Inscryption ~ Value through Variety

Play Log #3

Trapped inside a dark cabin, a shadowy figure sitting across from you invites you to join him in a card game. The rules are simple, but the stakes are enormous. Your very life is on the line, and with seemingly no way out, your only choice is to play the game.

Inscryption is a roguelite deck-building video game developed by Daniel Mullins Games and published by Devolver Digital. Inscryption is an odd beast, since its gameplay is segmented into three similar yet distinct phases, or acts. In the first act, the game’s deck-based form of play is introduced, from which the rest of the game will build off. The player starts with a base deck of creatures, with which they can place on any of a row of four slots. The opposing player can play creatures too, though their moves are telegraphed by an additional row of slots, highlighting what they plan to do next. Each creature has an attack stat and a health stat, and at the end of one’s turn, all their creatures on the board will attack, either lowering the health stat of the opposing creature, or attacking the foe directly, and tipping the weighing scale, which decides the winner. The goal of the game is to tip the scale by a difference of five points.

This unique scoring system pushes the player to think out how and when they place their cards more so than other deck-based games. The scoring system also combines with the game’s roguelite elements to favor the player’s personal style. Will you build a hyper aggressive deck where it’s not uncommon to claim a fabled one-turn-kill? Or will you focus on equipping your creatures with powerful defensive abilities to be able to weather any attack from your foe?

It’s the game’s gothic personality that really makes it stand out. When the player eventually loses in Inscryption, which it is impossible not to on the first go, the shadowy figure across the table says that he plans to end your life, and by taking your picture with an enchanted camera, he traps the player character in a card. A new character then appears at the table, and the player must start their deck from scratch. The game’s commitment to this ghoulish tone is consistent throughout the first act. The bulk of this opening stretch of gameplay is spent seated across from a figure that is completely hidden to you. The cards are played in low lighting, and most of the cabin is in shadow, making it feel like the entire world is contained on the table between the two of you. Additionally, the game’s low-poly art style leaves the nitty gritty details to the player’s imagination, an advantage A massive boon the game features is its great sense of timing. While the cards are placed and move on the board in a realistic way, every movement is snappy, making the game flow excellently, especially when compared to other card-based video games I’ve played that feel like a slog sometimes.

If the player chooses to, they can stand up and explore the interior of the cabin in which they are trapped, which features a couple miniature puzzles that reward the player with powerful new items and cards, some of which that are essential to progressing the game. Some of the cards that the player comes across in their game actually speak and offer advice for how to defeat the shadowy figure once and for all. By following their orders and uncovering the secrets in the cabin, the player finds their own roll of film, and after defeating the shadowy figure in a climactic battle, they take a picture of him using his own camera, ending the first act of the game.

Personally, when I decided to play Inscryption, I didn’t know how much this game really had to offer. All the advertisements I saw for the game had shown gameplay from the first act, and they’d all focused on the game’s horror aspects. What the game offered me next, and what I had not expected at all, was a bank of video logs by a card-collecting enthusiast named Luke Carder. These vlogs begin to tell the story of how Carder finds a mysterious card pointing him to the location of a buried computer disc which appears to be the very game of Inscryption that I’d been playing for hours, and it is the continuously evloving story of Inscryption that remains one of its most fascinating aspects for the whole playthrough.

The next act takes the form of a top-down RPG, more akin to Pokémon than the horror game Inscryption had been performing as prior. The player character is tasked with defeating the four Scrybes of Inscryption, each one commanding a different aspect, and with it, a different mechanic that fundamentally expounds upon how the game is played. Leshy, the Scrybe of Beasts, and our shadowy figure from the first act, has a sacrificial mechanic where weaker creatures must be sacrificed in order to play stronger ones. Grimora, the Scrybe of the Dead, has a mechanic where everytime a creature dies, the player receives one bone token, which they can spend to play certain creatures. Both Leshy and Grimora’s mechanics were introduced in the first act, but the other scrybes have entirely new ones. Magnificus, the Scrybe of the Magicks, holds creatures that can only be played if a creature brandishing a Mox is on his field. P03, the Scrybe of Technology, introduces a mechanic where the player has a certain amount of energy each turn to play robotic creatures. It’s all but stated that the three Scrybes other than Leshy were the talking cards that helped the player in Act 1, and that Leshy had used his camera to take control of the game before the player defeated him.

After defeating all four Scrybes, P03 reveals that he wants to be in control this time, and in the third act, with gameplay very similar to the first, he traps the player in is factory and demands they help him bring about The Great Transcendence. Expanding on the base game from Acts 1 and 2, Act 3 adds another card row to the board, from four to five. Additionally, while the player could choose their own mechanic to focus their deck on in Act 2, in Act 3, their forced to play by P03’s rules, as all cards have an energy value that can only be met after a few turns have passed. While the gameplay is still very similar, the game mostly abandons its horror elements, instead focusing on the game’s plot, as the other three Scrybes ask once again for your help to stop P03’s plan. The Great Transcendence is revealed to be a mass upload of thousands of copies of Inscryption to the internet, but as the player defeats P03 in a final boss battle, his plot is averted. However, Grimora hints at a great evil that is contained deep within the game’s files and executes a command to delete all the game’s files.

In one final sequence, the player faces off against all the remaining Scrybes, though there’s little risk of losing. Grimora, Magnificus, and Leshy are slowly deleted, and in a final cutscene, it’s revealed that Luke Carder was killed by the publishers of the fictional Inscryption game, with the supposed evils remaining unrevealed.

The game’s wild variance of gameplay and story is a massive plus, especially how each act expands on the base gameplay system introduced in the opening chapter. However, the story, while subtle in the first act, takes center stage from Act 2 onwards, as Luke Carder’s vlogs take several minutes to watch in full. On another note, the game makes a rather bizarre choice when it comes to the player character. Starting in Act 2, Carder’s voice can occasionally be heard commenting on the gameplay, basically confirming that all the player’s gameplay is, has been, and will be, in-universe gameplay recorded by Luke Carder. In my opinion, this subtracts from the player’s presence within the game. The choices the player makes in each moment lose a little of their value, as in the game’s story, they’re not choices made by the player, they’re choices made by Luke Carder. Carder’s comments are very uncommon, so the effect is mostly invisible.

Thankfully, during the concluding sequence, Carder is mostly silent, letting the player comprehend the game’s events and focus on their final few matches. The last duels with each of the Scrybes are almost heart-wrenching. Grimora pontificates on the beauty of death even in the face of it, Magnificus challenges the player in a humorous Yu-Gi-Oh parody, and Leshy laments that he just wants to play more rounds with you. The weighing scale is deleted, but Leshy says it doesn’t matter, as it’s fun enough to play the game without keeping score. This moment reveals what the game had been preaching practically the entire time. No matter what variations the gameplay featured, or how the card game was presented, it was fun, and even when the game was horror-heavy, I really wished I could’ve played more. It’s a shame that a story-heavy game like this has less replay value than other roguelites, but a free update released after the game came out added a game mode featuring an endless deck-building adventure that the player could make as difficult as they wanted.

«Darkest Dungeon – Stressful but Satisfying»Unheard ~ Pay Close Attention