So I Sat Down to Play… Inscyption (2021)
You know how there are some TV shows, movies, or especially games that people always go like “you need to go in completely blind, dude.”
These people are usually right, and Inscryption definitely fits this category.
That being said, this rule often applies simply because a movie or whatever depends so much on a plot twist or a change of setting so much that knowing it beforehand kinda ruins it. The Sixth Sense? Yeah, I don’t wanna watch it again. The Usual Suspects? Nah, that movie is so well made that I wanna watch it again even if I know the twist.
I think Inscryption falls somewhere in the middle of this spectrum. Not knowing what will happen next is half the fun of this game because, without getting into details, it’s practically impossible to know what happens next during your first playthrough. On the other hand, the game itself is very solid and there are many little details that you would miss in a first playthrough and I’m sure I missed a bunch of stuff, I know there were a few puzzles I missed. I guess that’s an advantage that games have over movies in this category, if the gameplay is good you will likely want to replay, because it’s a more interactive experience.
Given this, I’m gonna try to talk about the game without saying too much about it in the first part, but then it’s spoiler central.
So this game is a horror card-building rogue-lite, and I have this feeling that I lost at least half of you just there. Long story short, it’s a game you play with cards that you pick up along the game (hence card-building), but if your character dies you lose most of your cards and have to collect them again (this is called “rogue-like”, I never figured out why they call some “lites”). As for the horror part, well, you have to play against a mysterious figure in a strange environment and you don’t really know what’s going on, but you’re sure it’s not good. That’s horror enough, for me at least.
And I really like games that push the envelope like this, games that aren’t afraid of mixing up genres that feel completely unrelated to one another. Some people like to use the term avant-garde and well, I’m pretentious enough to like that. Avant-garde games are good, if not necessary, because if everyone is going with the flow, just copying what is making money
then you just end up with a sea of Call of Duty and open-world games.
See why avant-garde games are necessary?
At 41, I am old enough to remember when games were still experimental. Sure, there was a formula that big companies followed (Sierra and its dozens of AGI-based games with crappy plots, anyone?) but people were still trying to find the next “Big Idea” (TM) that would make them money. Nowadays, you’re not allowed to deviate from the formula because everyone is so risk-averse. Good thing it’s also easier for everyone to make and sell games, so indie games are a much more viable option.
Going back to the mysterious figure you’re playing against, this was one of the things that got me hooked in the game. It’s like playing against the worst best DM ever, never really explaining the rules to you, always waiting to tell you “gotcha!” when you don’t have a counter play for one of their weird combos, but also so obsessed with the world they have created for you to play in that you want to humor them and keep going. I’m not sure if they were going for this feeling, but that’s what I got out of it.
Also, the card game itself is really solid. It’s not anything ground-breaking but it’s good. This is why Inscryption is a solid game, unlike those other meme games that I cannot wrap my head around at all. Even if you were to remove all the plot, the horror elements, and the plot weirdness, the core gameplay is good enough to get you to keep playing.
But not the puzzles. You see, the game has a bunch of logic puzzles in it, and me having grown up with point & click adventure games, and being in a, uh, venerable age had no problem with them. Because I just facerolled my way through them. Fuck logic puzzles. Seriously, all I did was randomly click until they worked. Except for the very last one, but by then it was too late to start caring and I just used a walkthrough. I don’t even feel bad.
Okay, that’s the extend of what I can say without going into spoilers. Let’s start with gameplay spoilers.
Now it’s time for the weird stuff.
I wish there were a way to see the faces of people who bought this game as a horror rogue-lite card-building game, only to see it go off the rails like that after Act 1, heh. I had previously played Pony Island, the first game from creator Daniel Mullins, so I was kind of expecting the madness, but I can see how so many people would be upset by the rapid change.
That being said, the word of mouth around the game can prepare you for this somewhat, if you pay attention to it. You know that there’s a radical change coming, you just don’t know what it is. To be honest, I wasn’t even expecting it to be a card game after Act 1!
Which it is, it remains a card game. So, if I’m being honest here, I think any kind of backlash is kind of misguided. The horror elements change (it’s still very much a horror mystery), and the way the game plays changes, but it’s still a deck-building game.
