Overview
What is Realm of Ink?
In Realm of Ink, players will embark on an epic adventure starting as Red, the skilled swordsman, and unlock new characters as you advance. Harness the boundless power of the Fox to navigate through perilous 'Story Relics,' face off against four distinct bosses with rich histories, and strive to break free from the unpredictable Realm of Ink. Overcome a myriad of trials and hurdles, shaping your fate through repeated rebirths, and demonstrate unwavering strength as you wield your sword with determination.
It’s a roguelite real-time RPG that engages in thrilling battles and experiments with various combinations to shape combat identity. You’ll be able to take control of three dynamic characters: the unmatched Swordswoman Red, the Nightmare Hunter Wang Ding, and the Fox Judge Ning Ye. You’ll also be able to arm yourself with a formidable arsenal comprising nine powerful weapons like the Scarlet Sword, Shadow Twin Blades, and Azure Aura Blade.
Realm of Ink features:
⚫︎ Multiple tiers of gameplay difficulty
⚫︎ Mix and match gear, relics, stat upgrades, and food effects
⚫︎ Meta-progression elements
⚫︎ Specialized unlockable characters
⚫︎ Character skins for customization
⚫︎ Pets can participate in combat
| Digital Storefronts | |||||
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 Playstation |
 Xbox |
 Switch 2 |
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 Steam |
 Epic |
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| $24.99 | |||||
Realm of Ink Review: Bold Statements in Daring Words
Etched a Niche for Itself
It’s been a while since we’ve reviewed Realm of Ink back when it was freshly released as an Early Access title. Back then, it suffered mostly from minor issues such as the lack of standard quality-of-life features like viewing obtained items mid-pick and some truly jarring English translations. Now that it’s entered 1.0, though, the issues have moved from the nitpicks of the old to the understandable ones of today.
What do roguelites suffer from, typically? The grind tax? Illusion of skill? An insanely diluted reward pool as you unlock more options? Those are all present in Realm of Ink to some degree. Thankfully, though, the game isn’t defined by the issues it suffers. Instead, Realm of Ink is a title that separates itself from the crowd by how seamlessly it has integrated its theme with the art, story, and even the gameplay.
Realm of Ink is entirely defined by its painting and calligraphy theme. It is practically impossible to talk about it without making some sort of connection to it. And that’s what makes it stand out. Because despite its issues, the prevailing impression you will always come out with is the cohesiveness of its design. That’s something special.
Escaping What’s Written
The game puts you in the shoes of a swordswoman named Red, who finds herself trapped in a pre-written world controlled by the Master of the Ink Realm, the Book Spirit. However, escaping from a divine domain is a massive ask for a mortal, and she will inevitably fail. Fortunately, she has the backing of a fox youkai-run inn, whose residents help salvage her body and soul whenever she falls in battle.
There’s more to Realm of Ink’s story than its initial premise, of course. The narrative offers dialogue-driven insights into a rather well-constructed world, with Red’s own history gradually being unveiled as you clear progressively higher difficulties.
Unfortunately, roguelites aren’t really the best medium to tell a story in a traditional sense. Due to the quirks of the genre, its narrative will almost always be delivered in broken pieces scattered in a way that’s wholly dependent on both the player’s skill and luck. This makes detail retention quite a bit of a pain and, at worst, prevents you from forming a proper sequence of events or a picture of the overall development.
Realm of Ink, thankfully, is well aware of this structural barrier and delivers its lore in a way that doesn’t require you to progressive piece everything together. This is achieved by keeping each narrative snippet as barebones as possible, delivering only the vital bits that are loosely connected to previous major milestones. Just knowing these scattered details—like Red’s adolescent life as someone who never skipped training, or her family’s true origins—is enough to form a functional picture. You can freely forget the finer specifics between successful runs without losing track of what’s being built up.
Most importantly, the relative vagueness of it all allows the story to take a nominal backseat to the action. That same mystery ensures that gradually uncovering the secrets of the Ink Realm and Red’s origins remains an enticing prospect. It keeps you invested in the world's flavor while never intruding on the core gameplay loop’s spotlight.
Paint the World Black and Blue
The Building Blocks of a Busted Build
Speaking of the gameplay, Realm of Ink is a roguelite that features all the standard fixings the genre is known for such as permanent meta-progression mechanics, scaling difficulty tiers, random map node generation, and RNG-heavy upgrade pools. There’s not much novelty to the overall experience besides the Ink Relics. These are effectively your weapons and you can equip up to two of them, depending on your build. Each Ink Relic comes with a skill, a passive ability, and also endows an elemental property to your ink pet companion.
The passive abilities are arguably the most important because these steer you into specific builds. For example, an Ink Relic might allow you to increase the power of your ink pet, enabling them to be the main force in battle instead of yourself. Or, it could provide you with robust shields and hurt enemies that attack you, allowing for a more passive style of gameplay.
