Inscryption – Review
Inscryption begins with a simple and well-known premise. During a rainy night, you’re stuck in a cottage in the woods. Leshy, a mysterious black entity in the shadows, is your only companion. Leshy teaches you how to play a card game, which is a strange hybrid of a deck-builder and a scenario-driven narrative campaign in this case. You’ll learn about creature types, strategies, and builds, as well as numerous card abilities. Moving ahead on a map, triggering numerous encounters, gaining new cards and power-ups, and finally challenging boss battles are how you progress.
Pros:
Fun card based gameplay
Interesting take on horror
Great puzzles
Cons:
Story could be better presented
Score – 9/10
Except that something doesn’t seem right the entire while you’re playing these games with Leshy. You can stand up from the table at any time and explore the cabin. As a result, you learn more terrible details about your situation. There are escape room-style riddles strewn over the place. You get cards with cryptic warnings as a prize for solving these riddles. The first time you lose to Leshy and are hauled away to an unknown fate, the warnings get more menacing.
Inscryption can simply be described as a deck-building roguelite based on this synopsis. You build a deck, move from encounter to encounter, experiment with different strategies, and discover how far you can get before you lose. Some of your progress is carried over, and you improve your understanding of the game’s rules and dynamics, allowing you to try again.
To some extent, this is correct. The goal is to master and subvert the game’s rules in order to beat Leshy at his own game, but it doesn’t stay that way. Characters and details start to provide you with conflicting information. Audiovisual flaws start to appear. Cards consisting entirely of static begin to be added to the loot pool. The winning power-ups become increasingly brutal, such as tearing teeth out or plucking out eyeballs. While these aspects are horror staples in and of themselves, Inscryption’s actual unnerving menace comes in the gaps and margins.
Inscryption begins showing multiple aces up its sleeve after what would be a final boss encounter in any other game before totally flipping the table. The game’s entire structure shifts, from an evocative and gory locked-room thriller to a classic horror card-based RPG.
The closest point of comparison I have for these areas is Yu-Gi-Oh!: Reshef of Destruction, a Game Boy Advance game. It features all the trappings of a top-down RPG, including encounters, boss fights, and some brilliant puzzle-solving. Everything is resolved, though, using the same card battle principles that you learned at the start. In fact, the roguelite genre’s trial-and-error character, which was introduced in the cabin, completely vanishes at this moment. Even better, you have practically complete control over the construction of your deck. The training wheels have been removed, and the game does not slow down until the end.
Surprisingly, this isn’t the last time Inscryption undergoes a complete transformation. Any additional information would jeopardise the storey twists, therefore the less stated the better. However, the card game remains the focal point of the experience, preventing it from devolving into a confused, Calvinball-style plunge into randomness. As you progress, new mechanics, systems, and features are added, yet they’re done at such a regular pace that they feel natural.
Inscryption is an engrossing horror experience, despite a confusing story and some questionable riddles. Even while teaching you the fundamentals of a complex card game, it manages to be scary and unpleasant. Few games are capable of simultaneously teaching and abusing their players’ trust while also breaching the fourth wall, but this game does it with ease.
