Inks Apple Arcade Gameplay Campfire Completing All Levels iOS
2Inks Apple Arcade Gameplay Campfire Completing All Levels iOS
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INKS
INKS updates pinball for a new generation. It combines the joy of pinball with skilful puzzles, and allows you to create wondrous works of art as the ball smashes around the canvas. Blocks of colour burst like beautiful fireworks across the surface, building up in vivid layers and recording a visual history of your gameplay as you perfect your score.
HOW IT STARTED
Luke Whittaker, co-founder and creative director of State of Play, says that inspiration goes back their BAFTA winning iOS game Lumino City: “We hand built a real physical pinball table for one of the puzzles. We had such a great time with it and were so pleased with the result that we wanted to do more with the idea."
HOW IT WAS MADE
Pinball is incredibly popular, but that in its old form it's also intimidating for a mass audience. "We love the game and spend evenings at London arcades like the Pipeline and The Four Quarters playing on old tables.” says Luke. "But they’re effectively hardcore gaming. Until now pinball videogames have always just copied physical tables.” Not so with INKS he says, "We wanted to bring the core pleasure of the experience to everyone, and we knew we could make it beautiful."
With hundreds of levels which streamline gameplay into elegant small challenges then gradually increase the difficulty, the experience becomes one for everyone to enjoy.
As you play INKS the ball smashes along the walls, blocks of colour burst like beautiful fireworks across the surface, building up in vivid layers and recording a visual history of your gameplay as you perfect your score.
Inspired by artists like Miro, Matisse, Jackson Pollock and Bridget Riley, each table becomes a unique work of art in its own right, sculpted by the player as they fire an ink covered ball around the canvas. The player is encouraged to share their final work of art on social media with the iOS share function. They can even print them out if they like - with the story of their perfect game literally drawn on the canvas in front of them, something to be proud of and share.
With State of Play’s creative flare and skill at crafting beautifully elegant gameplay, INKS. offers something new to the mobile marketplace: art and gameplay as one, for everyone.
INKS was developed by the good folk at State of Play Games, an indie games studio based in London.
What touch arcade says
There are a few ways you can look at INKS. ($1.99), the latest release from Lumino City ($4.99) developer State Of Play. On the one hand, it’s a beautiful piece of interactive art, allowing each player to uniquely paint a design based on how they play. On the other hand, it’s probably State Of Play’s most conventional game yet, since it’s really just pinball at its core. That’s a genre which has no shortage of excellent entries on the iOS platform, and when compared on a strictly mechanical basis against them, INKS. is far from the front of the pack. You have to take it as a fusion of both of those things to see it on its best merits, I think. If nothing else, it will teach you more than a few things about how to play pinball, and it does it in quite the artistic fashion.
Rather than having you score-chase or try to complete a series of missions on a board, as in most other pinball games, INKS. gives you 72 stages, each with a slightly different design. Your goal on each table is to hit every colored target, at which point a hole will open up and the stage will be cleared. If you can do that in a set number of shots for that stage, you’ll earn a gold star. Take more than a couple of shots, and you’ll lose the star, but still get a nice gold medal. If you drain the ball, your grade will decrease for every ball lost. You never run out of balls, but after missing a few shots, the ball will become an inky black color that leaves dark trails behind it. As you progress through the levels, new obstacles will be introduced along with trickier table layouts, forcing you to shoot precisely if you want to earn top marks. The later levels take on a near-puzzle quality, forcing you to pay careful attention to every contour to find the paths you’ll need to send the ball along.
The main gimmick of the game is that when you hit the colored targets, paint will explode out of them. How big the splatter is depends on how hard you hit the target. If your ball passes through the splatter, it will pick up some of the paint and leave colored trails behind it for a while. By the time you’ve finished some of the more complex boards, you’ll have something quite reminiscent of a Jackson Pollock drip painting. This is not only nice to look at, but also serves a practical purpose. Those little trails your ball leaves behind are a nice reminder of exactly where the ball will go if you hit it with your flippers in the same spot.