This review contains spoilers

I don’t really like roguelikes or card games so I decided to play a game that’s both of these things for some reason. As it turns out, I didn’t really like it much, but not for the reasons you would expect. Oddly enough, I liked the roguelike part. It’s everything else that isn’t a roguelike that I didn’t really like.

Inscryption is split into 3 acts, each one based on a certain genre of video game. Act 1 is a roguelike, act 2 is a Game Boy inspired, adventure-ish game similar to Pokemon or Zelda, and act 3 is similar to act 1 only now it’s a soulslike instead of a roguelike. Alongside all this is a found footage, ARG/meta narrative about a card unpacking Youtuber who discovers that the physical card game, Inscryption, has a secret digital version of it that no one knows about. This leads into a big conspiracy where the developer behind the game is calling him and his life is being threatened and stuff like that. Basically, imagine something like a wannabe Marble Hornets only now it’s got sonic.exe “there are demons in the video game” stupidity going on too.

Without going too deep into explaining all the card game mechanics, I can safely say that act 1 by far is the most well designed part of the game. The roguelike elements that I normally don’t like aren’t too punishing or frustrating here because dying is not only expected but forced at some points in order to introduce more mechanics on the next run. Bosses have gimmicks that are fun to work around and never feel too unfair or luck based. Also the atmosphere and mystery is at its peak here as you try to unravel what’s going on.

Where the real problem lies is act 2 and beyond. As mentioned before, act 2 has a completely different aesthetic and is now a pixel game. The card game also changes a lot as well. You now have 3 other card types each with very different playstyles and you have to create a 20 card deck in which all the cards synergize together well. What’s annoying is that the game does very little to properly acquaint you with these new mechanics unlike the first act, so it feels like you’re just slamming your head against a brick wall for the boss fights for a while. It’s overwhelming and all the new mechanics, even when you figure them out, aren’t nearly as fun as the first act. I think part of what makes them annoying is the amount of time it takes to set up a good group of cards. Ends up being a very tedious process.

What’s also annoying is that the roguelike elements that were beneficial for you in act 1, like card upgrades, are no longer present, so there’s no fun builds to make here. The cards you get through puzzles and merchants are all you get. It’s just a downgraded version of a better game. On top of all this, it feels like RNG is a much bigger issue here. There were a few fights where the first few cards I drew were useless and I was put into an unwinnable situation. This may sound like I just had a poorly made deck, but I would go into the fight again with the same exact cards and win easily just because I got better card draw RNG.

For me, it felt like I was no longer outsmarting a worthy opponent and instead crossing my fingers hoping for good luck. Fights were no longer balanced, either I had an underpowered deck and got curb stomped, or my deck was so powerful that it decimated the opponent leading to an easy, but boring win.

Act 3 has a similar problem, but here I felt extremely underpowered until after the first boss, which from that point on I had no trouble at all completing the rest of the game. Act 3’s main issue is that, due to how the mechanics work here, you’re forced to stall for the first few turns before you can place a card that can actually do anything, meaning for some fights you’re extremely limited to what you can do. Sometimes, the opponent can just get a few free hits off of you if you don’t draw specific types of cards. I’m sure I’m partially to blame for the frustrations I encountered, but I was legitimately stuck for a while and thought I was softlocked due to how bad my deck appeared to be. Eventually I managed to get good enough luck to progress and once I got a few more upgrades and better card variety the rest of this act was incredibly easy (and boring too).

As previously mentioned, this act has a soulslike aspect to it where losing a fight resets all the fights you won since the last checkpoint, and you lose money which you can use on new cards and upgrades. Finding a new waypoint prevents the enemies in that area from respawning. Hey guess what other genre of game I’m not really a fan of? That’s right, soulslikes! Luckily here, this element is barely relevant since it’s very easy to retrace your steps and cheese checkpoints so that you never have to deal with some fights more than once or twice. It kind of feels half-assed, honestly.

Ultimately, this all culminates in a finale that goes on for far too long and tries to do something that feels like it’s trying to be emotional, but really drops the ball hard. It just feels cheesy and unearned. I didn’t care about the characters, I didn’t care about the overall story, and I definitely didn’t care about the ARG and meta stuff that had absolutely nothing to say. Inscription is ambitious, I’ll give it that. It tries a lot of things and you can tell a lot of passion was put into it. Unfortunately, for me, it all simply fell flat.

Reviewed on Jul 06, 2022


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