Inscryption is a 2021 roguelike deck-building game developed by Daniel Mullins Games and published by Devolver Digital. Directed by Daniel Mullins, it was originally released for Windows on October 19, 2021, and on Linux, macOS, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch, Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S over the following two years. The game puts the player in a cabin where a mysterious gamemaster makes them play a tabletop game.
Inscryption blends various genres, including deck-building, roguelike, turn-based strategy, escape room, puzzle and adventure, while drawing inspiration from, among others, tabletop role-playing games, board games, horror, vlogs, and found footage. Its presentation is a combination of computer animation, pixel art, drawn art, and live action, as well as first person, third-person and 2.5D perspectives. It provides no context nor backstory at its start; its cryptic, metafictional narrative must be put together from subsequent story elements and various optional clues. A real-world alternate reality game (ARG), embedded both in video from the game and outside of it, offers additional story elements via many easter eggs that must be decrypted.
The game originated as Sacrifices Must Be Made, a much shorter and simpler game made by Mullins in 2018 for a Ludum Dare game jam, which used a deck-building system in which the player had to kill their own creatures to summon others. After publishing the prototype to itch.io in December 2018, the positive response led Mullins to significantly expand on the original game, resulting in the making of Inscryption. The game received positive reviews upon release, winning several Game of the Year awards and selling 1 million copies by January 2022: its originality, card battle system, visuals and narrative were particularly praised, although changes in the later parts of the game received some criticism. A free expansion titled Kaycee's Mod, allowing players to focus on the tabletop game without Inscryptions various other elements, was released in March 2022.
Gameplay
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 remain 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, which 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. If that attack reduces the card's 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 to represent each point of 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.
Each card has a cost to play, which depends on which of the Scrybes created that card. Those created by P03 use energy; the player starts with 1 energy at the start of each game, refilling all cells and gaining an additional cell 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 to play, 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. The game proceeds through four randomly generated maps through which the player charts a path, akin to the maps in Slay the Spire. The player's options include card battles with Leshy, opportunities to add or remove cards from their deck, or to gain consumable items that can be used during card battles to tip the odds in their favor. Each of the first three maps ends with a boss encounter, while the final map leads up to 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. Upon defeating Leshy, the game enters the second act.
During the second act, representing the original version of Inscryption, the game is 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, used 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, simply not progressing the story. Once the player has defeated all four Scrybes within this act, the game moves into the third act after an unwinnable fight against P-03.
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 it takes over the Inscryption code in an attempt to achieve "Transcendence" by publishing Inscryption 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. The 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, it does reset the player to their last collected checkpoint, which are represented as antenna towers within the map.
Plot The game is presented as found footage recorded by Luke Carder, an internet content creator who specializes in collectible card games under the pseudonym "The Lucky Carder". Before the beginning of the game, Carder, while opening a pack of old, little-known out-of-print cards known as Inscryption, finds inside a set of handwritten coordinates indicating a location near his own. There, he finds, buried under the dirt in a forest, a box containing a floppy disk titled Inscryption. The disk turns out to be an Inscryption video game, although Carder cannot find any trace of its existence on the internet. He turns on the game,The real life Inscryption game begins at this point, with the player originally unaware that they are playing Carder as he plays the disk game. This part of the game is also technically found footage, as Carder records his playthrough, occasionally reacting vocally to its events; live action videos made available later in the game gradually reveal both Carder's backstory, and the fact that Inscryptions playable sections are all a game within a game with Carder as the player character. but finds he cannot start a new game, and is instead forced to select the "Continue Game" option.
In-game, Carder's unnamed player character interacts with a shadowy dealer named Leshy within a cabin, where they must play a card-centric tabletop game with Leshy as gamemaster. Every time Carder loses, Leshy uses a magic camera to capture the character's soul into a "death card", and Carder restarts as another character. Between rounds, Carder's character can move about the cabin and solve puzzles to obtain various advantages in the tabletop game; they also find three sapient cards, the Stoat, the Stinkbug, and the Stunted Wolf, who work together with Carder's character to find a roll of film and beat Leshy's tabletop game. Upon their win, Carder's character steals the camera, uses the film roll to capture Leshy inside a card, and finds the previously missing "New Game" button. Upon acquiring it and selecting this new option, Carder is able to play the Inscryption disk game in its original form.
In its original form, the disk game is radically different from when Carder first started playing, although it revolves around a card system similar to the tabletop game's. It is set in a world ruled by the four "Scrybes": Leshy, the Scrybe of Beasts who had taken over the game in the save Carder originally used, P03, the Scrybe of Technology, Grimora, the Scrybe of the Dead, and Magnificus, the Scrybe of Magicks. P03, Grimora, and Magnificus were previously encountered as the Stoat, the Stinkbug, and the Stunted Wolf respectively, having been trapped into the Leshy-led version of the disk game and turned into cards. Carder's player character arrives in this world seeking to challenge the Scrybes; after defeating all four, they pick one Scrybe to challenge again in the hopes of taking their place, but P03 appears and fights the player regardless, using a glitch to defeat them and take over the game as Leshy did. Between play sessions, Carder, growing increasingly obsessed with the disk game, continues his investigation of its origins and contacts the publisher of the Inscryption cards, GameFuna; GameFuna denies the game's existence while also forcefully demanding its return, repeatedly sending a representative to reinforce the demand, whom Carder sends away. He also learns that a GameFuna developer, Kaycee Hobbes, mysteriously died while working on the game, and notices that his camera is experiencing an increasingly large number of uncanny malfunctions.A Kaycee death card appears in the Leshy-led version of the game, while an NPC named Kaycee Hobbes featured in the disk game's "normal" and P03-led versions claims to have been named after one of the game's developers. Several optional story elements expand on Kaycee's key role in events prior to Carder's playthrough.