Act 2 is more of a jRPG card game though, and it honestly reminded me of those GBA Yu-Gi-Oh games. Which, no joke, is a good thing. Those games rocked. And Act 3 is kind of like a Dark Souls kind of thing, where you traverse a big area with no real map to speak of (complete with invisible walls!) and if you lose, your currency drops down and you have to go back and pick it up.
So yeah, the game gets weird. But the gameplay doesn’t change to the point where there’s no continuity with what came before. Gotta say, though, one thing I didn’t like is how you’re given four different kinds of decks but eventually, you have to play with all of them. It’s like story modes in fighting games, where you have to play through them using all the characters. Hey, NRS, I don’t wanna play fucking Kano or Flash, I just wanna play the characters I like. Similarly, with Inscryption, I was fine playing the Yu-Gi-Oh inspired sacrifice deck, I never cared for the robot deck with the electricity currents synergies, and just facerolled through the bits that I had to play that. I find this frustrating, is it just me?
And all the parts of the game are so well-made, you can tell that Mullins loves all these different genres he uses in his game, they’re not just there for the “lulz” as people in the 2000s used to say. And it’s full of little inside jokes and references to said genres, for example, there is a card called a “Curve Hopper”, there’s a specific character who hates another guy because the latter “cares about the lore and not the mechanics” and every statement he makes (whenever you play a card he says “complete misplay!”) he comes off as an elitist prick. I’m sure we’ve all met (or been) that guy at some point.
Another bit I liked was how in Acts 1 & 3 you make your own cards; in Act 1 you make a card of yourself after you die and then at the final boss fight you can fight against such cards that other players made, (I hope you get to fight against my “Fourikis” card because that one was OP) and I am pretty sure that one such card I saw called “Kaycee” was a reference to a Kaycee we learn about in the story, a girl who died while working overtime, because of course she did. Then in Act 3 you design a card and you send it to another player if one is fighting the same boss as you, and if they win you immediately win too. Fun little novelty right there. It also takes so long for this part to end, I’m sure it’s gonna piss off speedrunners.
That being said, if people are weirded out not by the change in gameplay but by the changes in the story, then yeah, I totally get that, because well… Story spoilers to follow.
Yeah, the story is really out there, man.
And the way we get to experience this story is unusual, too. First thing I said to myself after Act 1 was “I thought I was playing a card game, not Her Story!”
Because, in order to make some sense out of the story, you have to watch a number of videos made by this dude called Luke Carder (christ his last name makes me cringe) who is actually our player character. In the game’s world, Inscryption is a physical card game but he inadvertently found a digital copy of it and that’s how his trouble began. These videos are a bit all over the place, but they give us enough information to piece together what’s happening.
One small detail I really liked in these videos by mister Carder is the touches of realism. You hear cars passing by all the time while he’s recording, a bane that all amateur/indie video makers are all too familiar with, his camera battery runs out at the worst possible moments… It’s little details like this that make the game feel more plausible.
Which makes it hard for me to ignore that Carder found the Inscryption game buried in a floppy disk somewhere. Not only would humidity have made that floppy its bitch, c’mon dude, you know you can’t fit a game like this in a single floppy. It’s not clear when this game is set but at the earliest it’s in 2006, we used USB flash drives then, not floppies.
I know this is such a random thing to get hung up on, but when everything else is so realistic and this isn’t, it’s just grating to me.
Another thing that I’m sure most people on the Internets loved are all the 4th wall breaks. Too numerous to mention, these are more Sixth Sense than usual suspects. They’re cool, but I feel that the novelty wears off after a little while.
All in all, though, I feel that the plot is not that compelling. It’s all very meta and stuff, and I like meta stuff, but the plot can be surmised in a few words: there’s a game called Inscryption and somehow evil got its claws in its code, and now bad things happen to anyone who comes in contact with it, and eventually humanity will be in danger.
I know it’s a bit reductionist to do this, for example here’s another one: Old guy realizes his short friend has a ring which is evil, tells his friend’s also short nephew to drop it down a volcano. But there are so many things going in between finding out that Bilbo has the One Ring and Frodo casting it down the fires of Mount Doom. I’m not sure the in-between things in Inscryption are as compelling, though I would like it if we learned who buried the floppy disk for Luke Carder to find. You get stuff like spies and Karnoffel code and even fucking Hitler is referenced (you can find the whole thing here), but we don’t know any of the people involved, and we don’t care about them either. That makes this whole thing just noise to me after a while. The story also ties in with Mullins’s other games, but honestly this was a lot cooler before Marvel started doing it all the time.
