Inked: A Tale of Love

Despite some of the confusing mechanics, awkward camera angles and inelegant solutions, Inked is still very much a visual delight.

Inked: A Tale of Love is an excellent adventure game. The compelling story and the concept behind it should appeal to most adventure game fans, and especially to lovers of physics-based puzzles.

Inked: A Tale of Love is a small and intense love story that will lead you to discover what you are willing to do in the name of this noble feeling.

If you like drawing and papercrafting, Inked is a game you won't miss.

A simple story about love, sacrifice and loss that plays out on sheets of paper, where you can draw different three-dimensional figures and play with elements (e.g. start a fire or creating a wind gust) to solve puzzles, often based on physics. The puzzles are usually easy, but well-designed and the game as a whole is a sight to behold. [07/2018, p.72]

Inked is a puzzle platform with a unique artistic direction which suffers, however, from a highly inaccurate control system.

Its clever premise, powerful narrative (flawed though it may seem at times), and enjoyable mechanics - Inked’s flaws come across as mostly minor nitpicks.

Inked offers up a selection of well constructed logic puzzles set alongside a well made, though potentially familiar feeling plot.

Without spoiling any more of the story, Inked will take you on an adventure of grief, loss, and healing. It does, as stated in the beginning, what good art should do: provoke thought and feeling. It is gorgeous in its presentation, but flawed in some of the execution of its gameplay features and controls.

The value of Inked lies above all in the ability to stage a small story of love and suffering through a very personal style and excellent visual impact.

Visually and audibly gorgeous, Inked battles to maintain its level of quality through an awkward camera, occasional obtuse puzzles and fumbled story.

Inked tries in earnest to make a small folk tale into a wider allegory about creative expression, and though admirable in theory, the self-reflexive bent ultimately hinders the sense of unease it creates through its pleasantly hand-drawn realm.

There is a lot of potential here for a great idea and certain moments are truly awesome, but the whole experience just doesn’t hold up and ends on a low point. If you have a stronger stomach for finicky controls, though, Inked might just be the game for you.

Gorgeous ink-on-paper visuals lift Inked beyond its humble mechanics and give it a unique flavor you won’t find in too many other places. With its puzzles providing the bulk of the gameplay, however, Inked’s problematic controls and technical issues cause it to fall short of the soaring heights its art readily promises.