What if Yugioh except it's the Blair Witch Project? And I don't just mean Yugioh the card game but Yugioh the ridiculous anime that wrings a high stakes plot out of that card game.

Inscryption is able to fully embrace being a single-player experience, with asymmetrical rules, opponents that just make up new ones on the fly and a meta-game of outsmarting the enemy both on and off the board. To win you ultimately have to decide how you're going to utterly break the game to beat the odds stacked against you.

As everyone else points out, the biggest sin is that the earliest part is easily the best. It's not the card gameplay, which I found highly addictive throughout and gets nicely injected with new mechanics as it goes on, but an expanding narrative context that causes a loss in momentum. Besides some cool fourth wall breaks (should have guessed this was the Pony Island dev) there's little to keep one hooked narratively, with radically diminishing stakes and a meta story that switches gears from fresh and genuinely unnerving to really silly and riddled with cliches. On the other hand they whip out a literal duel disk at the last second, so I can't hate.

It's still excellent and delivers on what I've wanted from digital card games forever, really the only problem is that the first third ignites far more narrative intrigue than the late game is capable of delivering on.