Starbreeze Publishing and Somnium Games announced that Inked is scheduled to release on April 26th, 2018 on PC via Steam. Starbreeze recently struck a deal with the indie developer in order to bring the project to life on Valve’s digital distribution platform, where gamers will attempt to journey through a worled that’s crafted with an art-style mimicking inked sketches.

It’s always the indie developers trying something new when it comes to visuals and unique graphical art-styles and attempting to tell stories that aren’t being told elsewhere. In this case, Inked is about a nameless hero, a ronin, who is the makings of a comic book artist named Adam. The Nameless Hero goes on a journey to seek revenge while also unfolding a tale that is about love and loss.

The gameplay itself is an isometric title where players will view the action through Adam’s sketches. It’s such an inventive take on the adventure-puzzle genre, and you can see what it looks like in action with the charming gameplay trailer below.

The highlight is that at least this is a proper story, without all of the regressive antics that have plagued so many other games that have come out in the recent past.

The actual gameplay is about solving puzzles in this paper-made world where ink both unfolds the action and helps drive the story forward by unraveling the narrative.

Unfortunately it doesn’t look as if there are any ways to initiate combat in the game. So while the story at least tells a proper story without all of the sociopolitical weights for gamers to wear as yoke as they trudge through the title, it still seems to adopt the Millennial antic of forfeiting combat in favor of other styles of problem solving.

On the upside, at least Somnium Games isn’t afraid of the prototypical story trope of a hero saving his lost love. It’s nice to see this kind of traditionalism return in gaming.

You can look for Inked to launch on April 26th at the end of the month on Steam. The Steam store page doesn’t appear to pop up for whatever reason, but if the game does well enough I can easily imagine this game arriving on the Nintendo Switch.