I finished Inscryption a few days ago and feel I should write about it, but I don’t entirely know where to start. Well, let’s start at the outside and work in: Inscryption is, to begin with, a roguelike deck-builder – a genre which, to the best of my knowledge, was more or less invented by Slay the Spire in 2017 and which still hasn’t seen any fundamental improvements from the model it set. Rather than try to compete with Spire in sheer elegance of design, Inscryption takes the model in a wholly different direction, setting the action in a concrete physical space, a tiny creepy cabin full of knickknacks, with some sort of malevolent entity as your opponent, visible only as glowing eyes in the darkness. This is not merely a difference in presentation: The cabin contains various interactive puzzles, some of which are interleaved with the card game mechanics, and solving them can grant various advantages in the deck-builder portion of the game.
At first, the card game itself seems quite simple and straightforward: During your turn you simply play units, “beast” cards, onto your board in one of four places, while your opponent does the same on theirs. At the end of each player’s respective turn all their units will attack, each dealing their damage to either the opposing unit (if there’s one in the same slot), or the opponent (if there isn’t). Score is kept by a scale: When one player has dealt five more damage to their opponent than they have received, they win the game.
Having the victory condition premised on point advantage rather than reaching a set threshold of points is somewhat atypical, but there are two other things which are immediately unusual about Inscryption’s approach: First, rather than damage being exchanged between units, as is common in similar games, only the current player’s units deal damage, opponent units needing to wait for their turn. Second, the resources used to play units are themselves units: Each unit costs from 0 to 4 sacrifices, and while you have a supply of 0-cost squirrel units you can choose to draw, you will also frequently need to sacrifice more valuable units to place damage where it needs to go on the board. Some units, scavengers, are instead played using bone tokens that every creature leaves behind when it dies – but, while bones are less intrinsically valuable than creatures, and these units can often be played for a negligible cost, it means you have far fewer options to get around shortages when you really need to get a unit on the board.
As the game progresses, you begin to see sigils which provide units with special abilities. Many of these are quite similar to the sorts of abilities seen in games like Magic: The Gathering and Hearthstone – such as flying (the ability to bypass an opponent’s defenses), or burrowing (which lets the animal block all incoming attacks) – while some create more unusual and unpredictable effects, like pushing all of your other animals over a lane at the end of each turn. You also find various one-use items which you can use to get out of a pinch – though at times at a grotesque cost, as with the pliers which let you slightly tip the scales by ripping out a tooth.
What this achieves is a sense of immediacy, high stakes, and desperation – not just through the aesthetic of the creepy cabin or the narrative of the threatening opponent, but also through the mechanical weight of trying to put together enough sacrificial beasts to summon the grizzly that will save you from death, or using an irreplaceable item to scrape out a narrow win in the hopes of finding something else to make up the disadvantage later. It doesn’t always work – sometimes you simply find yourself in situations you cannot do anything about, and once you learn certain tricks and gain certain advantages the threat retreats away from your mastery – but sometimes everything lines up just right, and you feel like your back is really against the wall in a duel of wits against an unknowable god.
However, that’s not the extent of the game: From here, Inscryption progresses in some wildly unexpected directions. If you haven’t played the game and are interested in card games, narrative/mechanical game design intersections, or genuinely surprising game design, I would recommend you stop reading here and play the game for yourself: It is one of the most exciting games of the year and will, I’m certain, prove to be an influential one.
The huge surprises that Inscryption holds in store are a bit less surprising, perhaps, if you’re familiar with the developer Daniel Mullins’ other work. My first exposure, and the developer’s first game listed on Steam, was Pony Island. Pony Island is a game about a game, itself called Pony Island, which the player has been brought in as a sort of test audience for. There are a couple of caveats to this play-test: First, the game has been made by a rather shaky first-time developer, and is quite simplistic and buggy; second, that this game developer is actually Satan, who has all the time in the world to perfect his craft and will actively build, rebuild, and rework the Pony Island project even as the player tries to subvert his efforts. Pony Island very effectively straddles the line between humor and horror, mining Satan’s tenuous grasp of human entertainment for humor while his manifest power over you and alien understanding of humanity back every awkward interaction with menace.
