Inscryption as modern mythmaking: Plurality/Tulpadom + the competing 'spirits' of card games + Mullin building off the pulp of lost footage creepypasta literature = modern mythchurning
Previously I spoke about Daniel Mullin's game The Hex in which I said that "Meta commentary can not be an excuse for weak game design or a mask for decent criticism. The fact that the game so openly jabs at those sort of metagames makes me rethink my perception on how to approach this fact and whether I was 'tricked' into liking some of those games more than I actually do. " But if The Hex floundered in its main goal, Inscryption thrives in storytelling and satire.
Inscryption is a complicated game to try and explain and summarize, you play as an at first unnamed protagonist trying to escape the cabin of a dungeon master named 'Leshy'. Inscryption is a deck building game, and beyond any other set of mechanical complexities, this primary concept of building up an army of cards which you have to choose how to sacrifice and what to do is one of the main effective things that retain throughout the whole game. To whatever extent you may have issues with playing card games, this game may provide difficulty for you, there are exploits you can utilize to make that part of the adventure less difficult, but theres a lot more contemplation around it than I believe a lot of people are patient for. Ultimately the game simplifies this, its not even remotely complex combat as magic the gathering, . But I've been met with resistance on these grounds regardless and I do sympathize.
There is also the ability to leave the table and walk around in many sections of the game, allowing you to mess around with some simplistic yet effective 'escape the room' style adventure
Of course anybody who has an even passing awareness of the game knows it opens up WAY more than that and provides a focused but far wider experience. There are a lot of moving parts that make Inscryption so brilliant, but one of the primary ones is how immaculate and unique the plot structure is in comparison to many other games. Simply put this game juggles quite a lot more threads of conflict and mystery than it lets on, there is
1. The 'escape the room/game' plot, 1st positioned on a microscale via medias res in relationship to what it shows later
2. The 'lucky carder' interjection mystery, as he unravels the history of the game and the operators trying to control the game
3. The vies for power by each of the 4 Spirits of the game, how their gameplay reflects the perspectives they have on how the game should be played itself
When I lay it out like that, it doesn't seem like an exceptional thing to juggle, but all these are told as a mystery story. Using each of these disparate pieces to make you question what is going on as the game continues to show more of itself. What's important to reflect on by comparison is that this is not just an interesting mystery in terms of games but the literary genre of the 'creepypasta' lost footage scare genre its building itself off of. So allow me to pontificate for a moment, lets compare them to both. We can see on the one hand the intricate detail of the mystery elements by comparing it to other games.
Complexity in relationship to mystery games:
I'm not going to pretend there are not some games out there with more complex mystery plots. For example The Silver Case and Killer 7 from my understanding would rightly debunk that right away. But let compare this mystery to the average acclaimed mystery game of merit, I hope these examples are not too controversial as comparison points
Disco Elysium, the Amnesia Plot about the history of your character and their relationship to the world. And the murder mystery plot. Disco uses the Amnesia plot to tell most of the emotional story and uses a murder mystery as an introductory backdrop to the world. A great game, but it has 2 overarching plots of conflict introduced right immediately after each other.
Ace Attorney, in ace attorney you have several subplots but they are episodic. Each one echoing and building off the one before but not directly tying them all in. They are introduced right after each other. Theres a 2nd plot conflict of your lawyer identity but its usually used as bookends for each chapter, only really paying off towards the end.
Meanwhile the fact is in this game it interweaves each plot into the next, hinting as it goes, utilizing the imprisonment narrative as the starting point for you to agree with your character and work towards figuring out whats going on. You and Lucky Carder share important character context by doing this. In these two other games, a mystery is a driving force for player engagement with the world.
