Inscryption

Inscryption
Developer(s)	Daniel Mullins Games
Publisher(s)	Devolver Digital
Director(s)	Daniel Mullins
Composer(s)	Jonah Senzel
Engine	Unity
Platform(s)	Microsoft Windows
Release	October 19, 2021
Genre(s)	Roguelike deck-building
Mode(s)	Single-player

Inscryption is a roguelike deck-building game developed by Daniel Mullins Games and published by Devolver Digital. The game is set in a cabin where the player tries to escape by beating a demonic force in a card game. Inscryption was released for Microsoft Windows on October 19, 2021.^[1] The game received generally positive reviews, and was nominated for Game of the Year for the Game Developers Choice Awards, the D.I.C.E. Awards, and the BAFTA Game Awards.

Plot[]

A Vlogger named Luke Carter, named The Lucky Carder online, films himself opening booster packs of collectible card games shown as found footage throughout Inscryption. After obtaining sets from Inscryption, a card game that was only printed once, he finds one of the cards has a set of coordinates written on it, located nearby. He digs at the indicated site and finds a box with a floppy disk labeled Inscryption, which is a surprise to him as he was never aware of the card game being made into a computer version. After setting up his computer to read the disc, he begins playing the game. The game's start menu is typical of most games but the "New Game" button is not working, forcing Carder to continue from the game's saved data.

In-game, Carder's player-character interacts with a shadowy, hostile dealer. The dealer intersperses game rounds with a story of the player traveling through the woods and encountering NPCs and bosses, which the dealer impersonates using wooden masks. When the player loses, the dealer sacrifices the player by using a magic camera to turn them into a "death card" which becomes available in subsequent playthroughs. As this happens, the player receives advice from one of their cards, the Stoat, who guides them into finding other talking cards, the Stinkbug and the Stunted Wolf. The three warn the player that the dealer has taken over the game and trapped them as well. They help the player solve puzzles around the cabin, eventually leading to the player finding a roll of film. The player finally defeats the dealer, steals his camera, and uses the film to capture the dealer into his own card. Able to explore the cabin more, the player finds the missing "New Game" button.

Carder continues to play the game and starts a new game. This resets the game into its original state, which resembles a traditional pixel art RPG. Here, the player is tasked with replacing one of four "Scrybes" possessing card based magic: Grimora, Scrybe of The Dead; Leshy, Scrybe of Beasts; P03, Scrybe of Technology; or Magnificus, Scrybe of Magicks. Leshy is revealed to be the previous dealer while P03, Grimora, and Magnificus were turned into the cards Stoat, Stinkbug and Stunted Wolf respectively by Leshy's camera. After the player defeats every Scrybe, they are permitted to challenge any Scrybe in order to usurp their role. Regardless of which Scrybe is selected, P03 appears and proceeds to hijack the game. Meanwhile, Carder attempts to contact Inscryption's developer, GameFuna, but receives a demand to return the game, followed by a visit from a female representative reinforcing that demand, which Carder refuses. He also learns that a GameFuna developer named Kaycee Hobbes mysteriously died while working on the game; she had previously appeared as a spirit in Grimora's area and as a death card in Leshy's original cabin.

Carder opts to continue playing the game after P03's takeover. The player now finds themselves in a factory setting of P03's creation, with P03 acting as the dealer. P03 tasks the player with defeating several "Uberbots" to enact "The Great Transcendence". During these battles, P03 lures the player to providing access to their computer files, claiming these are steps to help win each battle. When the player succeeds, P03 reveals that the tasks - along with the computer access - were a ploy to complete the unfinished Inscryption game and release it to the world, reproducing the "OLD_DATA" in the process. Before P03 can do this, the other Scrybes ambush and destroy P03. Grimora then betrays the others and triggers a full format of the floppy disk in order to end their squabbles once and for all and destroy the disk's "OLD_DATA", which she describes as a malevolent force. As the game is slowly deleted, each of the surviving Scrybes challenge the player to a few more rounds of the card game and thank the player for their company before their deaths. Magnificus warns Luke that if he witnesses the truth located in the "OLD_DATA", he puts himself in risk of death and horror. Just before the game wipes itself completely, Carder is granted access to the "OLD_DATA", the contents of which cause him to attempt to destroy the Inscryption disc by smashing it with a hammer.

