How far would you go to collect everything you need to survive? I’m really hoping you said to the ends of the world. In Boris and The Dark Survival, you must outrun The Ink Demon in order to get everything you need for. Joey Drew Studios brought this sequel( or teaser to Bendy and the Dark Revival) to Bendy and the Ink Machine in a new fashion. This time around, the game is a random level generated top-down dungeon crawler.
A dark and twisted re-imagining of the early days of the Disney Studios, Bendy tasked you to go to the old cartoon studio that has gone to hell. There were a few allies and Boris the Wolf was one of them. This game shows you what the friendly wolf was doing before the main game began. It seems that entailed bacon soup and running for his life.
Artistically, the levels are still dark and inky, just like Bendy and the Ink Machine. As Boris, you will take your elevator to random levels and systematically search the rooms for the list of items you need for that day. This could be cogs, plungers, spoons and more. Be careful however, because The Ink Demon will come for you in order to take everything you have and make you start over.
Not every hallway has a door to freedom. Luckily some areas have highlighted boxes with an ‘O’ on the top for hiding. These “miracle” boxes will aid you in getting away from The Ink Demon, but they aren’t always readily available. So make sure you take note of where they are in each level. Other lockers are in the area that may hold secrets. And a third cabinet with a soup icon give you more stamina when needed.
Running constantly depletes your energy, which can leave you stranded when Bendy chases you for your final journey back to your elevator. Although the game seems consistently easy, consider this to be more like a Binding of Issac’s style chase. You can hear the Ink Demon coming, and getting away or around him can be troublesome. Once you’re caught, Bendy gets right in your face and then it’s back to square one. The more you play, The Ink Demon seems to start coming faster which provides a pretty decent challenge.
The only thing that seems to slow this game down is that we don’t really have a solid story in place to know why we are running around picking up items. Hopefully after getting further in the game, more things will become known. Mechanically, Boris is easy to control and you really only rely on the ‘E’ key to open and collect items to take back to your home base level. Getting soup these days is pretty difficult, but it’s nice to see a different character back from the original to expand on a new story.
7/10
Available on PC, Android and IOS