The funny thing about this is plot thread juggling is it's probably better in games than in books because you have so much specific interface with everything so you can remember it better, but all you have to do is look at the botched story of Pony Island to see how ultimately hard it can be to get right. Without getting too bogged down here, Pony Island has a similar imprisonment narrative and aspirations towards narrative juggling, but only provides hints at the 'hell' and your character context through cryptic side explanations, making you have to go out of your way and play the game at least 3 times over to get a functional understanding of who your character is and why you are all trapped in Pony Hell. The issue with this is it actually detracts from the ending of the game proper, yes you escaped but the stakes of who you are is never revealed so it renders that stories ending about as cathartic as drinking flat soda. Both are imprisonment mysteries, but one is able to juggle and confront the player with its mystery better by actually centering the more 'disparate' pieces and giving them adequate narrative attention. The best way this is done is by completely splitting conscious attention, everything you pick up from Pony Island is information narrated directly and linearly through the roller coaster whereas Inscryption is happy to break narrative linear explanation, for example the Lucky Carder narrative is given through videos as intermission between each of the acts of the game. What this means is you'll ultimately never know what to expect throughout your adventure in the game which makes its narrative much smoother and more satisfying in terms of building towards climax and 'resolution'. I should be clear, its well designed, but it still follows a fairly well understood narrative buildup on this level.
The multiple entangled plot threads allows for a much wider discussion of interpretation about the events of the game thematically, you can see specifically draw from issues brought up in plot in relationship to how it may or not be commenting on the other two. By doing this it can build much larger contemplations beyond just being about 'identity'.
The other bit we should talk about is the video game creepypasta genre. There's a particular difficulty in talking about this because the subset of examples I have are frankly all a bit experimental and vary wildly in length & public perception. In fact part of the issue here is there's no central body of work I can point to. In a lot of ways it also operates as a sort of 'anti genre' because as genres have mostly been built around their consumer markets.
Take the 'Weird Fiction' genre for example, back when art like the King in Yellow and Lovecraft's fiction came out, there wasn't even a genre name pronounced and recirculated. It was only after Lovecraft's spontaneous rise in popularity a few decades after he was dead an obscure literary genre was connected, even then people think Lovecraft is to thank for all of it anyway and refer to games like 'Cultist Simulator' as 'Lovecraftian'. I'm not trying to call people out for literary ignorance here, my point here is that markets play a rather prominent role around this stuff. Because of the fact that most of the art produced is engaging in blank point copyright violation.
Here's a few examples anyway: The Terrible Story of Animal Crossing, by Chewbot is posted over on the LP Archives. Available to read. The story treats the protagonist as a living entity and uses the vehicle of horror to parody most of the unspoken regulations and artificialities of animal crossing. The protagonist jumps from figuring out how to escape throughout the text, in the process unveiling a sinister plot.
Sonic.exe is a fairly popular but somewhat sloppy short story, about a young passionate teenager who finds out a glitched anomaly copy of the game from their friend Kyle. Despite the warning to 'destroy the game' the protagonist boots the game out of morbid curiosity only for it to haunt him and for him to disappear mysteriously at the end. There is a game made inspired by this one, and a sequel.
Recently Crow 64 came out which is a swanky Youtuber review over an obscure game about an abandoned Demo that slowly eats up the narrator throughout the video. Using a strange backstory of its production along with the developer isolating and then dumping himself into the river.
There's a few identifiable features these examples have in common, thematic points of entrapment by games, mysterious unwanted gifts/discoveries, corruption, and horror through 'pandoras box' ownership of something (my assumption is that both fairly crass horror films like The Ring, and the genre of Weird Fiction mentioned earlier probably have an important influence on this genre). As a result I don't think the narratological hook surrounding Leshy's use of campfire is an accident here. The complexity of the story being a more involved mystery makes the work exceptional in comparison to these much quicker one shots that have a specific referentiality. The game absolutely revels in trying to show the complexity and fictional potentiality of these tropes.
