Inked: A Tale of Love

[url=https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3471052113][h3]Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆[/h3][/url] I’m convinced this game was designed to make the player furious at the Artist, because… Sir, please stop doing whatever you want with your own creation! Okay. Deep breath. Let’s rewind. Inked is a story about love, grief, and the slow, stubborn process of moving on.¹ You play as the Nameless Hero, who begins a simple journey with his beloved… which very quickly turns into a quest to save her. And whose fault is that? The Artist’s. Obviously. What made me play it was the art style. Yes. A.G.A.I.N. The ballpoint-pen aesthetic is gorgeous, like doodles coming to life. What kept me going, though, were the puzzles. They’re simple, clever, and fun to solve! That said, this is a very short game. (Sort of. You need to run it twice if you want all the achievements.) Now for the downside: the story. The idea itself is good. An Artist projecting his pain onto his creation, and that creation reflecting it back, trying to teach him a lesson about loss and healing? Great concept. But the execution didn’t quite work for me. It felt interesting at the beginning, but by the end the interaction between Artist and Creation fell off, which made the message feel weaker than it should have been. Overall, Inked is a beautiful experience with enjoyable puzzles. Still worth playing, especially if you’re in the mood for something short, artistic, and a bit emotionally bruising. Just be prepared to side-eye the Artist more than once. - ¹ I seem to be playing a suspicious number of games about grief lately. Universe, are you trying to send me a message? Because I see you. -- 𖹭 [url=https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3471052113][u]Click here[/u][/url] 𖹭 to understand the star rating.

Have you ever wanted to experience "Loss" but in an artistically pleasing form? I played through this game for the first time after seeing the map release for Escape Simulator. Loved the map, and thought "Wow, what an amazing style. I'd love to play the game that inspired this map." I downloaded the game for $4.49 (50% discount) and went into it thinking it was going to be an amazing puzzle game with an immaculate story to match such a brilliant art style. Upon finishing the game I saw an achievement for replaying this game. I prepared myself by putting on a 10-hour loop of "Spanish Flea" and muted the game's audio. Completed this game in a little over 2 hours time. You can keep the money, but please give me back the time. If you play this game, record your playthrough and upload it to speedrun.com, you WILL get 2nd place.

I was drafting a review of this game's narrative in my head while playing through it for the last achievement, but then I got to a point where I couldn't be bothered to go into detail, so I'll be quick. The narrative makes no sense. Is the Artist simply going through grief? Then his actions in the story are nonsense. Especially what he does to Aiko and how he talks to the Nameless Hero about it. Is the Artist feeling guilty? The "memories" make no implication that he is, nor does it imply he is at fault, and even then ending would make no sense. The "choices" the Nameless Hero makes are absurd (can't walk around a TREE??? or just shoo some penguins??? or just push some fish into the water that's RIGHT THERE?!?!) The puzzles are mostly dead simple; you will be spending most of your time waiting for the Nameless Hero to drag objects or walk or climb. Some puzzles are actually fun and interesting, and then the chapter ends and most of the mechanics you just learned are thrown away and we are back to dead simple. In the final area, most of the puzzles are just walking in circles (literally), and the teleporters can soft-lock you off in the void. Sometimes the game snaps you back to the ground, but otherwise you have to reload checkpoint, which actually means reload the whole chapter. And in the last chapter, the beginning is a 2ish minute long segment of walk/standing on a moving platform while the Artist talks at you... The art is nice though, that's why I bought the game in the first place after seeing the Inked Escape Simulator level.

I'm very much on the fence about recommending or otherwise this game. On the positive side, It has a beautiful hand-drawn 3D view art style & shading, in which the two characters, the Hero and his love Aiko, though very small and without much detail, can communicate action & emotion (I particularly liked the way the Hero looks around while travelling on a moving platform in the Factory level). The puzzles, based around manipulating elemental forces (fire, water, ice, wind etc) and objects such as cubes, ramps and pressure plates, are clever without being particularly difficult or lengthy, though in common with other 3D games with a fixed camera angle, manipulating objects precisely in 3D space can be frustrating at times. To be honest, I found searching for the nine paintings hidden in each level to be harder than most of the puzzles; I had to repeat every level at least once to discover all of the canvasses. On the negative side, the overarching message and story is a bit of a mess, with the Hero and Aiko initially trying to discover and remedy what has gone wrong with world created by the Artist, before everything turns dark ([spoiler]with the Artist sadistically abducting Aiko and forcing the Hero to further harm the world in his attempt to reach and free his wife; but bizarrely the blame seems to eventually fall on the victims rather than on the perpetrator[/spoiler]). There were a few glitches where the Hero got stuck but these were easily overcome by backtracking slightly; more seriously, twice in the Void level the Hero materialised but without the platform that he should have been standing on, so he could not move - I had to restart the whole level in both cases. But the biggest disappointment in my view was having an achievement for repeating the whole game - I assumed that it would lead to a different ending but no, it was just a purposeless and pointless repeat of every puzzle and of the original ending. Overall, then, a very visually attractive game with some interesting puzzles, but let down by an odd narrative from the middle of the game onwards, by having lots of little self-contained puzzles rather than some linked and/or more complex ones, and by requiring a complete re-run with no new aims or outcomes to obtain the final achievement. Nonetheless I will (lukewarmly) recommend the game to reward the lovely hand-drawn artwork, but only if bought at a discount.

A nice, short puzzle game that's an easy 100% completion in under 5 hours. The gameplay itself is enjoyable and the story is okay, but honestly, it would have been a much better experience without the narrator. Overall, a decent pick-up on sales for a quick playthrough.

满足了，要质量有质量，有掉卡有掉卡，要便宜有便宜，要云存档没云存档。 202505，steam，steam掉卡掉物抵扣，它处自定义包入的本体约3元。爱人如己，目前就这，看以后追评。

the most beautiful and painful game i've ever played "the things we do for love." ⭐⭐⭐⭐

Simple and easy puzzle game. The story is great.

I decided to get this after playing the free level from Escape Simulator, and.. beautiful. Just.. beautiful. The art style. The story. The puzzles. I feel I got my money's worth. The plot twist threw me for a loop, but at the end I finally got what the story was about. Definitely recommend this game if you love puzzles. However it's not without its flaws (and I witnessed two); 1. No Windowed Fullscreen. 2. Audio settings aren't actually controlling the volume of the game (especially the narrator's voice).

Please sir, the birds!