INK

It's sometimes hard to refrain from drawing direct comparisons to other games when trying to describe a game's content. You are a square block with fast, slippery movement and a floaty jump. You leap between platforms, utilising wall jumps to navigate tricky areas, as you make your way to the exit. It draws huge inspiration from Super Meat Boy, but they have brought a new idea to the table; the level is invisible - or it is at first...

When your character makes contact with a surface, you leave behind ink to reveal it. Double-jumping fires ink-splodges in multiple directions, uncovering parts of the level at a distance. There are also enemies whose movements also reveal the surface. If there are enemies in the level, you must stomp on all of them to make the exit open up.

Ink is persistent between deaths, meaning that successive attempts on each level get easier as the level gets progressively revealed. Death can come from touching enemies, spikes, falling to your death, or touching the bounds of the screen (top, bottom or sides). This is something that did annoy me during the early stages of the game. The floaty feel to the jump can often mean you reach the top of the screen, and if there's no ceiling to stop you, then you die, which feels a bit cheap. Respawning is quick, and since the levels are short (just like Super Meat Boy), then death doesn't become a frustrating experience. You can just carry on and learn from your mistakes.

You can often understand the level design, even if you can't actually see it, and so most of your deaths actually come from you making mistakes, rather than raging about something you couldn't see. Later on in the game, there's homing missiles that chase you down which cause most of your deaths. I found those levels to be very frustrating just like the ones in Super Meat Boy. I'd rather play levels that had tricky platforming rather than inflating difficulty by enemies that are constantly moving towards you.

The latter levels also have walled off sections where you must collect the corresponding key to unlock. This is another feature taken straight from Super Meat Boy. There are three bosses in the game, occurring at levels 25, 50, and 75. The first two are fairly easy to take down, but the final boss is trickier and seems to require a bit of luck. There are also 20 heart tokens to find throughout the game. Collecting them involves picking one up and completing the level. Die within the level, and you have to re-collect it.

The game's visual style is extremely simplistic. Your character is simply a square, the enemies are rectangle, objects that shoot projectiles are triangles. It does look pretty ugly, but it is playable for the most part. There's occasions where there can be too much happening at once though, so it would have been a better idea to have enemies and projectiles more bolder and distinctive to make them stand-out.

All the levels are very short; the 75 levels will only run up a time around 2 hours. At £3.99, the game is a budget indie title, and if you want more Super Meat Boy-style action, then it's worth checking out. Personally, I had a lot of fun until the levels introduced the homing missiles, then it started to become a frustrating experience. It's the main thing that I disliked about Super Meat Boy, so they have followed the Meat Boy formula a bit too close for my liking.

Not only did gaming in 2015 consist of some amazing platformers, 2015 was also the year game’s decided to throw some paint around! INK is a twitch-platformer based on the principle of learning from your mistakes. Anything the player touches leaves spatters of paint on its surface. Even when the player dies, paint is released. This basic mechanic instills a sense of discovery in a subgenre that often misses the mark in this regard. INK is definitely one of those ‘just one more level’ type of games, and maybe one of the most addictive games of 2015. What seems so simple on the surface turns out to be one of 2015’s best games. If you loved twitch-platformers or want to get into the genre but don’t know where to start, INK is a game I can’t recommend enough.