Inscryption

Inscryption is a roguelike deck-building game. The game itself is broken into three acts, where the nature of this deck-building game changes, but the fundamental rules of how the card game is played remain the same. The card game is played on a 3x4 grid which is later expanded to a 3x5 grid during the third act; the player plays their cards into the bottom row, while their opponent plays cards ahead of time into the top row, which are automatically moved into play into the middle row on the next turn. Each card has an attack and health value.

On either the player's or opponent's turn, after their cards are played, each of their cards attacks their opponent's card in the same column, dealing their attack value to that card's health. If that attack reduces the card's health to zero or less, that card is removed. If the attacking card is unopposed, then the card attacks the opponent directly with that much damage. Damage is tracked on a weighing scale, using teeth to represent each point of damage taken by that player.

The game is presented as found footage recorded by Luke Carder, an internet content creator who specializes in collectible card games under the pseudonym "The Lucky Carder". Before the beginning of the game, Carder, while opening a pack of old, little-known out-of-print cards known as Inscryption, finds inside a set of handwritten coordinates indicating a location near his own. There, he finds, buried under the dirt in a forest, a box containing a floppy disk titled Inscryption. The disk turns out to be an Inscryption video game, although Carder cannot find any trace of its existence on the internet. He turns on the game, but finds he cannot start a new game, and is instead forced to select the "Continue Game" option.

In-game, Carder's unnamed player character interacts with a shadowy dealer named Leshy within a cabin, where they must play a card-centric tabletop game with Leshy as gamemaster. Every time Carder loses, Leshy uses a magic camera to capture the character's soul into a "death card", and Carder restarts as another character. Between rounds, Carder's character can move about the cabin and solve puzzles to obtain various advantages in the tabletop game; they also find three sapient cards, the Stoat, the Stinkbug, and the Stunted Wolf, who work together with Carder's character to find a roll of film and beat Leshy's tabletop game. Upon their win, Carder's character steals the camera, uses the film roll to capture Leshy inside a card, and finds the previously missing "New Game" button. Upon acquiring it and selecting this new option, Carder is able to play the Inscryption disk game in its original form.

The game started as a small project that Daniel Mullins built during the Ludum Dare 43 game jam in 2018, where the theme was "sacrifices must be made". At the time, Mullins had gotten back into Magic: The Gathering and took influence from the sacrifice mechanic there to create the approach where the player would sacrifice creatures to play other ones. This idea extended to the player virtually sacrificing parts of their own body as well to influence the game with negative effects that may come from that, such as sacrificing an eye that would limit their field of view. His entry to the game jam was thus named Sacrifices Must Be Made after the jam's theme.

io, where it drew interest from players. As he had just finished releasing The Hex, Mullins decided to expand out Sacrifices Must Be Made into a full game. Initially, Mullins had considered expanding the game out into an anthology work as he did not immediately see a path for fleshing out the Ludum Dare version into a full game, but as he came up with ideas for this larger game, he saw a route to expand out the base game in multiple directions, including the incorporation of full-motion video.

Inscryption received "generally favorable" reviews according to review aggregator website Metacritic.

Rock Paper Shotgun praised the scale mechanic, writing that, "You lose and gain momentum, deliver killer blows, claw back from a near-loss by being aggressive... It's a compelling twist". Destructoid liked the art style and the horror elements of the game, but criticized the later chapters' gameplay changes, stating, "Maybe it was a good idea to change things up before it had the chance to grow stale, it's just nothing gripped me as firmly as the first chapter." PC Gamer's Jody Macgregor liked the beginning of Inscryption, specifically praising how the world feels "off-kilter and grotesque", but criticized the later part of the game, saying "In its initial hours, Inscryption is an eerie delight full of mystery.