Inscryption as Four Games in Three
It makes sense if you DON'T think about it
I had missed Daniel Mullins’ most recent game almost entirely by the time I decided to install it for my most recent 24 hour stream. I haven’t played Pony Island just yet, but I had played The Hex, his second game, and knew kind of what to expect: very self-aware, precise critique of the games industry and the limitations of games development generally, all in a very playable package. It makes you wonder why I waited so long to pick it up.
Part of my reticence is definitely that I’m just not particularly good at deck building games, of which Inscryption is firmly in the genre. I have this problem where, in constructing my deck, I simply want more cards that will potentially do damage to my opponent, as opposed to making a strategy to win by picking and choosing cards selectively. I’ve beaten Slay the Spire for instance, but only like…the basic game. There’s about 90 percent of game after that that I cannot unlock because I’m throwing out 35-40 card decks that simply give me a bunch of unusable stuff. Meanwhile, friends are trying to get me to stop and I’m telling them that the strong cards, are strong, and so, it’s bad, to delete them.
What’s compelling about Inscryption, though, is Mullins kind of gets this about me. Or, rather, Mullins gets how people approach these sorts of games generally. Clearly a fan of the genre, or at least enough of a good researcher to know the origins of the genre in early Magic: The Gathering, Pokemon cards, and even the medieval game of Karnöffel, which is used as the kind of signal for the big bad underlying the logic of the game itself.
And now is the time where I have to say: please stop reading this if you are worried about spoilers for Inscryption because there is no way to talk about this game without spoilers. Here I’ll give you a handy little break so you don’t do it by accident:
OK you were warned.
So the premise of Inscryption, when you open it up, is that you are in this terrible homicidal man’s cabin, playing a card game with him in an attempt to free yourself. The game relies on blood, sacrifice, and bones, and some of the cards talk to you and beg you not to kill them. If you lose, you’re taken to the back room, you make up a new card by using the stats of some old ones, and your picture is taken for this “Death Card.” As a result, quite a few are made.
But then, once you finally defeat your terrifying opponent, getting secret items and special workarounds, you steal his camera, take his picture and find that he himself is turned into a card. It hasn’t been murder — it’s been *magic* murder! At this point, the game kind of…stops, and you’re forced to quit to the opening menu, but not before retrieving the “new game” key. Because Inscryption has been a sort of layered meta-story from the start, with you taking the role of a card game enthusiast named Luke Carder who has a YouTube channel ripping packs and has stumbled, by way of this passion, into a secret floppy disc that holds the game you, the player, have been playing.
And this is where Inscryption really blossoms — it’s all a sort of ARG-adjacent experience, with real world exploration and mystery solving that — fortunately or unfortunately depending on your disposition — is long over and relegated to 2021. But within what’s left, as you watch the game unfold, you get to watch Luke’s increasingly hostile battle with the company that made Inscryption — GameFuna — turn uglier and uglier and uglier til it culminates in his cold-blooded murder by one of their operatives who retrieves the game disc and leaves him to bleed out on his living room floor.
You get to watch Luke’s life because he’s been taping it for content and just to have a record of the things happening to him. This is also why we get to see the game, as our actions are, in-universe, Luke’s own actions, just captured in the efforts to document this one-and-only copy of Inscryption the PC Game (inspired, in-universe, by Inscryption the physical card game). As such you have a number of games going on even before Mullins pulls his usual trump card and introduces several more game modes after completing the first one.
In addition to the ARG and the spooky, visceral card game, we’re given a GBA-esque top-down RPG that introduces several other play-styles but relies on the same basic rules as the first card game. This is clearly a sort of sendup of Pokemon and absolutely works as such, with the tone approaching a much more innocent version of the game than we’ve seen, though with some troubling implications baked in as well. The cards that had talked to you are back, now as three of the four competing powers who create cards in the world of Inscryption (Grimora, Magnificus, and P03), along with your leafy crusty captor from the first game, Leshy. As you complete this part of the game, you begin to notice that the four card sages have different playstyles, that the way that you’ve learned the game in the first iteration you were given — all bones and blood as energy for your cards, and sacrifice as a mechanic — is one of four different mechanics that are being introduced.
It’s a bit overwhelming, and some — like the wizard Magnificus’ strange gem and orb based mechanics — seem almost hastily thrown in. You’re attempting at all times to balance your playstyle and finding new ways and complications as you continue, ultimately triumphing over all four sages. At this point, the game shifts again, and we find ourselves in a Unity-like 3D world, faced with helping the robotic P03 bring about the “great transcendence” by playing a new version of the game on a tabletop display. Mystery abounds, and it’s fascinating, but of particular interest is what happens when P03 is defeated, thanks to your meddling.
Ultimately, you stop P03 from sending the game out to the world and leading a sort of robotic, optimized transcendence by bringing the three sages back into the world of the game. However, Grimora, the sage of the dead and the most thoughtful of the crew, decides the data on the disc — the “Karnoffel data” — is too dangerous and has infected the game itself, making for its clearly self-aware and intelligent protagonists. She proceeds to delete the game.
This of course dismays the other protagonists, though Leshy is quickly on board, and you’re treated to a fascinating interaction with all three. If I have something interesting to say about the game, this is where it is — I can’t speak to the ARG or the “reality” underneath the game. There is a lot of compelling creepypasta-ish (compliment) drama undergirding the work, particularly concerning a developer named Kaycee who GameFuna also killed and whose death the game seems preoccupied with, as well as the “old_data”, but there are tons and tons of better resources than me for that. In point of fact, I kind of avoided learning about the truth of the game beyond what I was given because I preferred the mystery and what it told me — there’s nothing to suck the wonder out of a strange piece of art better than an explanatory essay.
Wait, I— hm.
Anyway. In the last bit of the game, I think Mullins presents his most impressive analysis of card games in general, presenting us with one last taste of the genres he’s teased throughout. If our first game with Leshy was one focused on aesthetics over complexity, and our second romp through the game in its GBA form was about a story over mechanics, our third act with P03 was about optimization. Story is excised from this bit, and anything you do that isn’t meta-optimized is mocked by P03. In the final moments of the game, with P03 dead, you get to play against the other sages one-on-one.
Leshy is a very nostalgic revisting of the first bit, without the blood and gore, but with a more homey aesthetic. Grimora presents you once again with a story, a board with encounters with cards and a sort of dramatis personae instead of faceless card battles. And finally, Magnificus gives you this wild 3D wizardry card game where the somewhat rushed but deeply complex gem-mechanic is embraced in the mode of a somewhat bloated XBox360 game that had more going on than its sales would’ve suggested.
In short, you get a card game dominated by aesthetic, one dominated by story, one dominated by mechanics, and one dominated by meta-game relevancy. In this, moreso than in the admittedly fascinating ARG meta-textual work, is where I found just absolute joy in Inscryption. Don’t get me wrong, I think the filmed parts are written and acted beautifully, and I’ll always enjoy Daniel Mullins suddenly pulling a new style of games-making out of the back pocket. But I think this distillation of how the *way* you play a game can impact how the game itself appears, generically, is hugely important.
In short, Inscryption gives us lots of little games in one, but is able to highlight that the differences between these games have as much to do with their structural qualities as they do with the people who are running them and the ways they want you to play them. Strategy and intent, in other words, are the stars of the stage in Inscryption, and it might be the first game I’ve played to pull that move off effectively.