Going Rogue: Inscryption
It’s no secret that Inscryption is one of my favorite games. It is also the game that inspired these metrics, which is to say: When I started this column, Inscryption was, by definition, a straight-A game.
But after running it for more than a year and playing a good 50+ tactical roguelikes, I have a much broader view of the genre as a whole. And returning to Inscryption after all that, I found…well, it’s still pretty damn good. Still an A student, but maybe no longer valedictorian.
Let’s have a look!
The Game
Surely Inscryption needs no introduction. But in case it does: You are trapped in a spooky cabin playing a card game against your concealed captor. Your cards are various woodland animals, some of whom require other animals to be sacrificed in order to play them. But the cards are more than they seem, and unlocking the cabin’s secrets reveals an expansive story that transcends the basic game.
Simple Math: A
There are a lot of factors in play in Inscryption, yet individual parameter is simple. 7 is the highest number that appears on a base card. Spammy deckbuilding (the real key to the game, as in all good deckbuilders) can boost your cards further, but it’s vanishingly rare to get them over 12 or so. (Feast your eyes on my personal best accomplishment.)
But even with the spammiest build, every point counts — you’re constantly killing off a 2-damage card to play a 3-damage card, or playing a squirrel to block a single point of damage at a crucial moment.
Determinism: A-
There are no random elements in the matches themselves unless you count draw order, and even that can be eliminated by cards like the Magpie. Draw order, being input randomness rather than output randomness, doesn’t count against a game by my metrics.
There is, however, an enormous amount of randomness in the game progression. Now, chaotic game progression can be part of the fun. I love the frantic scramble to pivot your strategy in Monster Train because you encountered someone like Dante. Losing because you went all in on one strategy only for the the game to go a different direction is one of the challenges you face. If your best card gets eaten by cannibals — well, that’s a risk you take.
But I take a dimmer view of times when a lucky encounter practically hands the game to you. Totems like Immortal Squirrel or Ant Spawner Insect can give you such an overwhelming advantage that it’s difficult to imagine how you could possibly lose. Getting two boons can turn the nigh-impossible final boss into a cakewalk. It’s not that clever strategy can lead to overwhelming victory (it should!). It’s that occasionally you get an overwhelming victory with no strategy at all.
That said, Kaycee’s Mod eliminates a lot of these spammy possibilities and creates a tougher, more consistent gameplay experience. Play Kaycee’s Mod, people.
Tradeoffs: A
A multiplicity of individually-simple factors is a good way to create interesting balance that’s complex but not overwhelming. In Inscryption, your strategy must consider hit points, damage, blood cost, bone cost, board space, score balance, and draw rate (and that’s before accounting for special abilities).
Unlike most deckbuilders, the goal is not to wipe out all the enemy creatures. Rather, the goal is to inflict damage on the enemy player. This tips the balance on a scale, which tips back when the enemy inflicts damage on you. This objective creates a lot of nuance to your strategy. You can voluntarily soak damage indefinitely as long as you hit back enough to balance it out, or you can punch a single hole in their defenses and win the match before they have a chance to attack.
There are great tradeoffs in the progression, too. Lots of cards, like the Adder or the Mantis, are just okay on their own. The real strategy is in sacrificing them to redistribute their sigils to other cards in powerful combinations.
Geometry: B
This score may come as a surprise, because Inscryption was the game that led me to identify geometry as the secret sauce that elevates excellent tactical deckbuilders over merely okay ones. And generally, Inscryption’s design is extremely solid in this respect. There are four slots on your side and eight on the enemy side. As each slot only attacks the opposite one, which slot you play in is crucial — wrong placement can squander your strongest card against a weak enemy or leave you vulnerable to a big enemy attack. Some matches require strategically managing the enemy deck by keeping their best cards trapped behind junk cards.
On turns when you get to balance all these factors, the strategy is deep. But once cards are placed, they can’t be removed except by death or sacrifice, so as you play, your play options tend to become narrower. Some maps are cluttered up with trees or rocks that cut off a quarter of your space and can’t even be sacrificed. When the Prospector turns your cards to gold, you often just have to pass your turn until they kill something and you finally have some space.
Again, the problem here is not that these things add difficulty. One gameplay choice locking you out of later options can be a part of the strategy. It’s that they make the game less interesting. I habitually avoid cards that spawn inanimate objects, like the Beaver and the Daus, not because they’re weak, but because they’re boring.
Overall Grade: A-
So, yes, on the whole Inscryption is eminently deserving of its reputation (and its place as the instigator of my design metrics).
The goal of dissecting the weak points, as I have above, is not prove that Inscryption is bad, actually. It’s to tease out more depth from these metrics and look more deeply at the little nuances of design and how they can change the experience of a game, with an eye to how we can improve on a game even as excellent as Inscryption.
Metaprogression: Game
But at some point we gotta talk about the metaprogression. It’s brilliant. Until it’s not. (Spoilers ahoy, if you somehow don’t already know.)
Within the cabin, it’s so, so clever — you can freely explore the escape room puzzles at any time, allowing you to advance the metaprogression in a way that has no grind and isn’t reliant on your skill at the base game. (There’s a certain illogic to the metaprogression of games like Slay the Spire, where you have to do well at the game in order to get bonuses that make the game easier.) The talking cards provide a seamless and elegant blend of tutorialization, hinting, lore, and characterization that help you along almost invisibly.
And then you beat the game.
And then you get to the next part.
Unfortunately Inscryption’s big surprise is that it has a fantastic first act, a boring third act, and a second act so cursory that it barely feels like a game at all. While the first act is wicked difficult and requires sharp strategic thinking (except when it doesn’t), the remainder has no permadeath and isn’t particularly difficult. In the second act, you spend so little time with each new deck type and opponent that you neither need to nor have time to master the strategy, and the third act’s strategy is obvious and repetitive.
Obviously at this point some of you are waiting to jump in and say but that’s the point, it’s Making A Statement, but it’s still a damn game, and I’m unimpressed if delivering your message requires me to sit through hours of tedium (nor am I convinced that the story couldn’t have been communicated in a way that’s, you know, entertaining). When, at the very end, you begin a boss battle only for it to fade away, it’s thematically appropriate, but I still felt robbed. I wanted to fight that battle!
(The horror tone also gets less and less creepy as the game proceeds. In the first act, you drop human teeth onto the scale — including your own. In the third act, you drop bolts.)
But all’s well that ends well, and you end Inscryption by unlocking Kaycee’s Mod, by far the most interesting and well-balanced iteration of the game and the place where I sank the vast majority of my hours. Here we finally get a little toy to what’s otherwise a very game experience. Can you win with the reptile deck? The ant deck? The Black Goat?
As for our honorary award, I still love this game. The tone, the strategy, the lore, all work together into such a compelling experience that I can even forgive it for the third act. It’s truly a must-play game.
Honorary Award: The GOAT
And that’s Inscryption! Having tackled one of the best games in the genre, next time I’m tackling one I didn’t like much at all. Be ready for proof that I don’t grade on a curve.
