Game 18: Inkshade

It's Sunday afternoon and I've got some free time, and having just spend a month just moving posts over from Discord I'm ready to get back into gaming. Let's fire up the just-released Inkshade and see what we've got here. We start by being dragged along a carpet in a pretty nice house with an old record player. Some entity with glowing eyes is doing the dragging.

Clearly inspired by Inscryption, which is a good game to be inspired by.

Much like Inscryption, glowy-eyes wants me to play a game. Unlike Inscryption, this time I am a 'Captain', and I want to 'Sail my airship into the Abyss'. Which doesn't sound like a great idea, surely there are nicer places we can take an airship? To accomplish this, I need two things: A 'Starpointe', and a vessel. And that's all I know when I'm asked to choose a path.

The map is very nice to look at but not very informative.

I'll try the right path and head East. Glowy says that leads to the Kingdom of Faultis which it deems to be an ideal choice... if I'm looking to be impaled by a lance. Apparently this route can let me find a needle for the 'Starpointe'.

The sub-map where we get to pick our path.

And we're into our first battle. Looks like it's a hex-based combat system.

Hopefully I'm not also merely a novice of the blade.

I don't know exactly how to read piece stats but my 2 HP 'Wretch', which is my only piece, did one single point of damage on my turn and these guys have three HP.

I am in for an ass kicking.

Yep, wretch is very dead. I'm shocked. Glowy says that my starting crew is too weak - agreed! He tells me to get up and go get more pieces from the cupboard, which lets me check out the room I'm in.

A gramophone, a table...

... a map with a dagger in it, and a door with light shining through the keyhole.

Found the pieces, this little guy with a bat is cute!

I briefly check out some of the objects in the room but Glowy won't let me mess with them - yet - so I return to the table. I assume that much like Inscryption there's stuff to do around the room that will be essential but I'll play along with Glowy for a bit, let's check out these new pieces. Glowy makes me start over and I choose the left path this time, and we'll visit the Clergy of Ire.

I don't know what the pieces are called yet but I have bat guy, this hat guy, and a little grim reaper with a spear.

Combat is pretty straightforward - you can move X spaces, and attacks always hit and do set damage, so playing it out appears to be chess-like. Also if you kill enemies you get 'scrip' as currency for doing so.

Winning the battle rewards me with additional crew / pieces. I'll try this Knifethrower.

If my pieces die in combat they're gone for the run, but they appear to heal up between battles so as long as they don't die they'll stick around.

Currently trying to figure out what the symbols on the map mean by trying each one.

This campfire event lets you spend scrip to get benefits to your pieces or curses your opponents. There was one for 100 scrip that would make my knife-thrower do 4 damage instead of 1, so these are big benefits.

Cursing these enemies for -1 move only 10 is a great deal for cheap, assuming it hits all of them.

The very next battle I ran into had 8 foes on the map and I missed one behind a tree, losing quite badly.

Yes Glowy, these are rough battles.

Glowy again takes pity on poor me and now gives me a key to the Parlor where I'll find something that will let me make my pieces stronger. I find it refreshing that unlike Inscryption he's not killing me every time I lose - Glowy and I are just hanging out and playing a game.

The Parlor has a ton of stuff in it and a nice spread of food on the table.

I think it's time to thoroughly inspect these rooms, let's see if I can uncover something useful. There's lots of random things that you can interact with that Glowy just warns you off of or dismisses so I may well miss something important, but I found this piece collection box which I've only just started to fill.

We're going to be finding a lot of pieces!

Also this upgrade table where I can spend Scrip between runs to permanently improve my pieces!

Yes Virginia, this is a roquelite.

Holy smokes it's expensive but the Wretch can become a monster of a piece.

Every enemy I've run into so far does one damage so if I can get some defense on these pieces I'll definitely get farther than before. Exploring the house has also yielded a couple extra pieces and a bunch of scrip that were lying around. I also found a lighter and this 'light the right candles' puzzle but I don't know the right combination.

Since the candles are binary there are actually only 64 possible combinations but I'm going to be a good sport and wait until I find the clue for this rather than brute force it. For now.

This statue's head shifts when I'm not looking at it. I think I caught a glimpse of its eyes being open.

I found a lantern and got down into a dark basement - some scrip and another piece down here.

