Bendy And The Ink Hine Computer Game Free Embrace Of

A fight with a more brutish boss is equally slow despite the more aggressive boss, but he makes up for it by having a better chance at killing you to restart the fight.

Bendy And The Ink Hine Computer Game Free Embrace Of

The free embrace of the potential of animation allows for incredible exaggeration and surreal situations, even the most mundane expressions and actions easily made more appealing through creative absurdity.

However, the potential for comedy that the style allows also can feel somewhat uncanny, with massive toothy grins stretching faces, bodies that dont obey the laws of physics, and a demented air to it all as characters often engage in consequence free violence with each other.

Needless to say, its not too hard to see why Bendy and the Ink Machine chose 1930s animation as fuel for a horror game.

The environment is all rendered in a sepia tone, with black bold outlines to objects to make them look like an excellent fit for an old cartoon despite being 3D objects.

Our hero Henry Stein returns to the animation studio nearly 30 years after working there only to find it in a much worse state than he left it, the place seemingly abandoned and covered in gobs of dripping black ink.

Quite quickly you uncover the Ink Machine, a device that seems to be bringing cartoon characters to life, but the ink creations arent quite right, twisted and demented caricatures of the cartoon figures now lurking around the animation studio thanks to it.

Its very much meant to evoke the feeling of seeing a beloved childhood character twisted into something grotesque, the game introducing you to Bendy, Boris the Wolf, and Alice Angel through posters, footage, and the audio logs of Joey Drews employees before you ever see what the ink machine has done with them.

While there are some generic ink blob humanoids lurking around the studio, most of the more important monstrosities execute their concepts well, the corrupted ink forms of cartoons perhaps best done by the Butcher Gang, a trio of baddies Bendy supposedly faced in his old cartoons.

With one creature whose head is carried around on a fishing pole and another whose scalp is split open to reveal a mouth, the strange ink creations of Bendy and the Ink Machine are effective without ever needing to resort to gore or blood, and some of the better designs actually stray away from the cartoon style with characters like The Projectionist with his film camera head or the wonderfully macabre carnival ride boss from Bendys Disneyworld inspired chapter.

While the aesthetic oozes with imagination, the gameplay comes up unfortunately dry.

Presented in the first person, Bendy and the Ink Machines five episodes struggle to give you anything interesting to do.

There are some alright puzzles to be found like one involving instruments in the recording studio and using what seem like just fun audio logs laying around to provide lore as puzzle clues, but a lot of the game boils down to wandering around to find the items you need to progress, especially the obnoxiously slow third chapter where its literally structured like youre doing chores for another character.

The third chapter is certainly the most egregious, the player taking an elevator or the stairs constantly between floors to do small tasks that dont even have much opposition placed around to make it difficult, especially since at this point in the game you usually have a weapon that makes enemy encounters just a matter of whacking them enough to wipe them out.

This midpoint drag isnt the only instance of bumbling about, but its certainly the point where a player will realize Bendy and the Ink Machine doesnt have many ideas for what you can do in its wonderful world.

It begins as something that is too straightforward to really dislike, it being a way to clear away the little ink men who harass you, but the game starts leaning on it more as the game progresses, and youre usually just whacking things with a pipe or other similar weapon to get the job done.

Your health is represented by ink splattering your vision, healing requiring you to avoid damage for a while, so an already mindless battle that would have been about swinging and backing up can be slowed down by adding a need to step back even more often.

The game will take away your weapon sometimes and attempt to become about stealth, a few enemies able to outright kill you if the catch you at all, but your slightly faster walking option seems to be designed to be just fast enough to outpace them so long as you dont get lost down deliberately winding areas that are meant to guide you into enemy clutches.

These segments where you can get grabbed mostly throw you back to a recent checkpoint, the revival scene of you walking through an ink tunnel getting old but the lenient revivals making it easy enough to brute force a chase area by running around and doing whatever objective is required without worrying about your pursuer too much.

One area had the Butcher Gangs three members patrolling the latest area where I had to collect a certain amount of objects to continue, but here two of the gangs members got stuck on the same door, and this was after I had opened two doors they had gotten stuck on before to help them along.

Bugs can impact the game in many different little ways, with players still reporting losing save files or having unwinnable puzzles due to unexpected glitches, and there even seem to be little issues with attack detection in regular play, the game seemingly struggling to hold itself together at times.

Perhaps more telling about the problems with the chase designs though is that there are shelters you are able to hide in to lose whatever ink monster is after you, but the only times they felt necessary were when they literally were or when you happened to be cornered beside one.

The chase segments are at least a bit better off than the boss fights, these conflicts ending up mostly duds due to being mostly passive.

The interesting carnival ride boss for example is impressive until you realize you need to slowly wait on it to reveal its weak points and it cant hurt you if you simply stand to the side.

Bendy And The Ink Machine Computer Game