An evil monster named Patches is threatening the world, to really threaten the world he is after a doomsday weapon. You obviously have to stop him before it’s too late; this marks the beginning of your trip.

Ocular Ink is divided into several sublevels; you have to complete each level in order to gain on patches. Each level has its own theme and sub story. In one level you are chasing a samurai inspired warlord in a forest and in another one you are after a mad archaeologist.

The story and dialogue is really good and full of humour. One example is when you meet General Eye-senhower. You meet a lot of other characters along the game, each one enhancing the game and develop the story. The developers have used the same story system as Nintendo RPGs such as Zelda.

Ocular Ink has a new kind of control system, I haven’t seen anything quite like it before. In order to attack enemies you draw using a pencil. Sounds weird but it’s really easy, you simply draw a line from where you want the power to hit for example a rock. The rock moves and hopefully takes down the enemy. I was sceptical at first to this kind of control system but I have really changed my mind. It’s much easier to grasp in stressed situations that the usual fire button layout.

As anything new the controls takes some time getting used to. Thankfully the developers have included an optional tutorial (I like optional tutorials) that isn’t even remotely boring. It’s actually quite fun because they have integrated it well into the rest of the story,

I really love the graphics of this game; they are very simple but beautiful.The environments on the levels looks great, such as the grass and trees. I also like the character graphics, each character comes to live somehow. After a while you even get used to seeing eyeballs on screen. The thick black vector lines around some of the objects is an art feature that I always liked in games, and in Ocular Ink it looks better than ever.

If I were to complain about something it would be the music. The game loses someone not having a soundtrack, it simply adds much more to the whole experience. One might also wish for better sound effects, they are a bit basic for a game where everything else is perfect.

Ocular Ink is filled to the top with innovative game play, great storytelling and nice graphics. It simply can’t get any better than this, especially not at a Shareware/Freeware level. Download this game now and play it, it’s well worth the effort.

A really nice addition to the game is the level editor. It’s fairly easy to use and hopefully it will number of user made levels out there soon. Pistachio Productions currently offer Ocular Ink Episode 1 free of charge. Further episodes will not be free according to their website. It should also be noted that the version that we tested is v0.92b.