After the game is deleted, Carder, exhausted and traumatized from what he had learned and endured, contacts a journalist. He explains that the game took control of his computer and states that he has video footage that may help expose the wrongdoings of the GameFuna company. However, Carder is interrupted by the GameFuna representative, who returns to Carder's house and shoots him in the head, presumably killing him. The final shot of the game is of Carder bleeding out on the floor as the representative enters his house to retrieve the remains of the Inscryption disc.^[2]

A real-world alternative reality game (ARG), embedded both in video from the game and outside of it, led to additional information related to Inscryption's backstory. In this ARG, it was revealed that Kaycee had gotten possession of the "Karnoffel Code", a computer algorithm reportedly created by the Soviets during the Cold War after gaining possession of Adolf Hitler's corpse and discovering a connection between him, the game of Karnoffel, and the occult. A spy named Barry Wilkinson had gotten a copy of the Karnoffel Code from the Soviets and hid it on a floppy disc among other empty floppies, which eventually fell into possession of Kaycee. The ARG revealed a postscript to the game which shows Carder's computer turning back on by itself and beginning the uploading process of Inscryption to a digital storefront worldwide, then ending with a winking ASCII image of P03/the Stoat, aware its plans of transcendence had worked.^[2] Parts of the ARG point to narrative connection between events in Inscryption and Mullins' previous game, The Hex (itself a similar meta-narrative game about video game development), with characters from The Hex helping P03 or GameFuna.^[3]

Gameplay[]

The player can choose which way to move on the map, which affects the next encounters.

Inscryption is a roguelike deck-building game. The game itself is broken into three acts, where the nature of this deck-building game changes, but the fundamental rules of how the card game is played remains the same. The card game is played on a 3x4 grid which is later expanded to a 3x5 grid during the third act; the player plays their cards into the bottom row, while their opponent plays cards ahead of time into the top row, and then are automatically moved into play into the middle row on the next turn. Each card has an attack and health value. On either the player's or opponent's turn, after their cards are played, each of their cards attacks their opponent's card in the same column, dealing their attack value to that card's health, and if that reduces the health to zero or less, that card is removed. If the attacking card is unopposed, then the card attacks the opponent directly with that much damage. Damage is tracked on a weighing scale using teeth for each damage taken by that player. The goal is to tip the opponent's side of the scale by a difference of five teeth before they can do the same to the player's side. In addition to attack value, each card has various sigils representing special abilities such as the ability to fly past a blocker or to attack multiple columns each turn.

To play cards, each has a cost to play them which depends on which of the Scrybes created that card. Those created by P03 use energy, which the player starts at 1 energy bar at the start of each game, refilling and gaining an additional bar each turn. Those created by Leshy require a blood sacrifice from cards already in play on the board. The cards from Grimora require bone tokens, earned when cards are defeated or sacrificed. Cards from Magnificus require one of three gems to be present on the board to be played and remain in the game, and are lost if the gem leaves play.

During the game's first act, in which Leshy has taken over the Inscryption code, the player sees the game from the first person perspective, facing against Leshy in his cabin, though this information is not told to the player. During this act, the game plays as a roguelike deck-building game, where the player is given a simple starting deck, based only on Leshy's and Grimora's card types, and then proceeds through four randomly-generated maps of various encounters presented by Leshy, which include card battles with Leshy and opportunities to add or remove cards from their deck, or gain items that can be used during card battles to tip the odds in their favor. Each of the first three maps ends with a mini-boss encounter, while the final map is a battle with Leshy. If the player loses twice on a map, or once during a boss battle, they are taken by Leshy and made into a death card with his camera, which can appear on later runs. Between encounters, the player can also get up from the table and look around the cabin, solving puzzles similar to an escape room, discovering clues to locate the card forms of P03, Grimora, and Magnificus to help the player beat Leshy, bringing the game into the second act.

During the second act, representing the original version of Inscryption, the game is now presented as a pixel art-stylized top-down role-playing game, similar to Pokémon. The player is instructed to pick one of the four Scrybes to replace, and then must explore the game's overworld to collect card packs to expand their card collection and build twenty-card decks with which to challenge each of the other four Scrybes and their various underlings in card battle. In this act, cards from all four Scrybes are available to collect, and decks can consist of cards from each of the four Scrybes. During this phase, the player can lose a card game without any penalty but simply do not progress the story. Once the player has completed the full story missions within this act, the game moves into the third act.

