Yaza Games explained that they did have to leave out some of the weirder, more inappropriate things they found in the margins of manuscripts, in the interest of keeping the game’s absurd internal consistency. A rep from Yaza Games told me they even presented their drawn beasts to experts in historical marginalia, who were surprised but happy to see the real-life drawings represented so accurately - though one hopes they mean that in the static sense and not in the “beating each other off of the pages of the book” sense.
Perhaps the most surprising thing about the ink drawings is that there are real drawings showing them battling each other. Some of the opponents you’ll face include Death and Dante Alighieri. The single-player campaign casts the player as a fledgling Inkulinati building their own army of Ink creatures, and the player will be able to customize their own Ink avatar. The Inkulinati you play as - meaning the person who is drawing the Living Ink creatures to life in-game - can also interfere with their opponents directly, by smashing their hands down on the other drawings. Yaza Games plan to have around 50 beasts in the final game, and several are still in development. Some of them aren’t even real animals: One of the fighters is an arm-snake with little legs wielding various weapons and I can’t come up with a better description than that. A rabbit showing its butt to an opponent is a legitimate attack - just let that sink in for a moment. The little ink drawings attack each other in the silliest ways. While the gameplay strategy looks serious, the animations more than make up for it. You can customize your squad based on the map (or I suppose I should say page) you’ll be fighting on and what kind of fighters you’ll be facing. The game will have both a single-player campaign and a multiplayer component. Players will seemingly be able to use battlefield obstacles to their advantage, collect on-page ink blots in order to create more fighters or power up their existing ones, and face environmental hazards like fire and water.
It looks a bit like Darkest Dungeon, only not quite so… Darkest Dungeon. Inkulinati gameplay is your typical turn-based strategy, in which squads of around four-to-seven characters duke it out on opposing pages and the goal can often be to knock the other players off the book. Dogs carrying lances, bunnies carrying swords and shields bigger than they are, donkeys with trumpets very fittingly lodged up their asses… I’m told all of these things have some basis in historical marginalia found in 700-year-old manuscripts. These old doodles - known as “marginalia,” I learned from the game’s creators - include some very strange creatures, all of which will now be able to battle each other. If you’ve ever seen those strange medieval drawings of upright horses or dogs wearing clothes, the characters in the game look just like that. The odd title refers to a group of people who battle it out with each other via Living Ink creatures drawn on the margins of medieval literature. Originally funded on Kickstarter, the game comes from Polish indie studio Yaza Games, and it’s set to launch on Steam sometime in 2021.