Confession time – I haven’t seen Resident Evil in cinemas yet. It’s on my to-do list! I’m a sucker for third person horror games, and all the reviews suggest it’s a genuine love-letter on the genre, complete with weird key puzzles, dutch camera angles, and an implacable nemesis enemy. And over in tabletop land I’ve found an RPG that looks equally dedicated to capturing those survival horror vibes: Ink Ribbon.
Ink Ribbon is an upcoming game from Emmet Byrne, lately of Cubicle 7, author of excellent tabletop RPGs Age of Sigmar: Soulbound and the D&D-like Broken Weave, now founder of the studio Old Oak Games. My colleague Gab spotted Ink Ribbon back in July, and on Tuesday Old Oak Games launched a crowdfunding campaign on Backerkit to make it a reality.
Having looked at the offer on Backerkit, I’m not surprised – it’s advertising just about every feature that a survival horror fan could want. That starts with the setting. The game takes place in the final hours of Sparrow City, overrun by zombies and even worse bioweapon monsters. Players take on the role of groups of survivors doing their best to make it out alive.
The campaign gives this common enough setup an interesting twist with legacy mechanics. Rather than play as a single group of survivors for multiple sessions, you’ll take on the role of multiple groups, each playing through roughly the same span of time but in different parts of the city.
The game comes with a sizeable map – which looks like it was torn straight out of Silent Hill 2 – and you’ll record where and when major events happen, from buildings being explored to bridges collapsing. In later sessions, you’ll hear an explosion that you caused in another session, or enter the wreckage of a previous disaster from a different direction. You may even be able to loot your old character’s corpse – assuming they aren’t already up and moving around.
I think that’s a promising structure for a survival horror game. Done right you’ll get to experience a city-wide catastrophe, a sense of development and progression, and the characters in any given adventure can die without it making the campaign grind to a halt.
There are lots of other survival horror tropes worked into the game design. You’ll have a grid based inventory, and the deluxe version of the game comes with tokens for each item so you can play inventory Tetris. Weapons, ammo, and health items are in short supply, but there is a crafting system that lets you press bullets and mix medicinal plants from raw ingredients. There are even safe rooms that monsters can’t go into, simply “cause those are the rules”.
In one last touch that will hit nostalgic survival horror fans hard, the rules, monster guide, and scenarios are broken up into multiple small pamphlets which look to be about the same size and shape as the game manual in a PS2 disc case. Both the standard and deluxe versions of the game are packaged tidily into a box, and I have to wonder if Byrne intends to translate this for the Japanese market where all-in-a-box RPGs are de rigeur.
The campaign is off to a roaring start, and an extra scenario and extra monster guide have already been unlocked through stretch goals. As ever with crowdfunding, take a good hard look at your pile of potential before backing. You’ve got until 8pm PDT / 11pm EDT on October 22 (4am BST on October 23) to get involved.
Survival horror TTRPGs are a rare beast (as opposed to RPGs with horror themes, which are pretty common), with All Flesh Must Be Eaten probably the earliest big forebear of the genre. If you’ve got memorable table tales from horrific RPG encounters, I’d love to hear them in the Wargamer Discord community.
Source: Wargamer
