Review: Inscryption Is a Roguelike Deck-Builder with a Brilliant Theme Up Its Sleeve

The game is an unholy hybrid of a roguelike deck-builder and escape-room experience.

Inscryption
Photo: Devolver Digital

Video games offer specific ways in which to look at an artificially created world. Inscryption, a delightfully creepy genre-bending mindfuck from Vancouver-based indie developer Daniel Mullins, presents layers upon layers of such perceptions. The game is an unholy hybrid of a roguelike deck-builder and first-person escape-room experience that reveals itself to be a grand reflection of and meditation on lives lived within a bubble.

The first sign that something is off about Inscryption’s world is that you can’t select the “new game” button, only the “continue” one. You’re stuck following in the footsteps of your predecessors, your whole world limited to the confines of a dimly lit cabin in the woods, your actions narrowly defined by the mysterious man who whispers to you from the shadows in the corner. He unfurls a map, places a wooden figurine on it, and off you go, playing a game within a game within a game, building a deck of animal-themed cards to use in combat. Lose and you’re turned into a card, joining the literal pack as the game resets in a loop.

This gives Inscryption, at first, the appearance of a roguelike, in which each death sends you back to the start with, perhaps, a few persistent, hard-earned upgrades and the knowledge necessary to progress further. But the game never settles into such a comfortable and familiar routine. Instead, the repetitions begin to twist and curve back on themselves, with everything from the rules to the visual presentation to genre itself being flipped on its head.

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The cabin and its carved figures are the first twist, as the world here is revealed to be seen through the eyes of the naturalist, a Scrybe, who’s imprisoned you. His rendition of Inscryption revolves around sacrifice, and so you freely place weak critters like squirrels on your side of the 3×4 card table and then kill them in order to play stronger cards, like a wolf. By the second loop, he adds new rules: creatures that can be conjured with the bone tokens gained by your dying creatures and magical boons that can grant your cards additional sigils (i.e., powers). As the board expands, so does the world. Your actions both within the card game and the cabin allow you to influence and solve puzzles between the two, and eventually you’ll overcome the naturalist’s will and get a better sense of your unseen protagonist, Luke Carder (Kevin Saxby), a card-collecting vlogger who goes by the name of The Lucky Carder.

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Without giving too much away of the metatextual rug-pulling that follows, the cabin isn’t the extent of Inscryption’s world. There are actually three other Scrybes beyond the one you’ve been dueling, and these other rule-makers bring to mind Pokémon’s gym leaders, in that each has their own speciality (in this case death, art and magic, and technology). All four adhere to the same fundamental mechanics of the card game: You place cards in an attempt to weigh down your opponent’s side of a scale with damage tokens before they can do the same to you. But just as communities and countries have their own customs and laws, so, too, do these Scrybes have their own rules and ways of seeing the world, which can drastically change the way in which you not only play but interact with and interpret the game as a whole.

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The cleverness of Inscryption comes from the simple truth that if you follow only the rules that you’re given, you’ll never survive. Interact with only the cards on the table and you’ll miss out on the deck-enhancing tools that can be found beyond it, hidden within, say, a cuckoo clock, a caged statue of a wolf, and a mysterious picture on the wall. Building a deck solely out of animal cards alone is risky, as it may be easier to instead summon creatures with bones, energy cells, or moxes. You have to really pick up the rules—and literally so, as you’ll have to grab a rulebook and flip through every page to find the clues hidden within—so that you can build upon them and exploit them, similar to the way that There Is No Game: Wrong Dimension and Mullins’s earlier Pony Island play into and against expectations.

It’s true that the game’s card-based randomness may allow some players to stumble through boss encounters without properly solving them. But what is the proper way to come at most things is a social construct. Allowing players to find their own, occasionally lucky, way through the game is a brilliant way to demonstrate Inscryption’s cards-as-life theme. There’s no one right way to live, and despite all your preparation, sometimes you may draw an unlucky hand.

The game was covered with a review code provided by Tinsley PR.

Score: 
 Developer: Daniel Mullins Games  Publisher: Devolver Digital  Platform: PC  Release Date: October 19, 2021  Buy: Game

Aaron Riccio

Aaron has been playing games since the late ’80s and writing about them since the early ’00s. He also obsessively writes about crossword clues at The Crossword Scholar.

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