses, which provides some variety to each run. There are also daily runs, and extra difficulty levels which add modifiers. • The biggest negative relating to gameplay is that the boss fights can be annoying, especially at the end of the second act, which I often find is much harder than the final boss. The bosses have lots of health, but also constantly spawn more minions which have unavoidable attacks. Its not unusual to start a turn in a position where the potential incoming damage is more than half of your maximum health bar. So you have to spend action points on killing the minions just to stay alive, which means you can only chip away at the boss’ health bar slowly, and eventually the ink circle will get so small that there’s just nowhere safe to stand. • I don’t necessarily object to encountering difficult fights, I’ve beaten Slay The Spire, Monster Train and Balatro on their top difficulties (and I kept coming back after losing many runs). But while I’ve beaten Inkbound’s third difficulty level, its just hard in a way that isn’t fun, so I don’t have much motivation to keep going. Story (poor quality) • There is some kind of story that progresses during and between runs, but I’ll be honest and say that I don’t really understand what is happening, because the various NPCs just ramble on about nonsense. Something about villains stealing ink which means friendly characters can’t write stories anymore. • The presentation of the story doesn’t help. Many quests ask you to talk to several NPCs, and because you only visit two zones during each run, it will often take multiple runs to complete a quest, so the story doesn’t flow properly. Also, the player character is unable to speak, so I feel disconnected from events. • I don’t know how long the story is, but I don’t think I’ll finish it. I’ve read that there are a lot of quests, so I don’t think I’m close after 20 hours. • I also don’t like that the hub area where you start each run and where you’ll find some other NPCs, has other players running around like an MMO, which I find distracting. Technical (good quality) • I didn’t have any problems with framerate, bugs or crashes. • Controls are fine with mouse and keyboard. Recommendation Inkbound is one of those games where I’d prefer if Steam would let me give it a sideways thumb. Its not terrible, and the first few runs can be fun, but long term replayability is hurt by annoying boss design and poor story presentation.

Oct. 2024

This game would be a sideways thumb for me if I could, but I can't. I'll start with the good. Mechanically, the game is very fun - it's a turn-based roguelite with an emphasis on positioning. The strategy of it lies in its equipment system, called "vestiges," where each one has one or two specific synergies which get stronger and stronger the more you invest in them. The game offers you a choice of three at random, and is more likely to show you items from your strongest synergies, helping you snowball, and Inkbound lets you live the roguelite dream of having an incredibly busted build that instantly nukes the whole screen of enemies, with enough strategic depth to make it interesting to do so. Despite that, the game is challenging enough that runs will fail somewhat regularly if you make a build that can't hang. The in-combat UI isn't cluttered or busy, and once you learn to read it, it's easy to tell how much damage you are going to do to an enemy, and how much you will take in a turn, and vice-versa. There's also a very helpful button (bound to R by default) that resets your movement between actions, letting you test out different positions to see how much damage you will take. Then, the bad. The game's quest system leaves much to be desired. This would not matter if they could be ignored, but several character classes and many of the strongest vestiges are locked behind them, which forces you to commit to runs specifically to achieve quest results (and often abandoning them halfway through) which feels more like a grindy chore than fun. The quest menu is an absolute mess and fulfilling an objective means the tracker often displays "Complete one of these three subobjectives:" without displaying what those actually are, forcing you to try to dig through the quest menu to change what's tracked manually. Some of the quests are based on RNG results during a run, which is also frustrating. The story is underwhelming, and the characters you perform these tasks simply don't have the draw or charisma to them that makes me want to help them. The most obvious parallel here is to a turn-based Hades, but with all the parts of Hades that I liked replaced with a failed attempt at childish whismy. The very attractive side characters that made Hades so appealing are replaced with a bunch of losers, and instead of chasing them down in the hope of more interactions like I did in that game, I found myself clicking through the dialogue as quickly as possible to try to get to my quest reward. Finally, the mid - I found essentially nothing compelling about the setting or the plot - it's neither bad nor good, it simply exists, but that does mean that when things happened in it, I did not care. The game aesthetically is very much the same - it's stylized consistently, but not in a way that I find interesting or appealing. The voice acting performances are good, though not compelling simply by virtue of being attached to such uninteresting characters. All those complaints aside, I'd still recommend this game to someone looking for a satisfying strategic roguelite - it might not be the first game on that list, but there's enough here to have fun with.

Oct. 2024

Turn-based roguelite with multiple characters with each, many types of builds You can play this solo or multiplayer, but I solely played it on my own Mechanically, this game is wicked. As with all roguelites, the start is a bit rough while you learn the ins and outs of the battle system and each an every single item, but by the end of a few runs I was flying through each book (this game's version of a dungeon floor) The bosses have quite a few unique mechanics that keep you on your toes adding to that strategy aspect, and since this is turnbased - there's no pressure Naturally, you will gravitate towards characters and builds that you like or aligned with your playstyle, but there is enough variety to keep you entertained for many runs I found the voice acting to be very pleasant and well done, so kudos to all the actors If you just want to breeze through a run and just experience the game and/or story then there are difficulty levels catering to those who want to dabble in the game, up to the masochistic gamers who define their life's work with their gaming achievements The one main thing that brings my score to the game down is the pacing of the story and quests. For example, towards the end there are many times you are required to reach NPC A who is in a specific book/world, only to then be asked to visit NPC B who is in yet another book/world, then once again asked to return to NPC A for their response... I don't really have an answer on how to make the questing experience better, but I just know I didn't enjoy that In the end, to reach the credits I had to do many, many runs (some runs that I needed to restart in order to find that NPC in question) which made me feel the game overstayed its welcome Thankfully, the game's mechanics and build diversity got me to stay until the end credits which lends to how neat they are TLDR: is it fun? yes should I get it if there's a sale? definitely should I play it for the story? ehh

