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.
Inkulinati review
- Developer: Yaza Games
- Publisher: Daedalic Entertainment
- Platform: Played on PC
- Availability: Out January 31 on PC, Mac, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S (Early Access)
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.
With its small health pools, smaller damage pools, and round-limiting apocalyptic threats, play in Inkulinati requires intentional turn taking and positioning to get the chaos desired. Each side takes it in turns to play one unit – who can move within their range, and then act, before going to sleep. If all of one side’s units are asleep, then the other side just keeps playing. With no set turn order, there’s no way of knowing who plans to act next, and you have to prioritise carefully: who is in the biggest risk in their current position? Can I put them to sleep? Can I kill them? Can I shove them out of the way? Or better: can I shove them off the map, or into encroaching fire?