Replayed this in an afternoon, crazy how much shorter it is once you have a solid grasp on utilizing your resources appropriately.

Warning: no story spoilers here, but some discussion about the game structurally that might weaken certain moments if you're going in totally blind.

Inscryption is unmatched at its best, and a little messy and confused at its worst.

To give a little perspective, I am a card game guy, but I have very little patience for the standard mechanism that a lot of modern card games adhere to: mana. In some form or another, most games from the MtG mold want to control their pacing and power-scaling by limiting how many cards you can play in a given timeframe, trying to ensure both players actually get to play the game without getting totally buried.

This is cowardly to me, ESPECIALLY in a single-player card game experience. My traditional card game of choice is Yu-Gi-Oh (which I am terrible at) because the architects of that game concluded a long time ago that card games are the most fun when you get to be a total sicko, stringing together complex webs of lightning-fast interactions to construct a huge wall of momentum from all the little connective tissue nonsense that you've become intimately attuned to.

(Slay the Spire is my one big exception to this, because it too is designed around finding insane huge synergistic combos to play as much card game as fast as possible)

Inscryption, while nowhere near as complex as the decades-old 11000+ card YGO, perfectly exemplifies that same feeling, once you recognize the flow of gameplay and how to make all the little pieces click together quickly, efficiently, and overwhelmingly. This is enhanced tremendously by the roguelike deckbuilder format, leading you to constantly evaluate card choices not just based on marginal differences in attack stats, but how you make a deck that clicks together optimally as a whole.

Which boggles the mind just a little bit, because once you reach a crescendo of this style of gameplay, executed masterfully, the game pulls you along for a back-half made out of objectively slower iterations on this formula, ditching so much of the flow and spontaneity of its best moments for stripped-down versions that feel considerably more generic and sluggish, one after another.

This is ultimately in service of a phenomenal work of narrative framing, right up my alley, which is overall a benefit to the game. But I do wish there was a way to fulfill the premise while holding firm to the game design principles that make the game so instantly engaging at the start. Still, it should be said that the lackluster sections are only so readily apparent because they pale in comparison to their better execution... in the same game. Making a good, fun, interesting card game is a very difficult balancing act, and even Inscryption's worse chunks of gameplay are leaps and bounds ahead of the full efforts of other games in the genre.

Inscryption as a package and an execution of the card game genre is still incomparable. Daniel Mullins does the thing I think a lot of card game sickos secretly dream of doing: creating an entirely new, fresh, original card game experience that is genuinely complete and confident in the execution of its many parts. It's worth far more than the sum of its parts.