I will say that during the last parts, Leshy and Grimora get a bit mushy before they die, and somehow it works. I’m not sure why, but it’s touching in a way I wasn’t expecting this game to make me feel.
What I’m more interested in is the meta analysis of the game, which is not something you see a lot of since the game is still pretty new and everyone is still working on the ARG stuff.
So I’m gonna give it a try here.
At the very end of Act 3, you learn that you’re actually creating the Inscryption game for P03 (the main antagonist and the “DM” of Act 3). You’re designing cards, you’re designing boss fights, you even give him access to your hard drive and the Internet at large. P03 is then going to use this game to take over the world, and from what some people have theorized, he actually succeeds, as this game is the Inscryption game we’re playing.
I wanna be glib and say that this is a comment on NFTs, especially after the latest Square Enix announcement. By using the blockchain, we’re giving companies access to our hard drive, and we’re making their game for them so they can take all the credit. But nahhh, this definitely isn’t it, I just wanted another excuse to badmouth NFTs.
This could also be read as a criticism of Kickstarter campaigns. You pledge your money so that others can make a game, and your reward is creating an encounter or a boss fight or whatever, in somebody else’s game. You’re paying them to release a game and you’re also doing their job for them. I know I’m probably reading too much into this, but it feels like a very specific thing. Also, for the record, Kickstarter campaigns are fine; some suck, but we’ve gotten some good games out of them.
All in all, however, it’s hard not to see Inscryption as a game about making games. The very fact that all four Scrybes (what’s with the inappropriate use of “y” everywhere, is this another Mortal Kombat?) have actually playable versions of their own worlds, but we only get to play two of them in an extended credits sequence (one of them is an actual Yu-Gi-Oh pastiche, no joke) makes me think this is also something specific.
To create a game is to let your good ideas go, abandon them when they stop working, or what some people so eloquently call to “kill your darlings”. You have an idea for a level, for a mechanic, for a setting that is really great, and it’s gonna make your game so much better. But you don’t have the time or the expertise to really make it work, so you have to just… let it go.
These very bosses actually say so, “I wish we had more time, what could have been” -paraphrasing here. As a matter of fact, the two main bosses of the game, Leshy and P03 kind of represent the two states of mind of a game creator. Leshy, the dude who’s really into the lore and story of a game represents the creative process of making a game; you’re excited about what you’re making, you have so many things to share with others and you wish they’ll like them. Maybe that is why he gets emotional at the end, and why you can’t help but feel a little sad for him.
On the exact opposite is P03, who obsesses over what is right and wrong, what is optimal and what isn’t, and doesn’t care about the narrative -so much so that every time he should provide you with a bit of story he just dismisses the story and tells you to keep going. P03 is the ugly part of game making, the part where you want to do everything right and if something doesn’t or if someone thinks that it’s not, you get defensive and overprotective, because you’ve tried so hard to make everything perfect that you no longer have perspective over what you’ve created. Maybe that’s why he’s so manipulative, too.
The “Old Data”, which is the part of the game that is corrupted by evil/Satan/Hitler/your last fart you blamed someone else for is also an interesting thing. P03 says you won’t be able to resist accessing it, and it’s kind of a copout since all you can do is click on it -sidenote, there’s a lot of meta gameplay things with the choices that you make but I didn’t take enough notes on them and I don’t wanna replay the game right now.
What I think this Old Data represents is the kind of ideas that you have at the beginning that drag your game down as you progress, the type that you really should have removed at some point but you really didn’t feel like doing. Perhaps even, since it’s code, it’s the kind of sloppy code that you write when you start creating a game, taking the kind of shortcuts that you know you shouldn’t because it’s gonna drag your game down in the long run. But you do it anyway, and you tell yourself you’re gonna fix it “one of these days”. But every time that you go back to it, you keep making the same mistake, and never really fix it, so it keeps giving you trouble.
Hey, I tried.
Inscryption, then. What a weird, enjoyable, weird game. I don’t think I love this game as much as some others do, but it’s definitely worth playing, especially if you love a good mindfuck. More like this, please.