Realm of Ink on Steam
store.steampowered.com
Realm of Ink is an Ink-style action Roguelite game. While pursuing the Fox Demon, the swordswoman Red, unexpectedly finds that her life is dictated by the 'destiny' within the world of the book. Only by breaking free can she unveil the truth of her existence and challenge the constraints of fate.

So a couple months back I was randomly approached on Steam from someone claimed to be someone from a company called Maple Leaf Studio looking for playtesters for a game of theirs, and that because I had so many hours in Hades and Cult of the Lamb I’d be perfect for it.

I at first thought this was some kind of scam like those “Bro, join my TF2 team, sign up through this website, we can win so much money bro! Totally not stealing your account information!” (Especially since they kept flipflopping to being from Leap Studio to Maple Leaf Studio, wasn’t clear which they were from)

But I heard them out and saw they were legit, so they had me sign an NDA and I got a Steam Key for an early build of their game Realm of Ink. It’s pretty cool, not much I can say because of how early the build I played was… but I would say it plays a lot like Hades.

The gimmick seems to be that you have this pet made of ink that changes to a different animal with a different fighting style depending on what power-ups you grab, and other than that seems to play a lot like Hades if you’re into that. It was pretty fun and kind of exciting, I had never done anything like this before since I’m not some big youtuber.

The graphics are pretty cool too, there’s this Eastern theme, and the whole game looks like it was drawn on an old Chinese scroll of some kind.

Anyway, one of the members of the dev team I’d been reporting bugs and suggesting ideas for (I suggested an easter egg where you could light campfires that were strewn about the stages by using a fire based attack, I don’t know if they added that in), told me that I was free from the NDA and was allowed to openly talk about it, so I figured I’d make a post here and signal boost the game… Especially since an updated version of the demo I played is now public and can be downloaded from their Steam page (link here - https://store.steampowered.com/app/2597080/Realm_of_Ink/)

For the record don’t ask me questions about future plans for the game or its development history, I do not work for them, I make no money off of the game, the game isn’t even out yet, and I don’t know if there’s a release date, I just wanted to talk about my first experience playtesting a game intended for commericial release and share the demo now that it’s public