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dkirschner's Inscryption (PS5)
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| [January 15, 2025 01:47:48 PM]
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Finished this on Saturday. I really liked most aspects of the game, but the story lost me by the end. I was reading online to gain a clearer understanding of the details surrounding the woman at the end, and saw all kinds of stuff about the CIA and nuclear weapons that I had no clue about. Apparently there was an ARG where devoted gaming sleuths were decoding hidden clues, editing game files, and so on to gain more information about Inscryption (the disk in the game). There is a surface-level story within Inscryption, and I followed that, and then there is the second layer with Luke and what he's up to outside of Inscryption, which I pretty much followed, and then there is the third layer which involves all the clues. I saw some of the clues while playing, and clocked them as potentially important, but in no universe would I have known what to do with them. There are crossovers between Inscryption and Pony Island and all sorts of stuff.
This is all novel dressing around a good card game. It's simple, not necessarily in terms of mechanics, but in terms of scope. The board, for example, is either 2x4 or 2x5 depending on where you are in the game. So you are only dealing with up to 5 cards on your side of the board at any given time. On the opponents' side, you can see cards that are going to come into play on their next turn, so not only is it like 2x5, but you can see a third row of cards that are coming. Your main deck is only 20 cards, and you'll have multiple copies of most cards. You also have a secondary deck full of identical 0-cost cards that you can either toss on the board to take a hit and die or sacrifice to play more powerful cards. You can only draw one card (total, not from each deck!) each round, so your hand is also usually tiny. Opponents seem to have even more limited decks (and ran out of cards earlier in the game). Number values are also small. I think the most damage any card ever did at once was like 7 (except cards with the Bifurcated Strike or Trifurcated Strike abilities, which do their damage multiple times). Each match ends when either player tips a scale that has 10 points. It starts in the middle (at 0), and you need to tip it to 5, while your opponent is trying to tip it to -5. This means that if it's in the middle and you deal 7 damage, you win and then some. The scale can swing wildly as new cards attack; it keeps you on your toes to have such a narrow window in which to win. You could have the scale at 3, but made a poor play, and the enemy hits you for 8 (which tips the scale to -5) and you lose. Matches can end really quickly.
A large part of the game is countering the cards that your observe your opponent about to play. "A good defense is the best offense" applies here. You will have many defensive type cards with 0 or low attack, but that may serve other purposes if they have certain abilities or synergies. In the last act of the game (it's split into 3 acts), you actually get to buff your basic defense cards and they become extremely valuable. They're not only defense cards; they're also sacrifices. Most cards cost some resource to play, and often the resource is "blood," which you get by sacrificing one of your own cards. So, you might play a 0 attack 2 hp card, let it take a hit (and prevent you from taking a direct attack), then sacrifice it to play a stronger card that costs 2 blood. There is a 7/7 card that costs 4 blood. Given that there are often 4 spaces on your row on the board, that means that you must sacrifice everything on the board (usually it's one blood per card) and go all in to play the 7/7. But since you attack immediately and you can see what cards are coming from the opponent, then you can always get 7 damage in if you directly attack the opponent with that card. There are a wide variety of abilities and resources that allow for different strategies and play styles. Some other of my favorite abilities were snipe (lets you target any card on the board instead of attacking the space in front of the card like normal), poison (kills any card it touches, pairs great with a 1-damage snipe, which just insta-kills anything), and sentry (which attacks any card that enters the space in front of it, and since many cards only have 1 or 2 hp, this will insta-kill or kill on the next turn a whole lot of cards). Since Inscryption is a roguelike card builder, and you build your deck as you go, you don't always know which cards are going to become your superstars or what strategies you will be able to employ. As you proceed (in act 1 through a sort of dungeon mastered roguelike scenario, in act 2 through an SNES-era JRPG style world, and in act 3 through a maze), you will get the chance to do all sorts of random-ish things to your cards: add stats, add abilities, sacrifice cards, merge cards, etc., etc.
I think that it was this sense of "I have no clue what my deck is going to look like" that may have been my favorite thing about the game. It was constantly surprising me with new mechanics, new resources, a new style, a new weird story beat, new cards, new ways to enhance my cards, new puzzles, and on and on. And the whole thing is tinged with a mysterious, borderline horror game, tone. Like, it is extremely compelling, and in a way that is unusual for a roguelike. Most roguelikes, for me, are "just one more run" kinds of games. Inscryption isn't typical in this sense, as it's only in the first act where you are doing standard "runs." Incidentally, I died the most in the first act and tried it a few times before beating it (and upon each death, you get some stronger cards and may be able to solve some additional puzzles or get additional items to help you out). But Inscryption kept me going because I never knew how things would shake out. The cards also have a lot of personality (not least because a few of them talk to you).
Anyway, I've talked to a few people about this since playing, and piqued the interest of someone who really likes Slay the Spire and Balatro. I wish the story was easier to make sense of, though I appreciate the effort that went into the complicated presentation and am glad this exists for people who like to dig into clues like that and discover something. It was a really intriguing experience to play this one, definitely will remember it!
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dkirschner's Inscryption (PS5)
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Current Status: Finished playing
GameLog started on: Saturday 4 January, 2025
GameLog closed on: Saturday 11 January, 2025 |
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