The Dink Network

Charged by three witches to restore the balance and defeat Decretius once and for all, Dink must journey to strange lands, battle new monsters and save the world one last time. The demo is just the first land, other lands will be available in the full version.

This Dmod must be played in either DinkHD or YeOldeDink players, other versions will probably fail.

It is about 1 hour long to play depending on which way you choose to go.

The fabled Necromancer is finally here! Or at the very least the demo is, and what a demo it is!

The DMOD makes use of all kinds of new engine features, so you will need the latest DinkHD (V2.08 or newer) or YeOldeDink to play it! (Note for Linux users, FreeDink will not work for this...)

First of all, the intro cutscenes are absolutely amazing and blew me away! The extended frame limit in the new engines really shines here as having up to 99 frames per sequence allows for longer animation sequences.

The graphics are all around very very good! Almost ALL of the sprites are brand new, and when I say all I mean it! The only remaining graphics from the original Dink game are some hole/stairs sprites, some inventory items and some HUD elements (numbers and health bar). The animations of all the new sprites are very nice too!

I believe this is the first DMOD to use PNG sprites, which is really cool! The transparency allows for all sorts of cool looking effects that you wouldn't expect to see in Dink! Small stuff like the smoke coming out of the house chimneys really makes a difference in terms of atmosphere.

I remember back in the day as a wee teen when I played Stone of Balance all the cool new graphics blew me away, I suppose playing this gives me the same kind of feeling, it is quite nostalgic. Quite fitting for SimonK to once more blow my mind with the graphics upon his return

The combat can seem pretty brutal if you dive in expecting to just mash everything with your fists. The enemies have quite high touch damage so you have to be careful and use magic to your advantage. There is a cool mechanic where you can set bushes and other things on fire and it damages enemies. Although it only works one time since the burnable sprites get destroyed by the fire, I think it adds some interesting tactical feel to combat. Overall, I quite enjoyed it! I won't go into details, but the final boss fight of the demo can seem pretty tough in a fun kind of way too!

I never really know what to say about music, but I quite enjoyed it. I'm not sure if these are all original tracks or not, but they made for good atmosphere. Ambiental sound effects are also used throughout the DMOD and I always appreciate that.

The only thing that annoyed me about the DMOD are some of the number based puzzles

Overall, I'd say this is one of the must play DMODs and I am really looking forward to the full release, whenever that may be.