Inscryption
PC
You are sitting at a candlelit table in a wooden cabin. You are playing cards. You can’t make out your opponent’s face in the darkness – only its large, hungry eyes and the masks it puts on and takes off with enormous, leathery fingers. The card game – summarised by Inscryption’s creator Daniel Mullins as “a deck-building Roguelike in the vein of Slay The Spire” – sees you lining up cards to inflict or block damage, as measured by a pair of golden scales. Cards have a blood price: more powerful varieties require you to sacrifice others for points. Between card battles you move a figurine around a dotted parchment map. It’s not clear what you’re playing for, but the stakes are obviously high.
Sometimes other things appear on the table. There are knives, skulls and sinister goat-heads that seem to affect where cards can be placed. There are pop-up altars where you can burn a card to pass on key traits – the Sparrow, for example, has the ability to bypass the enemy row and strike directly at the shadows across the table. Sometimes the cards whisper things, their snarling animal portraits coming alive in your hand. And sometimes – after winning a round, perhaps – you are able to get up and examine the other objects in the cabin: mechanical statues, locked safes and a door framed by tempting light. “I’ve called it a card-based odyssey,” Mullins observes. “Because that cabin is the beginning of an adventure that will go places that you won’t expect. But I will say that it always remains a card game, primarily.”
Inscryption is as spooky and enigmatic a concoction as you’d expect from the developer of Pony Island, 2016’s diabolically self-aware arcade platformer. It delights in hiding games within games. The central card game has a symbiotic relationship with the escape roomstyle puzzles you’ll find dotted around within the cabin, for instance. “There’s a progression of puzzles that influence the deck-building Roguelike – you can think of them a bit like the persistent elements that a lot of Roguelikes offer, where you can make progress on fronts that don’t reset when you lose,” Mullins explains. He says the two feed into each other: “If you complete certain puzzles, you might find a card, but then when you’re playing the
“That cabin is the beginning of an adventure that will go places that you won’t expect”
card game, you might notice a detail in the cards or game pieces that reveals the solution to a cabin puzzle.” These crafty ambient touches make up for the complete absence of a traditional UI. “There’s no lives in the corner. Your hand is a physical set of cards, rather than an overlay. Because of that restriction, I had to make weird decisions about how I represent certain information and what information to just not have.”
As you move through the card game and unpick the mechanisms of the cabin, you’ll learn more and more about yourself and your faceless opponent. “And then, without giving too much away, there is a pretty big shift that happens. And it turns out that the premise I’ve described is kind of part one of a three-part game,” Mullins tells us.
Like What Remains Of Edith Finch, Inscryption is a story told via formal experiment, with “completely fresh challenges and presentation, new visuals and new gameplay components” facing the player at each turn. Some of these appear to involve other videogames – top-down 2D adventuring and a shark-fishing sim redolent of noughties Flash gaming, for example. These also recall Mullins’s last game, The Hex, “where there’s a surface layer that involves real people, and then there’s the secondary layer of the videogame world.”
Like Pony Island, Inscryption began life in a game jam, and you can still find the old Ludum Dare version Sacrifices Must Be Made on itch.io. Just be aware that the formula has mutated a fair bit since. “It was dark and moody, and some of the basic ideas were there. But maybe unlike Pony Island, I think Inscryption has really deviated from the original. There are so many weird ideas in it now.”