Inscryption

Inscryption is a game I’ve known about and wanted to return to for a while. Back in college I went over to my friend’s house and he had me try out the game. I played the game for hours that night and got all the way to the moon in act 1, but I lost because I ran out of cards.

I bought the game for myself on Steam later that week and played it a few times during downtime on campus, but classwork started to ramp up and I never came back to the game again until now.

When I started playing it again on a whim over the weekend, I ended up finishing acts 1 and 2 in a single sitting.

Act 1 is definitely my favorite part of the game. The card game is very fun, and the atmosphere is wonderful. I did end up speeding through it a bit because I already knew about the puzzles and boss mechanics. In fact, on my first run, I ended up getting to the Angler but lost because for phase 2 he just summoned an army of 8 grizzly bears and I was not ready for that. But that’s okay, because making deathcards was one of my favorite parts. It did take me several more attempts, but I finally made it to the end and got my revenge on the moon.

Act 2 seemed like something I could enjoy for a while if it were longer. It almost felt like if there was a physical Inscryption card game, it would heavily resemble the gameplay in this act. My only problem with it was that it was just very short and easy, so I never really got to go in depth with all the new mechanics introduced.

When I first started Act 3, I wasn’t enjoying it as much as I had Act 1. The atmosphere was definitely back, though I do prefer the cabin. My main problem was that at the beginning I just felt very underpowered and a lot of early fights came down to trial and error. At least there wasn’t a whole lot of consequence for losing. Once I took down the first Uberbot and got to upgrade the empty vessels though, things did start to get easier. The Uberbot battles were all really fun as well. My favorite was probably G0lly, but the Archivist was a close second for sure.

I loved the finale segment, geting to play against the other Scrybes one last time while the game was being deleted around them. Leshy’s segment in particular made me tear up until I pulled one of my deathcards simply named “GOD DAMNIT”. Kinda ruined the moment a little bit but oh well. And of course Magnificus’ Yu-Gi-Oh references did not go unappreciated.

Overall, I really enjoyed Inscryption. My personal ranking of the acts would likely go 1 > 3 > 2, but I did enjoy the time I spent in all three. At some point I’ll probaby come back and try out Kaycee’s Mod, once I get the craving for more of that good Act 1 gameplay.