What I'm trying to get at is that what this game excels at is a rather well constructed narrative form and how it was effectively transposed over to the realm of video games quite effectively. In this way, the game has effectively become a form of myth churning as well. It also puts the author, Mullins, in a unique spot where he can continue to capitalize and perpetuate this budding genre of Videogame Creepypasta. In the process justifying all of the affection and care put into the genre up to this point. Using specific gameplay elements to reinforce the narratological context and make you want to see it out. On the other hand its striking character roster is great for satirizing card games showing the different ways in which design functions flounder to make a cohesive experience. Showing how needless accumulation and repression of others can make a great idea for a card game less than the sum of its parts.
What's funny and also ultimately a bit tragic is that this game means quite a lot to me besides its plot structured satisfaction. Backloggd allows you to post more than 1 write up on a game but its unlikely readers who are primarily reading to find out if a game is 'worth playing' will come back for seconds. Meaning you ultimately have to either say everything about the game all at once: the longer it gets the less patience people have to read as a result. Or you have to suffer the potential that literally nobody will read your 'multiple attached essays'. Let's be honest, this website was not actually constructed with this intention in mind, hell its hardly constructed with long essays in mind in general. Originally I was going to wait to release this essay along with some speaker disembodied from me but that plan fell through. So all you really get instead is a petty complaint instead. I think it's worth mentioning here then that I am plural and that this reflects deeply into the game. I have separate speakers and thinkers that act separately from me that the plural community calls 'alters' each with their own conscious preferences. Sometimes I will get in conflict with them or fight to be the 'main performer' for an external audience. In this case I'm the writer equivalent of Leshy keeping the other versions of my consciousness muted and repressed from their convictions. At the same time I know in the back of my mind that not all of what they have to say is bad, and that there is some legitimacy in letting an established audience be introduced to new thinkers, but its a risk, and just as the corporate and financial game design neurosis will influence certain games which often conflict which each other fundamentally, so to do different conscious speakers in one person to try and figure out if somebody is even interested in an alter's attention. I feel like this game created both a great meditation on cards and also an excellent allegory on plural self repression and anxiety and that's why I have a personal attachment to it as well. The mythmaking for the multiple, what a wonderful idea!
Previously I spoke about Daniel Mullin's game The Hex in which I said that "Meta commentary can not be an excuse for weak game design or a mask for decent criticism. The fact that the game so openly jabs at those sort of metagames makes me rethink my perception on how to approach this fact and whether I was 'tricked' into liking some of those games more than I actually do. " But if The Hex floundered in its main goal, Inscryption thrives in storytelling and satire.
Inscryption is a complicated game to try and explain and summarize, you play as an at first unnamed protagonist trying to escape the cabin of a dungeon master named 'Leshy'. Inscryption is a deck building game, and beyond any other set of mechanical complexities, this primary concept of building up an army of cards which you have to choose how to sacrifice and what to do is one of the main effective things that retain throughout the whole game. To whatever extent you may have issues with playing card games, this game may provide difficulty for you, there are exploits you can utilize to make that part of the adventure less difficult, but theres a lot more contemplation around it than I believe a lot of people are patient for. Ultimately the game simplifies this, its not even remotely complex combat as magic the gathering, . But I've been met with resistance on these grounds regardless and I do sympathize.
There is also the ability to leave the table and walk around in many sections of the game, allowing you to mess around with some simplistic yet effective 'escape the room' style adventure
Of course anybody who has an even passing awareness of the game knows it opens up WAY more than that and provides a focused but far wider experience. There are a lot of moving parts that make Inscryption so brilliant, but one of the primary ones is how immaculate and unique the plot structure is in comparison to many other games. Simply put this game juggles quite a lot more threads of conflict and mystery than it lets on, there is
1. The 'escape the room/game' plot, 1st positioned on a microscale via medias res in relationship to what it shows later
2. The 'lucky carder' interjection mystery, as he unravels the history of the game and the operators trying to control the game
3. The vies for power by each of the 4 Spirits of the game, how their gameplay reflects the perspectives they have on how the game should be played itself
When I lay it out like that, it doesn't seem like an exceptional thing to juggle, but all these are told as a mystery story. Using each of these disparate pieces to make you question what is going on as the game continues to show more of itself. What's important to reflect on by comparison is that this is not just an interesting mystery in terms of games but the literary genre of the 'creepypasta' lost footage scare genre its building itself off of. So allow me to pontificate for a moment, lets compare them to both. We can see on the one hand the intricate detail of the mystery elements by comparing it to other games.