Searching the rooms was very productive, I found the candle puzzle as well as a gear puzzle behind a painting (I solved neither) as well as several new pieces and almost a hundred more scrip. There are also three locked doors - two in the parlor and one in the basement - so we've got a whole house we're dealing with here.

My piece collection has grown much larger after scouring the house.

All right, I've spent my scrip on a few upgrades and we'll try the center map this time. I suspect there's a potential strategy where I could do nothing but upgrade the Wretch and do very well but I'm going to spread things out and try to get a collection of pieces up to decent capabilities. You get more scrip for finishing battles faster so I want a team that can quickly clear battles. The center map takes me North where I can obtain an airship.

I can now bring four pieces into a battle and some of them do 2 damage.

There are 'book' spaces on the map where Glowy gives me a bit of backstory. There used to be four lands united, but because of entropy and decay they fell apart, which is part of the reason why in the game I only have four lands to choose from now.

Now that I know Scrip can permanently improve pieces I'm reluctant to spend this much here for a temporary benefit.

A random event produces a large battle, can my guys handle this now?

Yes, they can - but only, as it turns out, because there's a second way to win battles - you can occupy a gold space and survive the enemy turn to win without killing everyone else, and pull it off here by running for the boat.

One piece died but the rest escaped and the journey continues.

Shortly after that we hit our first boss battle, and this dude is beefy - he does three damage with a long range attack so he's killing one of my guys each turn.

We're so dead.

Interestingly, some of the enemy pieces battle and kill each other in this fight and I get the scrip reward for that. But the boss guy can one-shot each of my guys and I just can't reach him before they're all dead. This will be a game of many runs. Just getting to the boss here got me over a hundred Scrip so I'll be able to make improvements every run. Oh boy, I found a slave market!

10 scrip for selling my Lancer into slavery? How can I say no to that?

Have a great life buddy! I'm noticing that I'm usually offered 'common' pieces of a given place like Acolytes on the left path, so even though they can't be improved as much as the more powerful pieces, upgrading them will still help since they'll become part of my piece collection. I think I'm going to lose this run because of hidden enemies - and in this case 'hidden' doesn't mean the game has kept them invisible from me, I'm in a forest with bad lighting and the enemy pieces are just extremely difficult to see. I thought I was up against three archers in the dark woods, turns out I didn't see an extra three hiding in the shadows.

There are actually seven pieces in this screenshot.

The battles themselves seem to be set-piece and I've repeated some of them, so after this initial surprise I'll know to look carefully for hidden foes here. Also I barely managed to pull this one out by attacking forward and holding a golden hex. I've now reached the first boss of the left-side area, the Executioner. He's got decent health, some armor and ridiculous damage but little movement, if I had a ranged unit that did 2 damage I could kite and kill him but that's not in the cards for this run so it ends here after I kill as many of his minions as I can for the money.

Chonky but beatable, eventually.

When I visit piece upgrades I'm going to see if I can make someone capable of killing him.

Yes I think you have, but give me some more time to upgrade my pieces and I think it'll be fine.

Ugh, second try at the Executioner, I made an Archer that does 3 damage which is great and kills most enemies in one hit, but when I get to the boss he's not in my available pool of unit options so I'm hosed again. Ah well, I will get him sooner or later. I'm currently just re-attempting the left path because I think I can get this Executioner with this unit set if I can pull the Archer.

Giving the Wretch 1 armor proves invaluable as now he takes no damage from the most common enemies and he can tank for the party.

Get up there and let them stab you, Wretch!

Third time may be the charm, I've reached the Executioner again and this time I have both the Wretch and the Archer.

There are additional enemies in this battle this time - is that because of my strength or a random event?

Ok, good news / bad news time. First, the good news!

The good news! I got three pieces successfully up the left side and killed the boss!

The bad news? Killing the boss doesn't win the battle. I still need to get a unit to the gold tile or kill everyone on the map.

Hey guys, we beat him! We did it, right? Guys?

The party did not survive long enough to accomplish either. At least the boss drops 20 scrip which is a nice amount. I've had a day to mull over how I'm playing this and I think I'm going to change strategies - among the possible upgrades you can improve the number of troops you take into battle and your hand size. I'm going get up to 5 pieces I can deploy and never take more pieces on a mission than I have in my hand so all my pieces, including my best ones, are always available for every battle. I'm going to stop getting new pieces mid-journey because those tend to be weaker than the ones I've focused on upgrading, and I'll only take them if I need to replace a piece lost due to combat (or, uh, sold into slavery - sorry guys I need the money).

