Have you ever thought to yourself, “I just love the weirdo creatures in medieval manuscript marginalia but I really wish I could combine those sword-wielding dogs, farting rabbits, and other animals on the field of battle?” The question is really who HASN’T thought that? The masses have been crying out for a medieval marginalia battle simulator and, finally, Daedalic has provided.
(Of course it’s Daedalic, who else would it be?)
((That was literally my reaction, yes))
Inkulinati is a strategy game about the doodles drawn in the margins of medieval manuscripts fighting against the doodles your opponent draws. Basically, imagine those awesome tanks you drew on your notebooks as a kid, only you’re a medieval scribe so you don’t know what a tank is because they haven’t been invented yet. Instead, you’ve got whatever weird creatures your deranged medieval mind can dream up and you send them out to battle against the monks, nuns, knights, and other sorts that would be bored out of their minds and doodling instead of copying books like they are supposed to. Also there’s farting.
Inkulinati gives you armed and frequently farting dogs, rabbits, and various other creatures and puts you on a two dimensional adventure/strategy game…okay, it’s 2D in the sense that it’s flat, but it DOES have an element of verticality, meaning your farting rabbit can climb a ladder and shove someone’s stabbing dog into the apocalyptic fire lurking on the margins of every map before your scribe settles in for a nice nap (the end of turn).
Like most of these…is DarkestDungeonALikes a thing yet? Can we make it one? Whatever. Like most of those games, the profile view of your army (posse? entourage?) is important, but it also has the vertical aspect I mentioned, and falling can be fatal. This means cool bully-style shoves can actually wreck your opposing nerd in more ways than one. There’s even Obstacles, which is to say cover, some destroyable and some not.
It winds up being surprisingly tactical for a game with a Donkey Bard that plays the butt trumpet–that part is entirely true, by the way. Managing who is deploying where, who is wandering into a healing cloud (or farting range), and debating exactly when to take a nap for maximum Boredom–Boredom being the game’s major resource for drawing more crazy animals and creatures, since you are a medieval scribe, of course. There’s melee creatures, there’s ranged creatures, there’s creatures that do things like fart as a debuff (I told you there was a lot of farting).
The story plays out on an overhead map with a Master that looks suspiciously like medieval Yoda. He also speaks in kinda cryptic phrases. I’m just saying, there’s a lot of common threads between the two. In between cryptic lessons from Ye Olde Yoda, you’ll roam around making tough choices, buying items and improving your stats, and beefing up your legion of terrifying medieval manuscript creatures for future combat against the likes of The Alewife and The Miller.
I did not take any hallucinogens while writing this preview, by the way.