Complexity in relationship to mystery games:
I'm not going to pretend there are not some games out there with more complex mystery plots. For example The Silver Case and Killer 7 from my understanding would rightly debunk that right away. But let compare this mystery to the average acclaimed mystery game of merit, I hope these examples are not too controversial as comparison points
Disco Elysium, the Amnesia Plot about the history of your character and their relationship to the world. And the murder mystery plot. Disco uses the Amnesia plot to tell most of the emotional story and uses a murder mystery as an introductory backdrop to the world. A great game, but it has 2 overarching plots of conflict introduced right immediately after each other.
Ace Attorney, in ace attorney you have several subplots but they are episodic. Each one echoing and building off the one before but not directly tying them all in. They are introduced right after each other. Theres a 2nd plot conflict of your lawyer identity but its usually used as bookends for each chapter, only really paying off towards the end.
Meanwhile the fact is in this game it interweaves each plot into the next, hinting as it goes, utilizing the imprisonment narrative as the starting point for you to agree with your character and work towards figuring out whats going on. You and Lucky Carder share important character context by doing this. In these two other games, a mystery is a driving force for player engagement with the world.
The funny thing about this is plot thread juggling is it's probably better in games than in books because you have so much specific interface with everything so you can remember it better, but all you have to do is look at the botched story of Pony Island to see how ultimately hard it can be to get right. Without getting too bogged down here, Pony Island has a similar imprisonment narrative and aspirations towards narrative juggling, but only provides hints at the 'hell' and your character context through cryptic side explanations, making you have to go out of your way and play the game at least 3 times over to get a functional understanding of who your character is and why you are all trapped in Pony Hell. The issue with this is it actually detracts from the ending of the game proper, yes you escaped but the stakes of who you are is never revealed so it renders that stories ending about as cathartic as drinking flat soda. Both are imprisonment mysteries, but one is able to juggle and confront the player with its mystery better by actually centering the more 'disparate' pieces and giving them adequate narrative attention. The best way this is done is by completely splitting conscious attention, everything you pick up from Pony Island is information narrated directly and linearly through the roller coaster whereas Inscryption is happy to break narrative linear explanation, for example the Lucky Carder narrative is given through videos as intermission between each of the acts of the game. What this means is you'll ultimately never know what to expect throughout your adventure in the game which makes its narrative much smoother and more satisfying in terms of building towards climax and 'resolution'. I should be clear, its well designed, but it still follows a fairly well understood narrative buildup on this level.
The multiple entangled plot threads allows for a much wider discussion of interpretation about the events of the game thematically, you can see specifically draw from issues brought up in plot in relationship to how it may or not be commenting on the other two. By doing this it can build much larger contemplations beyond just being about 'identity'.
The other bit we should talk about is the video game creepypasta genre. There's a particular difficulty in talking about this because the subset of examples I have are frankly all a bit experimental and vary wildly in length & public perception. In fact part of the issue here is there's no central body of work I can point to. In a lot of ways it also operates as a sort of 'anti genre' because as genres have mostly been built around their consumer markets.
Take the 'Weird Fiction' genre for example, back when art like the King in Yellow and Lovecraft's fiction came out, there wasn't even a genre name pronounced and recirculated. It was only after Lovecraft's spontaneous rise in popularity a few decades after he was dead an obscure literary genre was connected, even then people think Lovecraft is to thank for all of it anyway and refer to games like 'Cultist Simulator' as 'Lovecraftian'. I'm not trying to call people out for literary ignorance here, my point here is that markets play a rather prominent role around this stuff. Because of the fact that most of the art produced is engaging in blank point copyright violation.