Ah good, just enough scrip to increase my piece count.

It also occurs to me that I've never seen the boss of the first zone I went to in the East, so I should at least go have a look at him so we can prepare. They have something of an ink-theme going, there's a black ink-effect in scene transitions and when pieces die they do so in a little inksplat.

Seems a shame to make a mess of this delightful little bar. I love the hexagonal tables.

Found the East boss. If you've guessed the pattern by now, you'd be right - he's going to kill me.

Yes sir I am ready to bend over.

He's got two armor so most of my pieces can't damage him, and my 3-damage archer isn't going to make much of a dent before he runs everyone through. There's two damage types in the game, physical and magic, and I think we'd be best served by bringing a strong magic user or two to this fight. Time to go down swinging. I'll go back to trying the Executioner, I'm sure I can kill that guy with what I've got, I just need to complete the level afterwards. Actually... hold my beer.

Just beyond the boss is a golden hex. Maybe I don't need to actually kill him to win.

If I can lure the boss away from the golden space I may still be able to pull this off and win a boss level without killing a boss. Ok guys... who wants to be bait? Two archers, a werewolf, a wretch, and an acolyte carefully pre-position for the attempt. Acolyte draws the short straw and runs in first, hoping to draw the Knight's attention. Both archers rush in on either side and each drop a guard, leaving the Knight by himself. Werewolf and Wretch push in behind the left Archer, ready to run for the objective. The Knight responds by ignoring the bait and killing one of the threats to him, pinning an Archer to the wall with his spear - dead. The Acolyte, breathing a sigh of relief, seizes the golden hex and the Werewolf moves to act as a bodyguard for the Acolyte. The remaining archer starts shooting the Knight and the brawny man cries out in pain as a shot pierces his armor. The Knight turns, enraged, and cuts off the remaining Archer's head... but the day is mine! The remaining three pieces escape the manor, leaving it aflame, and both the Manor and the Knight inside it perish in fire!

The Acolyte initially hated this plan but it turned out great for him.

Glowy has a present for me!

I can visit a new room!

Back to exploring the house!

This place is cool, best room in the house so far.

I have a lantern but I can only use when traversing the pitch-black stairwells, sadly our hero the Captain just puts it away and doesn't use it to get a better look when searching through these mostly-dark rooms. Oh, actually we just pull the lantern out sometimes in certain places, like being next to a desk. Fine, I guess.

The Praetorium has some cryptic clues...

... as well as some scrip and a couple more pieces like this mean little fella.

I feel like I've got a handle on things now.

Sorry

So, puzzles to solve:

• Gear puzzle behind painting in the Parlor.

• Candle puzzle in the Parlor.

• Need to find a fifth handle for a set of handles in the Praetorium (not sure if I missed it while searching or it's somewhere else in the house, I found three and one was already attached)

• Telescope in Praetorium shows me stars that blink in and out.

• Some sort of wall-circle puzzle in the Praetorium.

  
  

Puzzles solved so far: None, unless finding the lantern counts. All right, back to the board game. The last run is still in progress and now I can choose another path or continue to a second Eastward zone. I assume the second zone will be harder so I instead go back and try to advance on the Westward path since the party is pretty weak now. I pick up some Acolytes to replenish my strength and while we lack the hitting power of the archers it's enough to pass these levels largely thanks to the Wretch's armor.

What's this symbol? Looks like a spider is hiding under it.

Ah, the 'hard' battle is actually a refreshing AI change. Normally the AI enemies just wait around until you come in range of them, meaning you can kite off single guys and fight the enemy piecemeal. In these hard battles they all come at you at once which is a nice change of pace.

I've been taking Acolytes at refill my ranks and one dies here, but another shows up.

The party makes it all the way to the Executioner but I don't have enough firepower to kill him, lacking my archers. Instead I take a hint from my last victory and painstakingly kite the 1-move Executioner away from the exit and run past him for the loss of another expendable Acolyte.

Another room (literally) unlocked in the same run! Hero party!

The basement was extremely fruitful. I found this guy with a lamp who I'm hoping will, in addition to being a piece, be able to light up the darker boards.

I also turned all the wheels on this steam contraption which opened a chest that held more pieces.

