• Price: $9.99 USD
• Developer: Blackfield Entertainment
• Publisher: Entalto Publishing
• Release Date: December 11, 2025

A review code was kindly provided by Blackfield Entertainment. We thank them for allowing us to cover something they’ve worked so hard on.

Cartoons were a major part of my childhood, and I continue to enjoy them today. Cartoon Network, The Disney Channel, and Nickelodeon kept me entertained as a kid. And speaking of Nickelodeon, the story of the new action RPG Ink Inside was apparently written as a cartoon show for the network at first! They decided to turn it into a video game instead, dividing it into 3 seasons worth of content; Ink Inside tells the story of Season 1.

The story begins with main character “Stick” waking up with amnesia. Detective Fuzz, the gruff older drawing who rescued Stick, explains that they’re in a world of drawings made by a little girl named Hannah. Everything was fine until the Fire Nation attacked a phenomenon known as “the Sog” destroyed part of the notebooks Hannah used to create their world.

The Sog is spreading throughout the notebooks, causing drawing after drawing to become “Sogged” enemies when they get wet. To turn them back to normal, you have to hit them with a “core” to drain the water from them and then replace the ink the drawing is missing.

Their young creator seems to be a big fan of dodgeball, so it’s an important part of the world she created. You’ll fight the Sogged in action packed battles using different types of cores, which are “weapons” shaped like a ball. Stick and the other battle party member can both equip 2 cores each, and you can switch between characters in and out of battle.

Experiment with cores of different weights, which affects the rate at which the Cool Moves Bar builds up, among other things. Cores have different effects depending on type and how much they’ve been upgraded.

Take aim at the enemy and shoot your core at them in ranged attacks, which are the main way to damage the enemy. (I like how the game shows the trajectory of your attack before you commit to it.) If your core hits something it may return to you so that you can use it again right away. Otherwise you’ll have to wait for it to “recharge” before you can use a ranged attack again.

What are you supposed to do in the meantime, you might ask? Unlike in real dodgeball, melee attacks on your opponents are permitted! As is the case in actual dodgeball, you’re not allowed to cross the line to your opponent’s side of the field. However, there are a few exceptions to this rule in Ink Inside. For one thing, you can punch an enemy right across the line.

Additionally, there are cores that drag an enemy over to your side. But the most important exception is that Stick is one of the rare few who possess the ability to break the rules! Build up the Cool Moves Bar first by hitting an enemy or dodging their attacks.

When the meter reaches a certain point you can use a special move. But once it’s full you can activate the mode that allows you to break the rules, shattering the invisible barrier so you can attack enemies on their side of the battlefield (until you run out of time and get sent back to your side).

Part of the appeal of breaking the rules is that armored enemies take very little damage unless you hit them with enough melee attacks to destroy their shielding. Sometimes enemies become “Kranky,” which may cause them to deflect your core right back at you to inflict some damage.

You can deflect enemies’ ranged attacks using a sword or shield. There are other items that automatically deflect attacks for you, and some that heal you as well (there are no healing items like potions in the game, although you can stop and rest pretty much anywhere outside of battle).

I think the battle system is pretty complex; players have a lot of different ways to fight, with many choices to make as far as equipment and abilities are concerned. The game uses most of the buttons on the controller in combat. I will say that sometimes I had a hard time getting certain moves to work, such as finishing moves and “Hangtime.”

They made things more interesting by adding water to some environments, which heals your Sogged enemies while damaging you! Other areas have items such as crates or barrels (or even stacks of candy), which you can send flying into enemies for additional damage. I also appreciated how they provided players with a decent amount of options to customize their experience in battle.

The enemy drawings are adorably charming, and have their own unique abilities that will cause some trouble for you. I wouldn’t say that I found any of the battles too challenging; I was only defeated a handful of times in my ~15 hour playthrough.

You’ll start out with smaller battlefields, but eventually you’ll run into larger ones that contain more obstacles/environmental hazards and enemies. Enemies would respawn when I went back to certain screens again, and there doesn’t seem to be an option to run from battle. It could get a little frustrating when I had trouble figuring out where I was supposed to go and I kept running into enemies.

I really liked how they included a map, which shows you the unexplored areas and unopened treasure, as well as fast travel points. Unfortunately I still managed to have some issues figuring out where to go and what to do in a few places – even with a quest log.

Once you’ve obtained certain special moves, besides using them in battle you can use them to unlock access to “tears” in the notebook used to create the environment of their world. These tears are basically portals to another page of the notebook.

I had a lot of trouble remembering where each tear led in the Sugar Swamp area. There’s a quest where you have to hit 4 switches, and it took me forever to figure out where the fourth one was. I kept returning to the same rooms and fighting the same enemies again until I finally reached the last switch. I wish the tears’ destinations were clearly marked on the map.

For the most part the objectives were clear, but in the few instances when they weren’t I reached the point where I almost gave up on finishing the game. For example, in the “epic pierce core” quest line halfway through the game, I became more and more frustrated because I had the right core and thought it was supposed to destroy paper walls in the way so I could walk through and hit the switches. I thought it was extremely unclear that I had to shoot the core at an angle through the paper walls to bounce off the walls behind them to hit the switch instead.

Despite my confused backtracking, I was at least thankful that the loading between areas was quick. However, the game does have some issues with its technical performance here and there. One of the biggest problems was that the characters often turned invisible when walking around in tear areas, and that made it hard to tell where I was going.

They’d also disappear from their boxes on the status screen sometimes, and during conversations their portraits would be blacked out for some reason. More importantly, in the second half of the game it seemed like the frame rate dropped in battles a lot.

In the last quarter of the game or so, my party members would occasionally not accept commands and “freeze,” so I’d have to quit to the main menu. And sometimes the character I wasn’t playing as would get stuck in the corner of the battlefield, and I’d have to switch to them to unfreeze them and then switch back to the one I was playing as.

Thankfully there is an auto save feature for when I needed to quit and reload. I wouldn’t say these problems make the game unplayable, but they did make it a bit frustrating at times.

Unsurprisingly, they did do an “INK-redible” job with the game’s art and story. There are some fun animated scenes, and they made the unusual decision to add live action footage as well. That was pretty neat!

The character designs are all so colorful and cute, and I liked the designs for the environments in the notebook too (particularly the candy-themed areas). It was nice to see details such as the character portraits changing their facial expressions and poses during conversations. And dialogue for the important scenes is voiced!

Your party consists of Stick, Detective Fuzz, and Traff: the Princess of Cursing. Traff was probably my favorite character out of the bunch. There are a lot of children’s movies and shows out there that make subtle jokes that only adults should/would understand. So it was a surprising yet entertaining choice to have a character come right out with a bunch of expletives getting bleeped out in a game rated for everyone.

We get hints of the characters’ backstories, and there’s some depth to the world building. I liked the idea behind Genesis Memories (“Gene Memes”), which are the events that led Hannah to draw a character. While Ink Inside seems like a lighthearted experience at first glance, I got the impression that there are some dark secrets behind the notebooks and the drawings within them. 🤔

As this is said to be the first game of three, the story isn’t complete yet, but I don’t think this ends on a cliffhanger, necessarily. It felt like a complete introductory story arc that hints towards where the story will go in the next season/game.

While it has some minor flaws, if you’re a fan of cartoons in addition to unique stories and battle mechanics, you may want to check Ink Inside out. It’s very reasonably priced, and has a pretty decent play time while also respecting your time. They’ve certainly “drawn” my attention to the series with the opening act, and I look forward to seeing where they take it.