Like Pony Island before it, Inscryption is a game designed to be “broken.” You begin facing an opponent who you can’t quite make out in the dim candlelight of an old cabin, save for his glowing eyes and his spindly hands. This man, Leshy, narrates your progress through one of those deckbuilding roguelikes so currently in vogue, and he even acts as of the in-game characters by throwing on a mask and acting out the part. He’s a GM from hell, letting you gouge out an eyeball or use a pair of pliers on yourself to gain a slight edge in his scorekeeping method, a scale weighted by individual teeth.
It’s a thick, foreboding atmosphere where even the cards shiver in dreadful anticipation of being sacrificed for something more powerful, and it’s meant to nudge you toward the actual goal of the game, which is to stop playing altogether. You accomplish this by going outside the bounds of the card game, as you’re periodically allowed to stand up from the table and walk around the cabin, using the opportunity to look for clues and open puzzle locks. Through things like talking cards and safe combinations scribbled in the rulebook by some ill-fated predecessor, you find more cards and trinkets, and Leshy allows you to use them in his total assurance that they won’t really make a difference anyway.
In other words, the goal of breaking free from your captor sits right alongside the way we tend to interact with this sort of randomly-generated deckbuilder: by looking for ways to break it. The most satisfying examples of the genre lay out strict rules and then reveal that they aren’t quite so strict as they seem, like how certain items in Slay the Spire can totally alter your strategy or outright eliminate the constraints you previously had to deal with. In Inscryption, you mix and match card abilities, creating combinations and interactions so powerful that they don’t feel like they should be allowed.
Slay the Scrybe
Eventually, the whole thing changes, in a fashion that is perhaps expected for anyone familiar with developer Daniel Mullins and his favored conceit of layering secrets and mechanics onto a metatextual whole. In Leshy’s cabin, we play by rules similar to so many roguelike deckbuilders, starting over from scratch after two losses but maintaining certain progression elements to expedite the next run. As is typical of the genre, it’s frustrating to lose a genuinely good deck but the blow is softened by the promise of a fresh start, the drip-feed of new items and abilities we had yet to encounter and can now discover for the first time.
But upon advancing beyond the cabin, the game no longer forces you to start over after too many losses. Swapping to an 8-bit overhead view reminiscent of the Pokemon Trading Card Game game on Game Boy Color, the world is broken up according to distinct themes represented by different card-making characters called Scrybes. The blood sacrifices and bone accumulation used in Leshy’s cabin were just two mechanics, and they’re subsequently joined by robot cards that run on a slowly charging battery supply as well as magic cards that require you to play gem energy cards first.
It’s a lot to juggle, to the point where the reset-upon-failure that once seemed like a harsh consequence becomes more of a fond memory. Starting over again allowed for simplicity and elegance; now, losing just means you have to try again, rearranging your deck from a longer list of available cards rather than just adapting to what you happen to find. This 8-bit part of Inscryption is unequivocally “worse” than what came before it and the robot-centric part that comes after, but I think that’s also the point. Leshy’s cabin is presented as the character having overstepped his bounds, gaining the power to remake the game in a way that benefits his own style. He created a separate deck of sacrificial squirrels to draw from, because the blood cost for most of his creatures becomes so much more prohibitive in the base game, where disposable squirrels and rabbits have to clog your main deck.
Two Evils
The roguelike part of Inscryption functions like a sly tutorial in this sense, acclimating you to its terminology and its card symbols through repetition as you try and probably lose and then try again. You experiment with different combinations because all you can do is adapt to whatever cards you happen to pick up, hoping for the best and trying every possibility in desperation to avoid the progress wipe rather than picking a single strategy. As we progress from one style to the next, the game design philosophies actually shift alongside the art and the mechanics. Leshy’s cabin is built around presentation and atmosphere, and it’s also streamlined to accommodate that roguelike compulsion to try for just one more run.
The second, apparently “original” version is a headache to consider as a starting point, if you were unfamiliar with the mechanics. It’s designed for someone who already knows the basics, who can recognize that a shower of rewarded new cards won’t necessarily be useful and must carefully plan rather than subsume whatever they come across (this transition is even rockier if you are, like me, a shameful hoarder of health vials and many other varieties of video game items). And even when you’ve got the basics down, the number of mechanics to juggle feels a bit overwhelming; the 8-bit Inscryption is the sort of game that most people bounce off of and give up on.
The third section is another instance of “fixing” the core game, a series of metallic rooms mastermined by snooty robot P03. Rather appropriately for a cold, mechanical intelligence, this version of the game is built on iteration and refinement; it also refrains from wiping your progress and instead asks you to tweak and test one smaller deck over and over again until you can progress. It veers closer to the Souls game formula, where you make corpse runs to grab the currency you drop upon a defeat and replenish items at the cost of respawning items. The escape room mechanics are still present, but they’re uniformly less important; P03 sets you on a more or less fixed path that you’re meant to complete eventually rather than poke at forever in Leshy’s roguelike fashion. And eventually, down that road, you reach that similar, satisfying point where you feel like you’ve broken the game, able to create cards from scratch according to a system of checks and balances that are easily exploitable after a little thought.
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Ghosts in the Machine
Of course, we’re not actually breaking anything, and we’re (probably) not discovering some obscure method to progress. We simply desire that illusion of discovery and perhaps the illusion of escape from a plainly diabolical force. Although we don’t need to find every single one, these solutions are fully intentional — when cranking out something absurdly powerful via P03’s card-maker, for example, a voiceover from the player character cuts in to declare it as such. The later parts of Inscryption steer away from its initial horror flavor, but it does what good horror and good fiction in general does: it creates a disparate space for us to explore complicated emotions and ideas, to work out the things we feel and the things we fear.
Inscryption expresses a general apprehension of technology and its all-consuming nature, surfacing the latent mistrust of how much of ourselves we invest in what we fear is a one-sided relationship with a machine and/or a hobby. Here, we experience not just technology run amok but mass-produced entertainment run amok, the revealed agenda of a thing that we care about but does not care about us except as a vehicle for profit.
In the imagined scenario of an evil video game inhabited by some rotten, self-absorbed GMs, we live out our mistrust; that the game prominently features people rolling the dice on booster card packs that may or may not give them what they want feels appropriate. And even beyond that, we get to play out the fantasy of stepping away from something doing unequivocal harm. We get to forget how we otherwise stew in the uncertainty of a world where whatever pleasure we derive demands a fee of compartmentalization and ignorance.
About the Author
Steven Nguyen Scaife has written about pop culture for Slant Magazine, Polygon, Buzzfeed, Rock Paper Shotgun, and more.