Finally, when I found the lamp guy Glowy showed up and talked about me responding to the piece's 'plaintive cries', and I realized that meant there could be an audio cue when I'm near one - and indeed there is! It sounds like the clink of chess pieces hitting each other. Listening ended up helping me solve the candle puzzle, as it turned out there was a subtle hint on lighting the correct candles as to which set would open the box.

More Pieces inside!

I scoured the house listening for piece sounds and found another one I'd missed back in the Praetorium. Back on this epic run, I still think the rifle boss of the North area will murder us so I'm going to try going further up the West side.

The mansion is burning and I've left an awful ink mess on the Executioner's town.

That was... educational. The first battle of the second level completely destroyed the party and ended that run. I don't mind at all - that was a huge leap forward; two bosses, two rooms, and a lot of pieces.

We have a lot more pieces to choose from thanks to the six heroes in the middle.

I've also amassed a whopping 862 scrip, time to analyze the new pieces and do some upgrading - we'll need it to pass those advanced levels. I took the opportunity to max out party / hand size and then focused on the Wretch for the bulk of the upgrades, with the rest going to a new Rider piece that can move really far. There's some good new options like the Scholar which can act as long-range magic artillery and the Dendralite, a piece that already comes with both magic and physical defense, but the money only stretches so far before it's gone. Starting the next run, the bosses don't stay beaten - I'll have to defeat them again but with these upgrades it should be a lot easier. I think I'll try to take out the North boss with the gun this time, decent chance I have the pieces to do it. The maps are indeed getting harder based on either the pieces I've found, bosses I've beaten, or the upgrades I've gotten, because this is now the first map - with more than twice the number of foes originally present, and more dangerous ones to boot.

This originally had just 3 foes that each did 1 damage.

On the plus side this also means I'm earning more scrip every map. That piece with the Lantern? Totally works to light up dark maps. And has decent stats to boot.

I can actually see my enemies on this ambush map.

This time I find a way to sneak up on the gun-boss, who can only shoot directly straight. As a result, he can't just come out of the left side of the bridge and shoot any of my figures here, and the Wretch in the lead has just enough movement and damage to get in there and one-shot him before he can do anything.

Not charging up the middle this time worked wonders.

That earns me the key to the Bridge. Back to the house!

Thanks Glowy!

The Bridge has an old-fashioned ship's steering wheel and some complex control panels. I'd guess that we've been on an airship this whole time, I can see stars out of the front window.

Several puzzles here.

In addition to pieces, one of the puzzles on the bridge yields this compass which is flailing around instead of pointing in any particular direction.

I have no idea what use this is.

On the way back to the game I caught Glowy looking through the telescope on the Praetorium, once in awhile he leaves the game table and I find him elsewhere on the ship.

He's rocking at least four arms with four fingers each.

Back to the game, I'm happy to discover that in an area where you've already beaten a boss you get an option to skip all the battles up to repeating the boss fight, for a fee.

The fee will unfortunately get higher, and it does mean you don't get the scrip for doing the battles.

The pieces from the bridge are particularly good, I've found an ideal tank:

Most enemy pieces can't damage this guy, even if he can't hit anything himself.

Excellent artillery:

5 damage at range 6 will one-shot most foes.

Also, an oddity:

The life symbols on this guy are different, why?

Ahh, Apothecary - tried him out, he's a healer! This is huge - we're going to be able to keep parties alive much better now as we can pull units back to be fixed on larger maps. Or so I hoped.

He healed until he fell down and died.

Unfortunately, he has to give away his own health points to heal other units - and he can actually heal so much that he kills himself. And he can't attack at all. I don't see much benefit to a character that's simply a health pool for my other units, I think I'm better off using that unit slot for something combat capable. The Guardian and Corvusier on the other hand are every bit as good as I'd hoped. I should mention that while I think the combat system is a bit too simplistic for my tastes, the animations for combat are very good, and the Corvusier actually calls in a crow that swoops in and smacks someone. Also, an 'undo' button would be nice, combat is fully deterministic but more than once I've accidentally moved a unit to the wrong spot or ended their turn without attacking and there's no way to fix it if you do.

I've reached the second Western boss. Unfortunately I lost my artillery in the last battle but that Guardian piece is nigh invincible, I might be able to slip him by and win this via gold hex.

I also picked up an Executioner temporarily, right.

Alternately if I can eventually walk this Executioner up to him (at once space a turn) I might be able to straight-out kill him with it. Before that I have to take on this whole map with my four remaining guys.

This will not be easy.