The developer’s second game (at least as far as listed Steam titles are concerned) is The Hex, about a set of six games by the same developer, Lionel Snill, developed and released over the course of, seemingly, a decade or two, from the perspective of each game’s respective protagonist. These games are cursed by fate, circumstance, hubris, and the regrets and grudges of those games’ protagonists – as well as, perhaps, literally just cursed by curses. Over the course of the game the player experiences various sequels, revisions, prototypes, and mods for the games, many of which never see release. Since the games are experienced in chronological order, the player experiences both Lionel’s growth as a designer – later games being significantly more ambitious and refined – as well as his degradation, as they become increasingly unfinished and warped by egotism and cynicism. The characters find themselves haplessly exported to other genres, encountering suspiciously creepy glitches, and digging away at the seams of the virtual worlds that hold them trying to find a better path – or, at least, a more satisfying one.
Some themes are clearly emerging: Games within games within games, self-aware and dissatisfied game characters, occult code and cursed programs, otherworldly antagonists… Inscryption ties all of these ideas together and expands on them, creating a cast of warring game-design demigods with fractured visions of what a good game looks like. There are explicit narrative threads between these earlier works as well as thematic ones: Several characters and entities recur, and Satan himself again seemingly has a hand in the creation of the game – or, perhaps, merely the corruption of the game.
While the mechanical moment-to-moment gameplay of Pony Island and The Hex veered between experimental and perfunctory, Inscryption’s gameplay experience works very well in its own right, from its first moments. There is significant design challenge in these sorts of secret games-within-games – ensuring that players engage with the first game, by necessity a more shallow experience than the game in its totality, for long enough to find what’s underneath. The original Frog Fractions, likely now one of the most famous examples of a game which is not as it seems, relied to some extent on being so implausibly, nonsensically shallow that it couldn’t possibly be getting the attention it was unless there was more to it, pushing people to look deeper. The second Frog Fractions game, as well, relied mostly on word of mouth, on people buying it specifically because it was Frog Fractions 2. This was a particular issue with The Hex – there is definitely some interesting gameplay, but as the narrative follows the growth of a game designer the player’s first experience is of the developer’s very simplistic first project (supposedly). What has allowed Inscryption to drastically supersede The Hex in popularity is the simple fact that it is compelling and fascinating from the first moment, before anything gets weird, drawing its audience to inevitably discover its deeper secrets in the process of enjoying a game which is fun in its own right.
The way Inscryption couches its initial experience within the greater structure of the game is fascinating. The game is split into a three-act structure: The first act, the one that everyone sees on the Steam store page, is the one I described in the first section. The second act is themed as a nebulously retro game, vaguely patterned after Pokémon, and is no longer a roguelike deck-builder but a collectible card game, like Magic: The Gathering or Hearthstone, where you explore the world to find more cards to add to your deck, improvising new revisions as you go. The third act is presented similarly to the first, from a first-person perspective at a table with a malicious game-master, but merges the approaches of the first two acts, creating an open-world adventure where you improvise a deck as you go, card-by-card, slowly buffing and winnowing it over the course of the adventure.
What this all creates is a sense of continuity: The narrative, even as it jumps through time and genre, remains part of the same story – and even as the rules change, at times quite drastically, it’s possible to apply all of the knowledge gained earlier in the game towards later challenges. The second act introduces the idea that Leshy, the antagonist of the first act, was only one of four “Scrybes”, each with their own unique card-game mechanics. The design space doesn’t quite quadruple in size – it turns out that the entire concept of cards costing bones was borrowed from another Scrybe, Grimora, who has an entire undead-themed set – but it is nevertheless a huge expansion, verging on being baffling and overwhelming, and the only thing that keeps it from being so is that the core game is still effectively the same as in the first act. This degree of continuity is striking coming from other similar games like Frog Fractions, which are essentially mini-game collections – and even coming from The Hex, which revels in its disjointed puzzle-box narrative and gameplay. Every mechanic and narrative beat has a precedent, is foreshadowed – and, where leaps in logic might seem too extreme, a little extra subtle tutorialization hides in the world in puzzles placed to demonstrate the applications of non-obvious mechanics.
