Ink

Replace the blood and brutality of Super Meat Boy with paint, add invisible levels and marginally tone down the difficulty, and what you have is INK. The practical use of the featured art style is a novel idea, but somehow the title still lacks a distinctive sense of character - even with all the vivid colours on display. What's left is a streamlined but more basic fast-paced platform game that does a competent job recreating the same types of experiences we've seen in the past, requiring twitch-like reflexes and pinpoint accuracy.

INK is a decent little platformer that has a fun concept at the start but doesn’t really do enough with it. It’s good for a few little bursts, but more serious aficionados of the platforming genre won’t enjoy it as much.

Although you may find other games that could fulfill INK's purpose, INK's music, art direction, and spastic gameplay do enough to create a small world of originality that I'd personally like to see a sequel to.

Upon completing INK, I felt as one does after enjoying a perfectly-cooked steak: satisfied and satiated. In this case, I do want more, but not because INK didn't give me enough. Rather, it gave me exactly what I wanted; this time, with a splash of colour.

With the exception of the issues with control INK provides a great combination of platforming and puzzling to a degree, offering a fair amount of content for a pretty reasonable price. It isn’t an incredible game but it knows what it wanted to accomplish and, for the most part, executes it well outside of the somewhat wonky controls. If you’ve been looking for something a little different that you can play for a few minutes to clear a new level and then put down for a while it’s not a bad fit.

The added value of uncovering the levels with ink makes the game equally fun for casually players and speed-runners alike, but regardless of where your skill level falls expect a pretty good challenge if you hope to complete the game.

INK is a fun platformer with an interesting gameplay mechanic that has more than enough content to justify its price. The 75 available levels offer a good challenge, not to mention that finding all 20 hidden coins will require some extra time from players looking in out of reach spots. It's a short game that can be completed in a couple of hours with an extra hour or two for trophy cleanup… or at least for most trophies since completing all 75 levels in the game without dying will require a lot of practice, but at least it counts them in groups of 25 levels and not the full 75 levels in one go.

Overall, INK is a fun and fast-paced minimalist platformer that is fun on PlayStation 4. Due to the game's nature, there's a lot of trial and error involved, but you'll get better and better the more you play. It's a great effort from ZackBellGames with a nice twist to platforming that keeps it feeling fresh until the end, and I look forward to checking out the dev's next game!

INK may be a simple package, but it's a good package. Thanks to a well implemented, simple idea, you will find yourself getting lost in its allure. It's just too bad there's not a lot of reason to go back once you are done. If it had more meat on its bones then perhaps it would come as a higher recommendation. Unfortunately, though, despite being enjoyable, there is just not enough to it overall to help it reach the upper echelons in the current marketplace.

NK may sound very basic – and for the most part it is – but the gameplay is exceptionally enjoyable.