Here's a few examples anyway: The Terrible Story of Animal Crossing, by Chewbot is posted over on the LP Archives. Available to read. The story treats the protagonist as a living entity and uses the vehicle of horror to parody most of the unspoken regulations and artificialities of animal crossing. The protagonist jumps from figuring out how to escape throughout the text, in the process unveiling a sinister plot.
Sonic.exe is a fairly popular but somewhat sloppy short story, about a young passionate teenager who finds out a glitched anomaly copy of the game from their friend Kyle. Despite the warning to 'destroy the game' the protagonist boots the game out of morbid curiosity only for it to haunt him and for him to disappear mysteriously at the end. There is a game made inspired by this one, and a sequel.
Recently Crow 64 came out which is a swanky Youtuber review over an obscure game about an abandoned Demo that slowly eats up the narrator throughout the video. Using a strange backstory of its production along with the developer isolating and then dumping himself into the river.
There's a few identifiable features these examples have in common, thematic points of entrapment by games, mysterious unwanted gifts/discoveries, corruption, and horror through 'pandoras box' ownership of something (my assumption is that both fairly crass horror films like The Ring, and the genre of Weird Fiction mentioned earlier probably have an important influence on this genre). As a result I don't think the narratological hook surrounding Leshy's use of campfire is an accident here. The complexity of the story being a more involved mystery makes the work exceptional in comparison to these much quicker one shots that have a specific referentiality. The game absolutely revels in trying to show the complexity and fictional potentiality of these tropes.
What I'm trying to get at is that what this game excels at is a rather well constructed narrative form and how it was effectively transposed over to the realm of video games quite effectively. In this way, the game has effectively become a form of myth churning as well. It also puts the author, Mullins, in a unique spot where he can continue to capitalize and perpetuate this budding genre of Videogame Creepypasta. In the process justifying all of the affection and care put into the genre up to this point. Using specific gameplay elements to reinforce the narratological context and make you want to see it out. On the other hand its striking character roster is great for satirizing card games showing the different ways in which design functions flounder to make a cohesive experience. Showing how needless accumulation and repression of others can make a great idea for a card game less than the sum of its parts.
What's funny and also ultimately a bit tragic is that this game means quite a lot to me besides its plot structured satisfaction. Backloggd allows you to post more than 1 write up on a game but its unlikely readers who are primarily reading to find out if a game is 'worth playing' will come back for seconds. Meaning you ultimately have to either say everything about the game all at once: the longer it gets the less patience people have to read as a result. Or you have to suffer the potential that literally nobody will read your 'multiple attached essays'. Let's be honest, this website was not actually constructed with this intention in mind, hell its hardly constructed with long essays in mind in general. Originally I was going to wait to release this essay along with some speaker disembodied from me but that plan fell through. So all you really get instead is a petty complaint instead. I think it's worth mentioning here then that I am plural and that this reflects deeply into the game. I have separate speakers and thinkers that act separately from me that the plural community calls 'alters' each with their own conscious preferences. Sometimes I will get in conflict with them or fight to be the 'main performer' for an external audience. In this case I'm the writer equivalent of Leshy keeping the other versions of my consciousness muted and repressed from their convictions. At the same time I know in the back of my mind that not all of what they have to say is bad, and that there is some legitimacy in letting an established audience be introduced to new thinkers, but its a risk, and just as the corporate and financial game design neurosis will influence certain games which often conflict which each other fundamentally, so to do different conscious speakers in one person to try and figure out if somebody is even interested in an alter's attention. I feel like this game created both a great meditation on cards and also an excellent allegory on plural self repression and anxiety and that's why I have a personal attachment to it as well. The mythmaking for the multiple, what a wonderful idea!
Erato_Heti
1 year ago