In the last couple of years, I've gotten really into roguelikes and after a youtuber recommended playing Inscryption blind, I decided to pick it up. All I was told is that it's sort of a roguelite cardgame, but that also discussing the game would spoil/ruin the experience. I'm going to discuss the game in detail, but I also completely disagree with the idea that knowing about the game ruins the experience, so proceed at your own caution.
What kind of game is Inscryption? To put it simply, it's a really well-done creepy pasta game (think Sonic.exe with an actual budget). The game is structured by having a section of playing a version of Inscryption followed by some pretty campy FMV clips. This also immediately addresses my biggest problem with the game, and that is that every version of Inscryption is less interesting than the last. The first version is a mix between a roguelike and card game and has excellent TTRPG like vibes. The gameplay is fun, although having to repeat the same bosses becomes a bit of slog. I also had the bad luck of not finding the filmroll until after I defeated Leshy for the first time and then not getting another run to that point until hours later. Most of the puzzles in the cabin are also relatively easy, although I'm still not 100% sure I completely understand how the cabinet locks work. Everything in Act I is fine, nothing stands out as either particularly good or bad, just a nice experience that doesn't overstay it's welcome.
I don't really know where to put this, so I'm just going to shove it in here awkwardly and hope you think it's an artistic choice. The FMVs are in my opinion the worst part of the game, which is kind of impressive because Act III exists. In the FMVs you follow this guy named Luke Carder, who has a [legally distinct from youtube] channel where he opens card packs. He finds a very rare pack from Inscryption that leads him to a floppy disk that was buried in the woods with a computer version of Inscryption.
And thus starts Act II, most of the personality and art style of Act I is replaced by boring, washed-out pixel art. They also add a bunch of mechanics that they don't introduce, but you also don't really need to know these mechanics as this act is so easy that losing genuinely takes effort. Apparently it was P03's plan all along to have you defeat everyone so they could take over Inscryption and you just helped them by playing a very boring card game and solving what I think are supposed to be puzzles.
Snap back to Luke. He's been trying to figure out where this game came from and who made it. This is the reason I want to talk about Inscryption. While I'm pretty familiar with creepy pasta tropes, I am not and never was a creepy pasta fan. I do know enough that if someone finds a mysterious floppy disk burried in the woods, it's definitely haunted/cursed and is going to make the life of our protagonist much much worse. However, because the game was so wildly praised but also not talked about for fear of spoilers I assumed there was going to be a third layer. Something beyond the glitch effects and developers dying in mysterious fires.
You trudge through Act III, which I think is bad by design although that doesn't make it less bad, hope quickly dwindling that Inscryption can be anything more than a creepy pasta game which serves as a badly disguised metaphor about the history of games in general. You help P03 and then betray P03, because well because that's what you're supposed to do. You beat the game, the achievement even said so and you get the last set of FMVs. As you watch how Luke gets shot by shady figure in a suit and glasses because he did not want to handover Inscryption, all I could think about is why people were afraid of talking about any of this. The story is so predictable that I assumed there had to be some extra twist because otherwise why would people be so cagey about it.
You might read all this and come to the conclusion that I think Inscryption is a bad game. I was fairly negative in this post, but I don't think it's a bad game. Disliking something and thinking it's bad are two very different things. Inscryption is above all a love letter to creepy pasta. However if you don't really care about creepy pasta, the gameplay really doesn't save it, especially as Act II and III seem to be designed to make you want to stop playing Inscryption.
