Inkulinati review – deep and daft tactical play

1 year 2 months ago

Medieval marginalia strategy game Inkulinati holds the unique honour of being the only game to make me lament, out loud: "Oh no, he's not in my butt range." Overwhelmed in number, I was hoping to force a minotaur-esque beast on the opposing army to take a nap (and skip their turn) by using my rabbit swordsman to moon them. This is, I promise you, very serious tactics, and arguably the heart of Inkulinati: thoughtfully tactical, and uncompromisingly absurd.

So rabbits have the helpful turn-skipping debuff of mooning their opponents. Foxes steal resources from their targets. Devils, naturally, set fires. And that's before you get to the less coherent creatures. It's the weird and wonderful world of "things people drew in the margins of manuscripts hundreds of years ago", weaponised.

I spent most of my time with Inkulinati's Journey Mode, a single-player campaign divided into acts where each notch on the road is a different kind of battle, or event. It's easiest to explain how combat works with the most straightforward type of battle in Inkulinati: beast battles. It's your army of (up to) five versus the enemy army, and the first to eliminate the other wins - unless an apocalypse snares you both.

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Author
Ruth Cassidy

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