While the first act of Inscryption is great and well-polished, it also has certain foibles stemming from being merely one act of a three-act game: Certain cards can be easily exploited to quickly win successive runs with minimal thought and effort, new mechanics stop emerging fairly quickly, and in general the game becomes far more stagnant than it likely would have if it were intended for the player to engage with it long-term, with new mechanics increasingly skewing the odds in the player’s favor so that they can quickly move on to the next act. While the process of exploring expansions on the design and explorations of the story in successive acts is fascinating and engaging, it’s hard to escape the sensation that something is lost – that the promise of an endless unfolding challenge has been replaced with that of a puzzle box, something beautiful but bounded. However, this sense of loss is not inappropriate. The ending demonstrates this discomfort with paths untaken in beautiful and extravagant style: After getting a several hours to play and understand the games of two of the Scrybes, Leshy and P03, you briefly get to play fully-realized fragments of the other two Scrybe’s games, get a tiny sense of the worlds that never were or will be.
Of course, artists know that every work is full of these, of ideas and variations that never quite take flight, roads that dead-end before they even start, and so much of the process is in pruning these branches to guide the work where it needs to go – The Hex, as well, is very much about these raw ends of unrealized ideas. As a game developer myself, I have a hard time not seeing the four Scrybes are as exemplars for different sets of game design priority. Leshy prioritizes immediacy and visceral impact, the moment to moment experience; Grimora prioritizes structure and clarity, proper beginnings and endings and connections in-between; P03 prioritizes balance and finesse, the mechanical beauty of an interesting system; Magnificus prioritizes mystery and creativity, a world with unknowable and malleable boundaries. Unfortunately relatively little of these come through in their individual card mechanics, and we’re left to wonder what the greater structure of Grimora and Magnificus’s worlds would have been.
Also unfortunately, what we do see of Magnificus’s mechanics are, I would say, not very good. Each Scrybe’s set is defined first and foremost by what resources are used to play cards: Leshy sacrifices beasts to play other beasts, Grimora harvests bones to play various undead creatures, P03 simply accumulates energy like in Hearthstone – but Magnificus has to permanently dedicate a slot on his board to a “Mox”, a power source to play and maintain his units. This energy system seems interesting, but having units permanently take up slots on the board without doing anything meaningful is simply not worthwhile without a commensurately huge payoff.
Because I couldn’t stop thinking about it, I spent a while redesigning that faction in my head: First, rather than the blue/red/green energy symbols, Moxes could each have their own stats and sigils, but also have a unique “Inactive” sigil that deactivated all sigils and made them unable to attack. The rest of the deck would have construct cards, things like golems, which would be played on top of Moxes, absorbing their stats and sigils with the exception of the Inactive sigil, and mage cards, which would largely buff constructs and/or interfere with opponent constructs. Constructs might require particular sigils to be on the mox used as their power source, and mages might require particular sigils on the board to perform their magic. This is a relatively basic idea that could be revised in many directions, but I think it fixes the problem of having to fill your board with garbage while maintaining the core unique mechanic of placing persistent energy sources that makes Magnificus’s faction potentially interesting. Changing how players engage with sigils, shifting that relationship from mere bonus abilities to also being resources that can be harnessed, is both interesting and thematic. His brush could also be available as an item, allowing the player to rewrite sigils – either constantly available, at the cost of one damage on the scale, or as a one-time item on the side. But I digress: This is the sort of redesign idea that mostly only be relevant if one were to try to redesign Inscryption as a competitive game, which would probably raise more pressing design questions than the balance of one faction.
It will be fascinating to see what the long-term impact of this game ends up being. I expect in the short-term, as imitators most often imitate the superficial, we’re simply going to see a number of games featuring simple card and board games being played against nebulous and malicious opponents – various formulations of Chess with Cthulhu, as it were. In the longer run, I hope we might see more games with soft boundaries, expanding worlds with explosive iterations on design – though that’s not a trivial ask of any designer, so I suspect those sorts of developments may take a while longer to arrive. I hope designers try, though: It’s always so compelling to not know for sure where a game is going, to not know where the boundaries of it lie, to have mystery lie at its edges – even if, perhaps, mystery leads inevitably to the dissatisfaction of a path never followed.