Now, having one Ink Relic is cool and all, but the real magic happens when you get two with similar specializations and upgrade them to the maximum. This unlocks their complete repertoire of abilities at the highest possible values. And, if RNG has blessed your run, you’ll be able to work with some absolutely, hilariously broken builds, such as one that combines curse stacking to nerf enemy stats and another that uses stacked curses to nuke the enemy’s HP for obscene damage.
RNG upon RNG Keeps Things Fresh and Annoying
Thankfully, these busted builds aren’t common, else the game would be way too easy to actually enjoy. I mean, if every run is a near-guaranteed success, then it’s not really a roguelite in terms of the challenge anymore, right? Might as well just play a reverse bullet hell. Anyway, that’s because these builds are hidden behind a second layer of RNG—the procurement of Curios.
You can think of Curios as a third of an Ink Relic. That is, they only provide a passive ability to add to your resume with strict requirements for activating. For example, it could trigger when an enemy gets a certain amount of stacks of a particular buff or whenever you apply a certain negative status.
Simple enough. But in reality, no builds can actually function, at least well enough, if you don’t get very specific Curios for your combination of Ink Relics. So, more often than not, you will have to make do with a suboptimal set of tools or outright restart a run on the much higher difficulties.
At the bare minimum, it forces you to experiment, especially if you’re not the type to have the patience to do multiple resets—understandable, really, since I tend to get extremely fussy with builds, too. I think my record for restarts just to get a semi-AFK build up and running was in the early two digits range. Quite painful, to say the least.
Then you encounter the game’s third layer of RNG; Elixirs. While these only provide stat bonuses, because every build is heavily reliant on extremely specific ones, these tend to be just as important as your choice of Curios despite not having as much variety.
—There’s even a fourth layer; skill upgrades (which are also RNG-dependent). And a fifth; boss Curios, which doesn't even drop a hundred percent of the time. And so on—
That’s at least five layers of RNG in total. At that point, you might as well forget the idea of ever replicating a build you once made down to the last drop or item. No run in Realm of Ink will ever feel the same because you will always have to settle for something else, or make unplanned changes mid-challenge. And perhaps that’s the kind of feeling the developers intended for this game.
Just like calligraphy, variation is often the point. Even when a master writes the same character hundreds of times, no two versions are perfectly identical. Everything from the pressure of the brush, the quality of the ink that day, the weather, and even the artist’s mood changes the results. And I think Realm of Ink does a good job of capturing that.
There’s a Noticeable Difficulty Valley
Realm of Ink is anything but easy. Regardless of your build, absentmindedly running into a boss’ attack will almost always result in a good chunk of your health bar becoming empty space. Plus, it’s not as if many of the bosses will just sit in one place taking your attacks. A lot of them will pressure you into using the entirety of the map in order to avoid their assault, so you can’t just pretend that you’re a tree and stand in one corner either. For the most part, at least, since some builds do actually allow you to do that.
However, because the game’s meta-progression elements are so strong, your options quickly overtake the difficulty Realm of Ink can provide. This is worsened by a shallow stage pool; with so few maps on rotation, you master boss patterns almost immediately, stripping away the friction of trial-and-error in just a few runs. By the midgame, this lack of challenge becomes a glaring issue. Runs stop feeling like a fight for survival and turn into a predictable upgrade grind; one where you only ever lose to stat-checks rather than skill issues.
Do you know how it feels when you combine the gameplay loop’s near-limitless variety with the midgame’s ease? Like a sandbox. Basically, you’re just going through the motions of a roguelite without much of the payoff associated with it. Instead, you just get upgrade materials and the knowledge of whether the build you messed around with for “fun” is actually viable or not.
Thankfully, that feeling evaporates a bit later on, particularly when the mobs’ stats finally catch up with the limits of what the meta-progression systems can provide. By that point, you’ll be back to facing a challenge each run and the fun can resume.
Is Realm of Ink Worth It?
Gives a Lot More Than the Price Suggests
Now that the market is thoroughly saturated with high-speed isometric roguelites, shopping for one ultimately becomes a question of what not to buy. So many of them have excellent gameplay, after all. A lot of them can brag about their visuals, too. Story-wise, sure, there’s only very few with good stories, but that’s kind of a caveat that always seems to haunt the genre anyway.
Yet, within that crowded sea of alternatives, Realm of Ink stands out as a choice you can confidently make—a game where gameplay, visual splendor, and aesthetic purpose arrive in a strange, yet cohesive and beautiful bundle.
In a way, all you are really doing throughout your playtime is painting: pressing buttons to illustrate Red’s story, her journey, and her struggles. And just like real art, the final result—the experience itself—is never quite the same twice. That is exactly what makes Realm of Ink special.
Game8 Reviews
