Inscryption is a game by the makers of Pony Island, a game our esteemed illhousen previously reviewed. While I haven’t played Pony Island myself, Inscryption makes the exact blunders illhousen details in his review: the metatextual elements fall completely flat because it’s clear you’re playing a person playing a haunted video game, not actually playing a haunted video game yourself. In general, I found them tedious and uninteresting interruptions to the actual game. This is a shame, because the gameplay is actually very good.

When you first load up the game, the “New Game” option on the title menu is glitched out, but “Continue” is available. Pressing this places you in a dark cabin across from a creepy dude completely hidden by shadow, who wants you to play a game with him. This game takes the form of a series of card duels, with the following twist: In order to play cards, you must sacrifice cards already on the field and pay for the new card with their blood. The only cards you can play freely are useless squirrels, which have no attack power and only 1 hit point. Some cards are instead paid for in bones, which are generated whenever one of your creatures dies for any reason. To make this even creepier, some of your cards talk and react to the choices you make.

These sacrifice mechanics are actually the thing that got me interested in the game, as it was mentioned in a game design series I follow. It goes beyond just the cards to permeate everything in the game: In between card duels, you encounter nodes on the map that allow you to empower one of your cards by permanently sacrificing another; your “healing” items are a pair of pliers and a sacrificial dagger you can use to rip out your teeth or eye to weight the victory scale; and so on. I thought it did a great job of injecting an unsettling horror into something as innocuous as card games, something horror media often tries to do but fails at.

Additionally, you can at any point actually get up from the game table and explore the game master’s cabin; though you’ll quickly find there’s no escape, there are a number of environmental puzzles to solve, often using information obtained in the “main” game, which in turn give you additional cards and bonuses to use in the duels. I found this a really interesting mechanic that emphasized the bizarre artificiality of the card game and aided in immersion — we can feel the protagonist’s helplessness in how they can, technically, walk away from the game at any time, yet they can still only push against their restraints so much.

All of this was really, genuinely enjoyable to me. It’s a fun, interesting roguelike with a delicious undercurrent of horror and tons of secrets and mysteries to uncover.

It’s also only a third of the actual game.

See, after you beat the game master, the metanarrative gets its grubby hands over everything. Turns out you’re actually playing as a trading card enthusiast named Luke Carder, who found the game’s disc buried in the woods outside his house yada yada you see where this is going, it’s a haunted video game creepypasta. No, I was actually enjoying the creepy video game, thanks, please let me play it instead of making me watch your painfully cliche indie film.

After this you get access to the “New Game” option, which unexpectedly turns the game into a 16-bit RPG. It uses similar card duel mechanics, but the horror aesthetic is gone — the environments are bright and cheery and there’s no consequences for losing. We also get backstory on the game master: He’s actually only one of four card masters, each of them vying for control or the world (with the first segment of the game representing him in control), which is… really boring actually. After all that buildup, the explanation is literally “a wizard did it”? Seriously? (Oh, and the talking cards are his fellow card masters, not your fellow victims like I previously thought, which is probably the most boring route they could have gone with.)

During this segment, we also learn that each of the four card masters have their own mechanic, and sacrifices were just his. The bones mechanic is revealed to be another card masters’ gimmick; there are also robot cards powered by energy, which is a resource that starts low but increases every turn; and mage cards that require you to have resource cards on the field. Unfortunately, the sacrifice mechanic is by far the most interesting one, so instead of feeling excited by the possibility of new playstyles I was mostly just disappointed. Still, there is actually some interesting gameplay in this segment, as you have more control over your deck composition and can mix and match cards from the four styles. Some of them even have explicit synergies with the other styles, like robots that give extra blood when sacrificed or mages that are powered by bones. Unfortunately, this segment also has the fewest numbers of battles before…

The gameplay radically changes again! One of the other card masters gains control, and we go back to the 3D first-person perspective with them as the game master. Now, this is a cool idea, in theory; the “overworld” mechanics and the graphical aesthetics are completely changed to reflect the new game master’s different personality, which does a lot to help the new section feel fresh. (One of the most striking changes is that, unlike in the first act, you are not allowed to leave the table until the game master allows you to, a detail I found especially unsettling.) Unfortunately, like in the second act, I found the first game master to be much more interesting. The game even lampshades this with the new game master saying that the first cared more about lore and flavor than him, while he only cares about mechanics — which, if you find yourself writing dialogue about how this is a bad writing decision, maybe that’s a sign you shouldn’t do it? It doesn’t help that the new game master carries over the energy and magic mechanics introduced in the second act, which, as I said, I found much less interesting than the blood and bone mechanics.

Then we don’t even get an actual reveal on what’s so scary about the ~spooky haunted video game~, presumably because coming up with an actual explanation would be hard, and the game just ends on a whimper. Horror writers, I get that you feel very clever having read TV Tropes’ article on “Nothing Is Scarier“, but that’s not an excuse to not write a resolution. “Nothing” by itself is not actually scary; you need to provide the shape around that nothing to give us some idea to speculate on.

(Incidentally, the actual answer as uncovered by a bunch of overenthusiastic nerds who decoded all the secret binary messages and stuff appears to be, much like in Pony Island, that the game was made by Satan and that’s why it’s evil, which is the “a wizard did it” of horror. Wow, utterly uncritical and vanilla reference to your inescapably dominant religion, much horror, very scary.)

Also, not to victim blame, but Luke is such an idiot. Why on Earth did it not occur to him to just duplicate the data on the disk and send it back to GameFuma as requested? Why does he not take any precautions after mentioning multiple times he knows how incredibly dangerous they are? “Hold on, let me just open the door for this secret agent, not like I just made a video about how I know she totally wants to kill me!” I thought creepypasta protagonists were supposed to be at least somewhat smart?

So essentially, I think I can describe this as an utterly uninspired bargain-bin creepypasta story that for some reason had an actually really good game built as a tie-in. But alas, it is clearly the creepypasta first; there’s no postgame option to continue playing Leshy’s game as a true infinite roguelike, even though just about everyone wanted that. This would have been better if the first act had just been a full game, or even if they made each act into a full game instead of their ideas getting discarded just as they were picking up steam.

ETA: Apparently, this game started as a short for a game jam, called Sacrifices Must Be Made. It’s only a few rounds of the cabin section, but manages the be far more interesting. In particular, the plot is completely different, and has seemingly no relation to Inscryption‘s story.