Shiny Shoe's upcoming title, Inkbound, takes cues from its last release, Monster Train, and aims to give an engrossing, ever-evolving experience to players. Set in a world where stories come to life, inkbound takes players to Atheneum, the giant library that contains all stories ever written, where they are tasked with helping to protect it from forces bent on unbinding the worlds, and the stories they create.
The aesthetic is very much stylized story come to life, and at first glance it's incredibly attractive. Dark inkish purples and blacks cover each stage, while the entire game has a painterly look to it that jumps off the page - er, screen. As a rogue-like, each of the various maps you'll play on are procedurally generated, making each run different from the last. But they all follow the same basic formula: You'll choose a setting and from there beat waves of enemies while earning power ups and rewards to build your character, eventually culminating in a boss fight to end the run.
One of the more unique features of Inkbound, though, is that you don't necessarily carry that power over to the next run. Instead, you'll start each one with a blank page, able to effectively craft your character differently each time, depending on group composition and need.
Starting out, though, I choose the swift, rougish Mosscloak, but there are other classes like the heavy melee Magma Miner or the spell-casting Weaver, and even a masive two-shield weilding tank, the Obelisk. However, the classes in Inkbound simply feel like a starting point, as you can effectively create your own version of the class in each run.
This is thanks to the intuitive Binding system in each game, which presents ways to add skills to your character on top of the mains skills already available at the start. These skills can augment the playstyle you need for that round, whether it be a move that creates a lightning blast that jumps from enemy to enemy, or a heal to keep friends in the fight. Synergies and combos can also be built off of these Bindings, really rewarding creativity and planning for those players who realy get into it. Feels like an MMO min-maxer's dream, if I'm honest.
While Shiny Shoe is making sure that each class is able to be played solo in a run, where Inkbound really feels at home, at least in my opinion, is in its multiplayer. Being able to build my character alongside the developers was nice, especially as we could play off each other, add skills that we might need as a group, and strategize our builds versus just picking a Binding and continuing.
In my playsession, I opted for the Mosscloak, clad in green leaves and carrying a giant shuriken, the fast, damage-dealing class looked so appealing to me at the outset. And thankfully, in practice, it was a ton of fun to play too.
Instead of simply running around, zapping enemies with wild abandon like you might in other isometric ARPGs like Path of Exile or Diablo, Inkbound takes a more leisurely approach. Combat itself plays out in turns, with enemies making moves at the same time, while players move together on their turn. Each player has action points that dictate how far they can move per turn, and what actions they can take. Think Larian's Divinity: Original Sin 2. Each round, a misasma slowly starts to cover the battlefield, damaging players who end up stuck in it without movement points at the end of each turn. So timing and positioning are key to ensuring you get out of danger at the end of each round of combat.
Not only the miasma, but damaging an enemy draws its aggro, with Inkbound telegraphing the enemie's attack path, letting teams of players position out of danger when their turn is over. Each round bubbles also cover the battlefield that when interacted with will give back action points. So finding a way to chain attacks using these free action points can pull off some devastating combos if done well.
In my play session, Shiny Shoe Co-founder and CEO Mark Cooke also built a Mosscloak, giving us two high damage dealing characters in the run. While you can just sally forth and do a run with friends, Inkbound has a hub area that allows players to group up, select and collect quests, and more. These quests further the story being told in Inkbound, but also give players goals during the runs to level up, unlock more character classes and more.
Choose your own adventure
At the start of each run in Inkbound, you'll need to choose your villian. As Cooke explains it to me, each villian is an evil creature from the stories from the Atheneum that have broken free and are terrorizing the Sea of Ink, the world where each run takes place. As Inkbound is heavily driven by its storybook aesthetic, I couldn't help but think back to those old "choose your own adventure" books I read as a kid. I used to love them as they gave the illusion that I was interacting with the characters and the story as a whole on a real level, and the idea of not only choosing my villian, but also the setting in each run felt like the branching paths those old stories held.
Runs play out in successive rounds, where you enter a location, trigger combat, and gain rewards at the end if you come out victorious. At the end of each round, you gain the ability to learn a new Binding, which adds a new skill to your skill bar to use for the duration of the run. You'll also earn currency which you can use to buy items to augment your stats, such as boosting your critical hit chance, health and more. These abilities are randomized, and any class can choose them, giving each run a unique feel not just in terms of the environment, but also the style of gameplay you might need to use to adapt to the run itself.
Each world is represented by a book that you choose at the start. These worlds are the stories you're trying to cleanse the "unraveled threads" as the team behind Inkbound calls it, and each book will also have its own mutators to make each run even more unique. Though, despite the mutator, each book will have its own unique set of enemies, NPCs to talk to, and more. You'll run through three books in a run, facing down the big bad villian at the end.
During our playsession, Mark and I found ourselves gravitating towards a build with our Mosscloaks that specialized in dealing massive damage through critical hits. By grabbing bindings that increased critical hit chance, as well as critical hit damage, we were able to slowly build ourselves into two glasscannon, shuriken-throwing characters that would burn down even the strongest enemies in the end.
I found myself also leaning into area of effect damage attacks, such as one that let me chain a lightning strike among nearby enemies, dealing damage to every monster in its wake. This attack just got stronger and stronger as the run went on, at one point wiping out about 80% of the monsters in a round with a single activation thanks to my high critical hit strike.
Using skills that also put status effects on monsters is key as well, especially since your actions per round of combat are limited. So being able to apply things like poison to deal damage over time became a viable tactic early on in my first run. Being able to DoT an enemy and just forget about it, knowing it was going to die from poison damage its next turn allowed me to conserve my action points and just focus on who would be left.
Since players take their turn together, Mark and I were able to line up shots with our shurikens to chain combos and critical strikes, as well as making sure as much as possible that no move was really wasted on our end. As I got more comfortable and used to my character, we started to just burn through enemies like they were wheat meeting a scythe. It was incredibly satisfying seeing myself grow more and more powerful across the course of the run.
However, that power doesn't carry over to the next run, perse. You still have your basic class skills, but those Bindings that gain skills and augment your character don't follow you back to the library after a successful run. Instead, that adds to the replayability and challenge. No two runs are identical, and it might also help mitigate rotation fatigue, something that I know plagues many an MMO player, myself included.
Monsters themselves look interesting, ranging from tiny wisp-like creatures to hulking blobs of Ink, eager to cover the Sea of Ink in its miasmic wake. I'm definitely interested to see what type of monster variety there is across multiple runs, especially as more bosses are introduced at the end, but we'll have to wait to see closer towards release. However, nothing felt same-y or boring during my nearly two-hour play session. On the contrary, the world around me and the combat, as well as the prospect of getting even more over powered with each round, kept me glued to my screen.
Atheneum: The Library With Every Story Ever Written
Aetheneum itself is a social hub where players will meet, socialize, form parties, and more. It acts as a central location between runs to plan groups, grab more objectives and turn in quests to the Gatekeeper and other NPCs known as Binders.
This hub is small, though Shiny Shoe does say that it could expand over time. The Atheneum also has an MMO-style chat system, allowing players to chat organically and group up for runs together easily. Here in the hub you'll also turn in quests, grab specialized run quests that see you take care of specific objectives per run, and more. I personally like the idea of being able to unlock the various classes and swap between them once you do, just adding to the replay value in my opinion. If I get tired of my Mosscloak, I can easily swap to a Magma Miner or any other class I've unlocked along the way.
Inkbound looks to be shaping up to be a decent little rogue-like, and the slice I got to play with the developers has me eager to jump in even more. Inkbound is aiming to release in Spring of 2023 on Steam.