The third act is similar in style to the first act as a roguelike deckbuilder, but now the player faces against P03 in a robot factory as P03 takes over the Inscryption code to try to achieve transcendence on the Internet. P03 and its underlings have access to several of the death cards that the player may have created during prior runs of the first act, making battles in this phase more challenging. Player progresses through various encounters by moving through a series of rooms in a grid-like layout, similar to The Binding of Isaac, with battle encounters occurring between rooms while other encounters to gain, improve or remove cards taking place within the rooms themselves. While losing a card match in this act does not restart the game, players must reach specific checkpoints on the map to retain progress and prevent previously defeated enemies from respawning and to build up in-game currency to improve their cards.

Development[]

The game started as a small project that Daniel Mullins built during the Ludum Dare 43 game jam in 2018, where the theme was "sacrifices must be made". At the time, Mullins had gotten back into Magic: The Gathering and took influence from the sacrifice mechanic there to create the approach where the player would sacrifice creatures to play other ones. This idea extended to the player virtually sacrificing parts of their own body as well to influence the game with negative effects that may come from that, such as sacrificing an eye that would limit their field of view.^[4] His entry to the game jam was thus named Sacrifices Must Be Made after the jam's theme.^[4] Following the game jam, Mullins put the game up at itch.io, where it drew interest from players in early 2019. As he had just finished releasing The Hex, Mullins decided to expand out Sacrifices Must Be Made into a full game. Initially, Mullins had considered expanding the game out into an anthology work as he did not immediate see a path for fleshing out the Ludum Dare version into a full game, but as he came up with ideas for this larger game, he saw a route to expand out the base game in multiple directions, including the incorporation of full-motion video.^[4]

Leshy is based on the Slavic mythology entity of the same name; Mullins had considered that the dealer was a type of "forest demon" and while searching online, came across the mythos of Leshy, which he believed felt well with the horror theme of the game. From there, the other three Scrybes fell out as he had compared them to Pokémon gym leaders, each with a different theme; since Leshy was associated with beasts, the other three were associated with robots (P03), wizards (Magnificus), and the undead (Grimora).^[4] Mullins recognized that the game spends most of its time around Leshy and P03's stories, but felt that it would have made the game too long to include additional acts to explore Grimora's or Magnificus's backgrounds, though made Grimora central to the game's conclusion.^[4]

Daniel Mullins Games released a free update in December 2021 that included a beta version of a mini-expansion to the game called "Kaycee's Mod". In this mode, the roguelike deck-building game from Act I can be played endlessly, with the player able to unlock new cards and starting abilities to take on more difficult challenges.^[5] The mini-expansion will be released on March 17, 2022.^[6]

Reception[]

Inscryption received "generally favorable reviews" according to Metacritic.^[12]

Rock Paper Shotgun praised the scale mechanic, writing that, "You lose and gain momentum, deliver killer blows, claw back from a near-loss by being aggressive... It's a compelling twist".^[13] Destructoid liked the art style and the horror elements of the game, but criticized the later chapters' gameplay changes, stating, "Maybe it was a good idea to change things up before it had the chance to grow stale, it’s just nothing gripped me as firmly as the first chapter."^[14] Joshua Chu of PC Invasion disliked the story, feeling that, "Inscryption is extremely in love with its lore, an odd, mostly nonsense story that never stuck its landing. During the second half of the game, it feels like Inscryption lets its story sink its own ship."^[15] PC Gamer's Jody Macgregor liked the beginning of Inscryption, specifically praising how the world feels "off-kilter and grotesque", but criticized the later part of the game "In its initial hours, Inscryption is an eerie delight full of mystery. That feeling fades long before it ends".^[16] Eurogamer enjoyed the visuals of the game, describing them as "a cursed reincarnation of something you'd play on a floppy disc in the '90s: a low fidelity-but-trying kind of adventure, but hijacked by some kind of evil and then twisted and gnarled by malevolence."^[17]

Inscryption was nominated for Best Indie Game and Best Sim/Strategy Game for The Game Awards 2021.^[18] Polygon named Inscryption their best game of 2021,^[19] while Time and Ars Technica listed Inscryption as one of their best games of 2021.^[20][21] In the 2021 Steam Awards, it was nominated for Most Innovative Gameplay. Inscryption was nominated for Game of the Year, Best Design, and Innovation Award for the 22nd Game Developers Choice Awards,^[22] and for the Seumas McNally Grand Prize, Excellence in Design, and Excellence in Narrative for the 2022 Independent Games Festival awards.^[23]

By January 2022, the game had sold more than one million copies.^[24]

Fans of the games have worked to try to develop physical equivalents and gameplay of Inscryption.^[25]

Awards and accolades[]

References[]

External links[]

• Sacrifices Must be Made, the Ludum Dare game created by Mullins that became Inscryption