Ink Stains Games was founded on 7 April 2015 by a small European team that set out to build the kind of game that punishes hesitation. Their debut, 12 is Better Than 6, went to Kickstarter that September and raised just over fifteen thousand pounds, arriving on Steam in November of the same year as a hardcore top-down shooter with stealth elements set in the Wild West of 1873. Its signature is a revolver you have to cock with one input before firing with another, a deliberate half-second of friction that turns every doorway into a decision, and an art direction drawn entirely by hand in pen and ink so that the desert reads like a sketchbook filling with red. The studio returned to that world in December 2017 with The Apostles, a standalone chapter that extended the story rather than padding it.
The studio's second project reshaped its reputation. Development on Stoneshard began in the summer of 2017 and reached Steam Early Access on 6 February 2020, trading the Wild West for a procedurally generated medieval world and the twitch of a revolver for turn-based tactics, permanent injuries and a survival model that tracks pain, morale and infection alongside hit points. A core team of seven describes itself simply as based in Europe, and both games carry the same design signature: unforgiving systems that are always legible, where a death is nearly always traceable to a decision the player made rather than a number they could not see. For players who want mechanics with teeth and presentation with a distinctive hand behind it, this is a catalogue worth working through slowly.
