Pentiment and medieval strategy game Inkulinati combine for the perfect video game crossover
If I had a penny for every hand-drawn medieval manuscript game
The perfect video game crossover doesn't exi... Oh wait, what's that? Ink-based strategy indie Inkulinati is crossing over with who? The other game inspired by medieval manuscripts of course: Pentiment. This comes courtesy of Inkulinati’s first major content update, St. Francis And Friends (out now), and it’s beautiful enough to crack your repressed childhood excitement.
Pentiment’s main man, Andreas Maler, is joining the historical tactics comedy as a playable Tiny Inkulinati, available in both the Duel and Journey modes. In their recent Steam blog, developers Yaza Games say they’ve “been huge fans of Obsidian for what seems like forever,” before they met some of the team at Gamescom and “had a fantastic week with them where we talked about games, medieval times, and more. We clicked and became friends.”
The update is also adding a new Inkulinati Master and an Army of Beasts: St. Francis and his army of pigeon soldiers, sheep devotees, and wolf pilgrims. Francis has a slew of new abilities, such as the brutal Stigmat Laser and the ability to add armour - a man that’s equally capable of wildlife charity and wartime rage, it seems. Journey mode is receiving new minimaps and battlefields as part of the update, while the team is polishing battlefield randomisation in general. This means it’s now unlikely that the same battlefield will reappear in your campaign, adding more replayability to the hand-drawn strategy game.
The team are also rebalancing easy and normal modes, so now seems like a good time to jump into the playful Inkulinati. Rachel’s impressions of Inkulinati noted the connection to Pentiment, but she felt the games differed wildly in tone. “Inkulinati's humour is done in a way that stays completely loyal to the source material, fart jokes and all,” she said.
Pentiment’s decades-spanning mystery was great, so I’m almost tempted to jump into Inkulinati’s early access. The game is out on Game Pass (as is Pentiment) and it’s also available to buy for £22/€25/$25 on Steam.
Chris Wallace also recently interviewed Obsidian's Josh Sawyer on how the team ressurected dead fonts in Pentiment, if you're a fan of the style.
