Inkslinger
Year: 2021
System: Windows, Mac
Developer: Gateway
Players: Single
Genres: Interactive Fiction, Typing
Link: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1510410/Inkslinger/?curator_clanid=40000720
A Romancepunk, typing-game tragedy set on the harsh, guild-structured Isle Shammer. Write letters and speeches for your inkslinger clientele, and get transported into vivid daydreams about your troubled past in the smog-ridden Queendom of Nomania.
As an Inkslinger at Brassknee's renowned Wordshop, it's your job to write letters for the citizens of Isle Shammer. But through the veil of work lies forgotten trauma. A voice begins to speak to you in recurring daydreams, telling you about your tragic past in Nomania.
Inkslinger started as a student project, as an idea of how to better marry game mechanics to game narrative, a concept that has often been closely associated with the genre of Interactive Fiction. In Inkslinger you will not be wrestling with an interpreter like the text adventures of yore, but instead be given requests of letters to write, and then be given one or more words conveying concepts. You can pick one of these words and it will be conveyed onto the page in words chosen by the game’s authors, but in the style you chose by typing out one of the words that were your options. As you continue through the game, your choice of words, so to speak, will affect character relationships and change the outcomes of the story. The setting itself is interesting, being a sort of alternate history Victorian London in which Inkslinging is a job akin to fishmonger or butcher and you receive requests to put to paper to convey the feelings of the senders or what the recipients need to hear. It has a strong conceptual resemblance to the anime Violet Evergarden, which I also highly recommend, even if it isn't a Danish video game. ;-)
