How is Bendy and the Ink Machine so Bad?
The credits are rolling on Bendy and the Ink Machine, and I’m here to answer the question you all surely have. Is Bendy a good name?
Yes, it’s a great name. The implied movement afforded by the trailing y creates an adjective noun that reflects perfectly the rubber hose animation style from which the character Bendy pulls inspiration.
Oh, what, you said game? Is it a good game? Well, sure. The cartridge is the perfect size for the Nintendo Switch game slot, so how much better can the game be, right?
Oh, is Bendy and the Ink Machine a fun gaming experience…Hmmm, there’s no way I can intentionally mis-hear that one, is there? The short answer: no. Bendy and the Ink Machine is a broken mess of a game that somehow manages to be bad at every point in which most games would at least try to be good. Except one area, Bendy does do good in one area. I’ll mention that at the end of this video, but otherwise the game sucks.
At the very beginning of Bendy and the Ink Machine, the opening shot, the game fails to establish its reality. And it never makes up for that beginning failure. Let me be specific. You’re playing as a human and you’re placed into a strange, impossible animation-inspired setting where drawings actually come to life and attempt to kill you. But you, the avatar named Henry, do not react in any way to clue you, the player, into whether or not this impossible reality is strange to you, Henry. So you, the player, suffer three-and-a-half hours of grating dissonance, always wondering why you, Henry, don’t freak out when you’re being murdered by ink blobs and chased by an ink demon. The game simply fails to ever orient the player and that is a critical failure. The terrible voice acting and terrible writing doesn’t help this, but even a simple bit of exposition to solidly inform the player about the situation would have gone a long way.
But let’s move on. The game also fails to provide consistent feedback. Sometimes when you hit an enemy, it recoils. That’s good feedback. Sometimes, it doesn’t. Sometimes you can’t open a trunk, but then you do…something…and you can. Some interactive items glow orange. But others, like doors, give you no indication that they can be opened. But not all things that should be openable are. Doors. Sometimes they are openable. Drawers are not openable. Why? Sometimes when dying mid-battle, you’ll respawn with the enemies’ health still depleted. Sometimes not. And because of all these points of friction, I lose confidence in even the competency of the game optimization. Several times I thought the game was glitching due to uncharacteristically oft-spawning enemies or long periods of blackness. But I’d wait long enough and finally the game moves on. I was assuming the worst about the software because the worst of the gameplay had already been confirmed. Confusing players is bad game design.
But there is one positive I can give this game. The art style is really nice. I’m a sucker for anything that pays homage to the rubber hose, pre-golden age of animation. Pairing that style with an attempt to tell a story of a Bioshock-inspired failed utopia sounds amazing on paper. But off-paper, the game is awful. Wait, the game literally tells the story of good drawings on paper becoming real and turning bad. Is the game actually a genius a meta-commentary on itself? No. It sucks.
Learn more about Bendy and the Ink Machine
Credits:
- Pump Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
