Inscryption: Card Game Inception

Have you ever played a game where you felt the game was playing you? As the walls of meaning start to crumble, you gradually lose grip of the term “game”. And then another game within a game presents itself. And another one. Yet all you can say as you continue to stare at the screen is What The Fuck? Didn’t I buy just another indie card game? Yes and no—welcome to Card Game Inscrypception. We need to go deeper!

Major spoiler warning: Inscryption is a game that’s best enjoyed going in completely blind. By reading this article and especially by laying eyes on the screenshots below, a big portion of the game inadvertently will be ruined for you. Press the back button in your browser while you can. You’ve been warned. I repeat: this is a SPOILER-HEAVY playthrough report.

That being said, let’s dive in.

I’ve been wanting to get my hands on the game for a long time, and thanks to the folks at Limited Run Games, a physical copy now goes for ridiculous sums of money on eBay. A Christmas eShop sales pickup for just €8 it is, then. I’m still sad I don’t have a genuine copy of this amazing Daniel Mullins game, but at least I got to experience Inscryption.

Most other reviews of the game showcase plenty of snippets from the card game in Act I, like in the strange screenshot above. The game starts out with you somehow being imprisoned in a cabin in the woods, forced to play a mysterious card game against your captor, a scary person with glowing (and rotating, no less) eyes that acts as another person during boss battles. In-between the matches, you’re allowed to explore the cabin and inspect various trinkets that hopefully give clues as to what the hell is going on. Most do not give away their secrets easily.

Initially, your progress is measured with the help of various randomly generated maps not unlike in Slay the Spire, with events in-between battles that present opportunities to upgrade and/or delete cards and to acquire items that can help push evolve battles in your favour. The first hours look and feel very much like any indie roguelike card game, except for the eery atmosphere. One of the items, the pliers, has you remove one of your teeth to put in the scale as a point. Another has you stab out your own eye! The atypical cards themselves also greatly help set the right tone: instead of your generic dragons and elves, you’re drawing eels, skunks, and weird maggot-like creatures.

As soon as you fail to beat your opponent with the prying eyes, he locks you in the back of the cabin, takes a picture of you to create a card representing yourself, and kills you in cold blood. Again. And again. And again. Luckily, if you can draft a powerful version of yourself, and with the help of the right encounters, you eventually find a way to beat your opponent.

And then Inscryption suddenly puts things on their head: instead of advancing the game in a conventional way, it resets itself, and its “inhabitants” become aware they are in a game. Not only that, you suddenly have access to videos of someone who calls himself Luke Carder a.k.a. The Lucky Carder who puts out unpacking videos of physical vintage card games—including, of course, packs of Inscryption. One of those packs contains coordinates to a floppy disk containing the game we find ourselves playing. Or, rather, we find Luke playing as we watch? We need to go deeper? My head hurts.

Act II is still a card game at heart but now you can create your own deck and open packs like Luke does instead of being left to chance in the roguelike Act I. But instead of just one theme and set of mechanics, there are now four, as there are four unique bosses to defeat that all want to reign over the digital world.

Of course that’s not the full story there—in Act III, things yet again radically change, and towards the end, the amount of What The Fuck?s per minute increase exponentially. In a very very good way, I must add. To me, it was baffling to experience such a truly unique game that comes with many layers within layers. I’m sure I missed half of the hints and secrets, both in-game as… well… out-game? Is that even a thing? In the world of Inscryption, it is: there’s a whole after-game event thing going on as well that feels like a wild escape room hunt.

It’s surprisingly difficult to talk about, categorize, or even review the game. The only thing I can say for sure is that I was on the edge of my seat from the beginning all the way to the very end. The art and sound direction is impeccable and upped the creepy factor by a million. The ending is a bit of a shock. So is the beginning and so is the middle.

Inscryption is not a game: it’s an experience. And even if you’re done with it after ten or so hours, there’s a new mode unlocked that lets you enjoy an extended version of the superb core mechanics of the act I card game. Even that card game in itself, just on its own, would have made for an amazing game that I’d happily play over Slay the Spire. Where Spire stands for statistics and tactics, Inscryption stands for atmosphere and a world beyond the card game itself. Of course, the question is whether it’s even fair to compare both games.

Ah, dang it. Now I have to update my Top100 again.