Inkulinati

Bored scribes spent centuries filling the margins of holy books with rabbits holding swords, knights losing fights to snails, and animals doing things no abbot would have approved. Polish studio Yaza Games looked at those doodles and saw a game in them. Inkulinati, published by Daedalic Entertainment, is a turn-based strategy game about a Master of the Living Ink who fights duels on a single sheet of parchment. You don’t recruit an army. You draw one.

The whole design grows out of that idea. Every unit costs Living Ink, so each Beast you put on the page is a spending decision before it’s a tactical one. The units come straight from those manuscript margins: sword-wielding rabbits, spear-carrying dogs, praying monks and man-eating snails. Each has its own abilities, and those abilities work best in combination. On top of that are Hand Actions, where you reach into the page as the artist. You can squash an enemy with your finger, draw a wall, drag your own troops into position, or blow them up.

The game spent time in Early Access before its full launch on February 22, 2024, on PC and consoles, including Nintendo Switch. It entered a crowded field. Small tactics roguelites are everywhere, and most of them lead with a mechanic. Inkulinati leads with its look, and it’s unusual in having the systems to back that look up.

Critics have been broadly warm — Metacritic critics give it a 78 — but the enthusiasm is qualified, and the qualifications point to the real problems: a tutorial that won’t stop talking, Journey runs that start to feel the same, low difficulty, and a head-to-head game with no online play.

• Armies drawn with Living Ink: Units cost ink, so building your army means managing a budget. Each Beast has its own abilities, and they’re designed to be combined rather than spammed.
• Hand Actions: You act on the board directly, as the artist. You can squash enemies, draw walls, move your own units, or turn them into explosives. This is the game’s most distinctive layer.
• Dangerous battlefields: Maps have environmental hazards, and random apocalyptic events can turn a duel you thought you’d won.
• Journey mode: The roguelite campaign. You create your own Tiny-Inkulinati, choose Talents and a play style, learn new Beasts and Hand Actions, collect perks, and face famous medieval figures on a route that changes each run.
• Academy mode: A separate mode that teaches the rules before the campaign starts testing you.
• Local hot-seat: Two players, one screen, taking turns. It’s the only multiplayer option.

The Core Duel

Most tactics games separate the economy from the fighting. You build first, then fight. Inkulinati ties the two together: drawing units costs Living Ink, so every unit you put on the page is ink you can’t spend on something else that turn. Over-drawing early leaves you with a crowded page and no reserves. Holding back leaves you facing the enemy’s army with too little of your own. Good games make that tension feel natural, and this one does.

The unit designs carry more weight than the jokes suggest. A praying monk and a man-eating snail sound like punchlines, but they have clear, separate jobs, and the game rewards combining them. That’s why the strategy gets described as deeper than it looks. The silliness is the packaging, and the systems inside are real.

Hand Actions are the game’s most distinctive feature. Tactics games usually lock you into the view of a general moving pieces. This one lets you act as the person holding the pen. Squashing an enemy with your finger is a direct hit with real impact. Drawing a wall changes the board. Pushing your own unit into position fixes a bad setup. Blowing up your own unit is the most interesting of the four, because it makes your troops an expendable resource instead of pieces you have to protect. Few games in the genre let you punish yourself on purpose, and the choice gives the midgame real texture.

Hazards and random apocalyptic events add chaos. Used well, they break up the solved, repeatable lines that turn-based duels tend to settle into. Used poorly, they erase good play. Inkulinati mostly lands on the right side, because the events fit the theme: medieval scribes drew the end of the world constantly. Still, if you think tactics games should be decided by skill alone, those events will occasionally annoy you.

Journey Mode and the Roguelite Problem

Journey is where most players will spend their time, and it’s the weakest part of the game. The pieces are the familiar ones: choose Talents, commit to a play style, unlock Beasts and Hand Actions, collect perks, and travel a branching route against well-known historical figures. The route changes each run, and early on that is enough to hold interest.

It doesn’t hold up. The complaint that Journey becomes predictable after a few runs is a structural problem, not a nitpick. A roguelite’s appeal depends on every run feeling like a new problem. When the opponents, perks and route options stop surprising you, runs feel like chores. The drawing theme is new. The campaign structure around it is not.

Low difficulty makes this worse. In a roguelite that matters more than it would in a story campaign. The genre depends on the threat of losing a run. Take that away and perks feel like rewards you didn’t have to earn.

Onboarding

Here the game has the opposite problem. Inkulinati is easy to pick up for people who don’t usually play strategy games, which is rare in a genre known for dense rules. The Academy mode and the clear visual language of the units get new players playing quickly.

The tutorial takes it too far. It explains too much instead of letting you learn by playing, and that fits a pattern: the game doesn’t trust its own clear design. The units already look like what they do. Surrounding them with explanation slows the opening without adding much. Experienced players will want to skip ahead.

The Multiplayer Gap

Inkulinati is a dueling game with no online play. Local hot-seat is designed for two people sharing one screen, but for most players the computer is the only regular opponent. When that opponent is also too easy, the game’s best feature, the head-to-head duel, is left without a real rival. The missing online mode is the biggest single limit on how long people will keep playing.

The art direction is the reason most people will notice this game, and it deserves the attention. Inkulinati doesn’t just use a medieval style as decoration. It takes the real look of manuscript margins, with parchment, ink lines and oddly posed animals, and builds the whole interface around it. The battlefield is a page, and your units are drawings on it. That keeps the theme consistent from menus to combat.

The humor works for the same reason. It comes from the source material: the original margin drawings really were rude, violent and absurd, and the game lets the history do the joking instead of relying on internet references. The jokes are built to last.

The costs are small but real. A stylized board full of detailed, similarly colored ink figures can be harder to read at a glance than a clean grid with bright color coding. It’s a turn-based 2D game of modest scope, so hardware demands should be light. What will affect the experience is how readable the board is at a given screen size, not raw performance.

Steam (PC): This is the most natural fit. Hand Actions are built around a pointer, and moving units, drawing walls and targeting enemies all suit a mouse. The drawing theme and mouse controls suit each other. Hot-seat works at a desk, but passing a keyboard back and forth is awkward by design, so a TV setup makes more sense for two players.

Nintendo Switch: Short turn-based duels suit handheld play, and hot-seat may work best here: one console passed between two players is simple and easy. There are trade-offs, though. Moving a cursor with a stick across a busy parchment board is slower than using a mouse, and detailed ink art on a handheld screen makes the readability problem worse. Squashing enemies with your finger sounds made for a touchscreen, but check the current eShop listing for touch support before buying. If you mostly play docked, most of these concerns shrink.

Inkulinati is better than its concept needed to be. Plenty of studios would have used the medieval-margin idea as a marketing hook and wrapped it around a generic tactics game. Yaza Games built real systems into it instead. The Living Ink budget makes drawing your army feel like a real strategic cost, and Hand Actions give you a way to affect the board that the genre doesn’t usually offer.

The campaign around those systems is weaker, and it’s what keeps the game from a broad recommendation. Journey mode recycles too quickly, the difficulty rarely threatens you, and the lack of online play leaves an excellent duel game without steady human opponents. The tutorial’s over-explaining is the smallest problem and the easiest to push through.

Buy it for the duel and the art, and only if the caveats above don’t scare you off. Don’t expect it to hold attention for months like the best roguelites. As a smart, funny, very easy-to-learn tactics game, Inkulinati has real value for the right player. It just runs out of new ideas before the drawings get old.