Alas, it was indeed not to be - I probably would have made it if I hadn't missed an Executioner and walked the Guardian right into it. It occurs to me that if we're going to see the former boss as an obtainable piece that I'd want to get a better boss in my collection than the Executioner, who is simply too slow. I'll work on the North / East areas as I'd much rather have either the Knight or the gun-boss in my ranks. I reach the East boss first.

A nasty mage with decent protection!

This time I have a full party of upgraded pieces, and on this particular run I discovered that you can leave the table and upgrade pieces mid-run, so now the Wretch has everything but a life point and several of my other pieces are fully upgraded. This may look like a lot of enemies but so long as I'm careful I expect we'll clear them with little or no damage and then we can gang up on the boss. I think that eventually your pieces just get a little too tough - provided I position them correctly most of the enemy pieces (except the boss) just can't damage the Guardian and very few of them can damage the Wretch. I move up the left side, kite the boss over to me and gang up on him, and only suffer a total of five damage. If I'd been more careful that number would have been two from the boss alone.

Glowy are you insinuating that I was supposed to do this guy last?

We get a key to the Maintenance tunnels, which is an infinite repeating dark hallway.

Every so often you see this cute little diorama of where you are in the hallway relative to the exit door. Hello me!

The treasure in the tunnel yields two of the best pieces in the game - the Knight and the gun-boss, called the Farshot. I already have a Knight as a piece I picked up along the way so I immediately upgrade him. 2nd tier battles are becoming trivial with the fully upgraded pieces. Nothing on this particular map can hurt the Wretch, he could clear it by himself at no risk if I were so inclined.

Just for fun I'm running to the end without killing anyone to see if I get an achievement.

This in turn has detracted from the value of adding pieces to my crew during a run, because if I do that then I could end up drawing a bunch of mediocre pieces for a given battle and lose a map with them (and thus the whole run), or I can avoid them entirely and always have my best pieces available to crush everything. I'm about to intentionally sacrifice an archer to get my piece count down to my hand size. I guess the game heard me complain about my defense being too high, because it just offered me... a huge defense upgrade on the Guardian.

I think we're winning the game on this run.

We've found the North tier 2 boss, the enemy Captain of an Airship.

He's also a Wretch, but less upgraded than mine.

My Wretch just strides onto the ship and solos him and his crew, with the rest of my team playing clean-up. Killing him leads to the Study, which has the Executioner which I won't need unless something with insane defense shows up, and this... thing.

Oh good, a paperweight.

Finishing up with tier 2, it's back to the Western boss, who can now only do 1 damage per turn to the Wretch. Crunch goes that boss. That leads to the projector room, where I use the paperweight from earlier to shine a silhouette of it onto a wall.

The shadow puppetry I always wanted!

I've been wondering if I've been getting keys based on which boss I defeated or if I'm getting keys in a specific order. The Projector room reveals that it's most likely the latter - I find a box containing all three of the Tier 2 Boss pieces.

Do I really need to be any more powerful at this point?

Well, we now have our assembled Starpointe and the Airship. Glowy takes the compass I found on the Bridge from me and sticks it next to the game board and we proceed into, I assume, the final area.

I've made a mess of the world.

Sailing into the void, the map becomes a series of question marks, and you have to find the correct way via the compass.

If you go the wrong way you get sent back to the world map and have to start over.

In a cool twist, some of the crew turn against me and mutiny, so this battle actually takes place in one of the rooms I've been on in the ship, the Praetorium.

I've been willing to sacrifice you before, don't think I'll hesitate to kill you all!

The game throws a penultimate challenge at you with all three bosses in the same encounter, and after that there's just one fight remaining.

G.... Glowy?

He doesn't fight back, you just kill him. This thankfully does not kill the real Glowy who as far as I'm concerned has been a pretty nice guy up to this point, a bit rude but we're hanging out and playing games. Glowy gives me the key to the main deck.

I step out onto the deck and I am greeted by the starry void.

The ship is shattered in half, it is doomed to drift forever.

There is one piece left to find. My own.

Glowy greets me coldly.

I thought, perhaps, we were friends.

But no, we were playing through my murderous journey to this point, into the Abyss, making me relive it over and over until I reached the end. I murdered countless people to obtain the Starpointe and the Airship, including my crew, in mad journey into this place, for no discernable attainment.

Glowy pushes me off the deck, into the void, to fall endlessly into the Abyss.