April 2024

[url=https://store.steampowered.com/curator/31028489-Maddmike/]Maddmike Steam Curator https://youtu.be/96gtp2DQ0gQ The ink is finally dry now that Inkbound is entering 1.0, and having sprinkled in a few hours throughout early access and about 20 more this past week; I’m confident that Inkbound is an acquired taste. There is a deep strategy roguelite here, but you do have to wade through some tedium when it tries to wear other hats. I did eventually grow to accept and love its unique flavor but that onboarding was weird–especially because of how unique it is. Inkbound is a run based strategy game with a strong emphasis on build crafting. Though not a card game itself, it does inherit a lot of deckbuilding principles owed to this being developed by the same folks who made Monster Train. Start a run, pick synergistic abilities and enhancements after combat rounds, and hopefully make it to the final boss so you can do it all over again. But Inkbound is also a long term progression game. Massive cross-run quest chains, a persistent avatar, and annoyingly required story stuff are the scaffolding that support those runs: and they’re not always a positive inclusion. A lot of Inkbound makes more sense when you recall its early access launched with a battlepass and in-game cosmetic shop. Somewhere along the way the team did respond to all that anti-microtransaction pressure and removed them, but what’s a little harder to remove are the gameplay systems that were designed around their presence. Your rogue home base is an online hub where your little dude can walk around and gawk at other avatars. That visible and movable character is a design ethos outside of the hub too: even though the game follows a fairly standard “pick one of three lanes” roguey path system, you actually walk those paths instead of picking them from a menu—which also means there’s lots of little doodads you gotta click on as you travel the short but completely superfluous walkways. But where these systems go from headscratchingly weird to actively detrimental is long, grindy quest chains whose long grindiness feel like they were designed for the game that Inkbound used to be—not the one that it is. Some are passive kill quests you’ll accumulate in the background of regular play, some are cool incentives to try a build you may not have otherwise, but the bad ones are corny RP quests and mandatory story deviations. I once bottlenecked my progression because I didn’t realize a main story quest demanded that I play a particular class, go to a particular zone, then use an emoji. Other quests force suboptimal runs by having you spend one of your path choices on talking to someone and getting a random boon rather than piloting your run the correct way: and the story just is not interesting enough to warrant forcing you away from a perfect build. https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3217360650 I frontload all of this criticism because I do love Inkbound, but it’s despite and not because of its whole. It’s got a serious case of Marvel Midnight Suns Syndrome where a superb core gameplay system gets its attention diluted by a story and subsystems that are boring at best and bad at worst. When the game isn’t getting in its own way, you get a fast paced turn based battler with a strong building emphasis. Think of a roguelite version of the second Mario and Rabbids game and you’re on the right track: you get free, gridless movement where locations and movement points ‘lock’ into place after you attack, rather than treating movement as its own discrete action. It feels great: you get the strategic benefits of turn based but when it's time to start hitting things, the rules and animations allow you to quickly navigate and spam attacks. Your opponents all resolve their turns concurrently so you’re only ever not in control for a few seconds at most, and when you’re in control you’ve got a bit to think about. Whichever class you pick comes standard with three starting moves and a starting passive bonus, which you can accent with two additional moves and seven additional passives via items unlocked mid run. Those hard limits are where Inkbound gains a lot of texture compared to some of its peers. Whereas many rogues will treat the acquisition of a new passive as a permanent and uncontroversial addition to your power, Inkbound forces you to make trades and lateral moves on your way to a great build. https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3217360111 A small sprinkling of autobattler inspiration exists here in the form of numerical set bonuses, where reaching certain threshold of like passives will give all of them a boost. They’re both an incentive to chase on your road to power and they also fold into the limited slot strategy: one of the most powerful boons you come across on your journey are ways to free up item slots but retain the set bonuses of that item, which takes some of the sting out of all the swapping and dropping you’ll have to do. The late-run encounters always give a great feeling of a build coming together, and that feeling is exacerbated by how tangible the combat is. There’s also a lot of interesting class design here. There are loose approximations of archetypal warriors, rogues, and mages but also a spear wielding gladiator and a brawling fisticuffer and more. They vary in their damage patterns and mobility, but they’re all flexible enough to take advantage of any build and item that may drop. The added layer here is that they can also interact with each other: maybe the one benefit of Inkbound’s weird online priorities are that it gave us a half decent co-op system with its own stat tracking and progression. The trickster area damage class is fun on its own but get someone to compliment it with the relocation focused “Weaver” to suck all the foes together and you’ll really see its potential. Relying on matchmaking for a party can be kind of a bummer though, as there’s no protections against people leaving you mid run—I was really dying for a way to convert a half finished run into a solo when the random I was playing with disconnected. In Conclusion Inkbound is all over the place. You don’t need to look at old reviews or read articles to learn about how its vision changed during development; it’s manifest in the text itself through lack of focus and vestigial systems that supported something closer to a live-service than the final game ended up being. At times it feels like a better combat system than it does a game. Despite that inelegance, the rogue core is great fun with tactical yet fast paced combat and the thrills of stitching together a powerful build. It’s created an interesting middle-ground between a pure action roguelite and a turn based strategic one; even if it spills too much ink on everything else. Follow our Curator page, [url=https://store.steampowered.com/curator/41449676/]Summit Reviews , to see more high quality reviews regularly.

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