Spoilers for Inscryption follow.
There are some games in our lives that just matter more.
You know what I mean. I’m sure you have one. It’s the game that has transcended into essentially a separate hobby, the game that’s become almost like a lifestyle for you.
For me, it’s card games, specifically Magic: The Gathering. I’ve played Magic consistently since I was 14, and it’s only recently that I’ve slowed down.
But Magic has been a mainstay of my free time for literally half of my life at this point. It’s helped me discover confidence in myself. It pointed me towards a professional career in games. It served as the foundation for some of my most meaningful friendships. It has been more than just a game; it’s been a companion.
I know how that sounds, and I know that I maybe give it a little too much credit. Magic was simply a catalyst for a series of personal discoveries that are wholly my own. Maybe those discoveries would have happened elsewhere if Magic wasn’t around.
Still, even now that I’ve largely walked away from Magic as a hobby, it holds a special place in my heart for being such an inspiring spark in my life. There’s value in thinking about how and why a game comes to take up so much space in our lives.
When I heard a friend rave about Inscryption, a narrative card-game roguelike from indie game wunderkind Daniel Mullins, my ears perked up. He sold it to me as a Magic-like card game packed with some mind-bending puzzles and wild narrative turns. “There’s more to it than you might think,” he grinned.
He was right. Inscryption is more than what you see at first glance. It’s not just a roguelike deckbuilder with adventure game puzzles. It’s not just a strategy game with a fourth-wall shattering conspiracy-laced narrative lathered on top. It’s also a thoughtful meditation on the relationships we build with games, why we let certain games take up so much real estate in our lives, and how we learn when it’s time to get up and walk away from the table.
The core game in Inscryption is a card battler reminiscent of Magic: The Gathering and Hearthstone, with one compelling catch; you sacrifice your creatures/minions to harvest your resources instead of relying on lands or a fixed resource system like in Hearthstone.
There are nuances to this system that I won’t detail here, but if you’re a card game player of any veteran stripe, you can probably see right away just how exploitable this might be. It’s a very brittle, fragile approach to a strategy game economy, and that’s fully intentional.
Inscryption really, really, really wants you to break it in half. In fact, arguably, there’s not really a way to progress past the first act of the game without doing something broken. The game presents you with a loop of challenges and rewards that are so oppressive they demand you start looking for shortcuts around them.
In this way, Inscryption forces you to engage with its systems the way top-level strategy players consider their games of choice; they look for holes to exploit, nuances to question, interactions that produce mind-boggling effects that can overwhelm and overpower an opponent before they even get to act.
It’s fun to break stuff like this. It makes you feel smart, especially if it’s in response to a game that might have been intimidating at first. Inscryption certainly puts you across the table from an intimidating opponent; the forest demon Leshy, in the game’s story, has trapped you in his cabin and forced you to play the game with him until you lose, at which point he traps your soul inside a card forever.
So obviously it’s pretty fun to beat this guy. And beat him you will. Humiliate him, even, as you dominate him at his own game. This is an important right of passage. Leshy is your first antagonist, but he’s also the tour guide that ushered you into the world of this game.
Sure, he’s doing it to toy with you, but he has passed along his enthusiasm for Inscryption the card game almost like a virus. Through looking for a new challenger to play with, he has inadvertently armed you with the weapons you need to beat him. He has introduced you to his world, and you have conquered it.
Think back to the kid who taught you how to play Pokemon, or something like it. Think about the satisfaction you felt when you finally bested them at the game they imparted on you.
That unique feeling — besting the person who brought you into the world of a hobby — is your relationship with Leshy. It’s the beginning of a relationship with a game itself. You’ve moved past what Leshy can offer you as an opponent, and it’s time to seek out new challenges. You got into the game because of your relationship with this person, and now your relationship with the game has gone beyond those bounds.
Naturally, your reward for beating him is more game — but a different kind of game. Inscryption pivots in its second Act and starts to look like a top-down 8-bit RPG, extremely similar in scope to the Game Boy Color adaptation of Pokemon: The Trading Card Game.
The game becomes significantly more complex at this point, as we’re introduced to a number of different resource systems and card types that all function in unique ways. Narratively, we find out that Leshy was only one of four “Scrybes” in Inscryption, and that the version of the game he taught us was actually just a fraction of what’s really available.
In this way, Inscryption’s second Act functions largely like a big “Now What?” As you learn more about what the game has to offer, it starts to feel like some of the doors that flung open after beating Leshy are closing in your face.
Certain strategies simply aren’t viable, and others don’t match your style. The promise of endless possibilities from broken systems and interaction whittles away into a mode of rote calculations. This process can be demoralizing. It can even be tedious. It’s only through repeated failure that you find out what won’t work.
Engaging seriously with strategy games requires this same kind of thinking. As you expand your circles and graduate away from playing with your schoolyard pals, you’re exposed to new strategies — things your friends couldn’t even fathom, let alone challenge. As a game becomes a hobby, you’re exposed to its community, people who want to take the game as seriously as you do. In the world of Inscryption, that community just happens to be a set of self-aware AI entities trapped inside a ’90s video game.
The game’s third Act looks similar to the first, but instead of being trapped with Leshy in a cabin, you’re stuck with the game’s cold, metal antagonist, P03, who plans on breaking out of Inscryption and taking over the whole of the internet once he bests you.
P03 is a different kind of opponent. Leshy was a murderous forest demon, sure, but his love of the game was never in question. He went to great lengths to set up unique roleplaying scenarios to match with each game board, and he always seemed to be having fun.
P03, on the other hand, has grand designs, and the game seems to be more of a means to an end rather than the thing he wants to be doing. It’s almost as if he’s built himself a prison inside the game itself.
If you’ve played any game at a highly competitive level — be it Warhammer, Smash Bros., Magic, Chess, Poker, whatever — you probably see where I’m going with this. P03’s attitude towards the game is all-too common among elite players, those whose initial joy in the bounty of discovery has eroded as they’ve become jaded.
In many ways, these are players who passed through that second level of engagement weathered and beaten-down. They look to win not to chase joy, but because they are compelled to win; they feel like they deserve to win. They’ve earned it. And any defeat is proof of an unforgiving, unfair, and unbalanced world, and it cannot stand.
Indeed, when you do finally take P03 down, it reveals an unfair and unbalanced world that cannot stand. The metatextual world of Inscryption crumbles around you, and you see glimpses of the other Scrybes unvisited domains.
Then, in the most poignant moment the game has to offer, something magical happens. As the world collapses, you return back to the table with Leshy, who has one simple request: He just wants to play a game. Like old times.
As everything begins to fade away, Leshy insists on keeping the game going. Who wins and loses isn’t important to him. It’s the act of play, the joy of the game and its systems, that drives him forward. It’s endearing, especially after everything you’ve gone through, and as a result you greet him like an old friend at your table once again. There’s a purity to the game that you haven’t seen since Act 1, and it’s a reminder of what got you here in the first place.
It’s a beautiful moment, not unlike the moments I’ve had picking up a deck and playing with a friend after a brutal loss at a tournament. It takes someone who loves the game to remind you why you play.
In doing so, Inscryption closes the loop on its themes and comes away with a noble conclusion; we don’t play these games out of compulsion. We play these games because they give us something we can’t find anywhere else.
Inscryption is more than just a love letter to Magic: The Gathering and similar strategy card games. It’s an examination of the relationships we form with the games that take up our lives, an analysis of why we’re compelled to spend time on activities that might seem, on the surface, frivolous. It’s a game about why we play games. It’s a game about the games that matter more.
