The Haunted Hoard: Bendy and the Ink Machine (PC)
As I mentioned back when I took a look at Cuphead, the early 20th century rubber hose animation style is one I am incredibly fond 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 don’t 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, it’s not too hard to see why Bendy and the Ink Machine chose 1930s animation as fuel for a horror game.
Taking place in Joey Drew Studios, a fictitious analogue to Walt Disney Animation, Bendy and the Ink Machine even styles it main location, the animation studio, like an old cartoon despite seemingly taking place in the real world. 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 aren’t quite right, twisted and demented caricatures of the cartoon figures now lurking around the animation studio thanks to it. Quickly finding himself trapped, Henry has to find his way out while also learning what lead the animation studio down this awful road, all while the ink creations hunt him down for their own dark purposes.
While the rubber hose animation style is used for the fictional cartoons that Bendy and his supporting cast come from, the actual in-game representations of them are fairly solid 3D models, leaning more into the horrors of the ink and how their appearance has been corrupted by it rather than any inherently off-putting designs. It’s 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 Drew’s 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 Bendy’s Disneyworld inspired chapter.
When it comes to art style, presentation, and concept, Bendy and the Ink Machine is definitely a treat, mixing its creativity with horror in a way that’s striking, creative, and all without being needlessly grotesque… but sadly, my praise for the game ends there. While the aesthetic oozes with imagination, the gameplay comes up unfortunately dry. Presented in the first person, Bendy and the Ink Machine’s 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 it’s literally structured like you’re 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 don’t 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 isn’t the only instance of bumbling about, but it’s certainly the point where a player will realize Bendy and the Ink Machine doesn’t have many ideas for what you can do in its wonderful world.
Combat is a frequent part of Bendy and the Ink Machine, but it’s not really ever done well. 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 you’re 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 don’t 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.
Even if you buy into the intended tension of these chases, there are some flaws in enemy behavior that weigh them down. One area had the Butcher Gang’s three members patrolling the latest area where I had to collect a certain amount of objects to continue, but here two of the gang’s 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 can’t hurt you if you simply stand to the side. 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. At least the brute isn’t underwhelming though like our final fight that at times can feel like the game’s final boss is not even directly targeting you with their aggression.
THE VERDICT: Most of Bendy and the Ink Machine’s problems come from tedium, and the art direction can’t really overcome those, especially since the animation studio setting is relied on for too long before you finally begin to see some areas that look appreciably different. It’s easy to lean on the phrase “style over substance”, but Bendy’s game feels like it could be a textbook example of that being the case. The mechanics have no appeal on their own, the things meant to carry you through the experience slipping into dull repetition quite often and not packing the punch needed to make the moments designed to be scary or tense work. Combat never finds its footing even in boss battles, but the game does at least try to keep putting its concept, characters, and story forward more than its play. The creativity put into the world design and its history is intriguing on its own, but entering that world only ends up hurting your experience with it.
And so, I give Bendy and the Ink Machine for PC…
A BAD rating. Save for the glitchiness or where things just aren’t working right, the appeal of Bendy and the Ink Machine’s monster design, horror concept, and set design can prevent the game from being a boring overall experience, but it is still certainly boring to play. Learning something new about Joey Drew Studios is enticing, seeing the next creature design draws you in, but then you start whacking things with a pipe again or trekking around a bunch of similar hallways to find five items like you’ve done five times before and it’s hard to maintain interest in the adventure. Originally released in an episodic structure, Bendy and the Ink Machine definitely feels like it was struggling to find what works and what it wanted to say, and while the narrative and art design can survive being tinkered with and growing into something more, the directionless approach to the activities you actually participate in means playing the game never feels right. It could have likely benefited from diving into horror and story completely like in a narrative exploration game, or it could have kept to mild puzzles to break up story beats and add the occasional pressure of monster chases, but even those would need to be improved to deliver on their intended emotions.
Perhaps appropriately for a game who draws its inspirations from old cartoon shorts, Bendy and the Ink Machine is likely best experienced as a video that’s been edited down to something more digestible. Playing it requires pushing through slow, bland chores and fighting tepid battles, so if you remove the unfortunate interactive segments, it could be easier to enjoy the visual style and surrounding story. Even as a fan of the art style on display both in its normal state and corrupted horror form, the ill-conceived gameplay barriers to experiencing it were just too much for me to recommend trying it.