This review contains spoilers

Act 1 starts the game off incredibly strong with a good mix of atmosphere, roguelike elements, puzzles and most of all a fun card game. The game takes full advantage of being a single player digital card game in its creative bosses.

Act 2 hurt the game a lot. It's now a deck building game with no punishment for dying. The pixel art style doesn't have anywhere near the same effect, and for a card game it especially sucks as there's no cool art on the cards anymore, which especially hurts as the game gives you a ton of new mechanics, so trying to learn the new cards based on crappy pixel scribbles makes deck building more tedious than it should be. It does more or less keep the good writing and fun bosses from before though, and while I think the puzzles aren't implemented nearly as well, there's still some rewards for exploration.

Act 3 basically puts itself in the middle, by bringing back the roguelike elements of building your deck based on random choices, but you can no longer pick which path to take and thus which kinds of choices you'll be given. Instead its just a case of randomly finding buffs or new cards on the ground. It also brings back "punishments" for dying, but being relatively light and only setting you back to the past checkpoints.

I felt like act 3 had the weakest of the card games, and while they expand some mechanics as you progress (which were already seen in act 2...), by the time you've finally got an interesting card game to play you only have a couple of opponents left. But the highlight of act 3 is definitely how it capitalises on the crazy bosses. Act 3's bosses are some of the most memorable not just in card games but gaming in general.

The epilogue had some neat ideas, but it was purely story and the card games are just window dressing. This is especially the case in the very last one, which presents a really neat Yu-Gi-Oh set up, but then takes like 5 minutes of mindless playing with zero strategy as the story slowly happens in the background.

Overall I'd say Inscryption is a game that starts very strong and while it never gets "bad", 2/3rds of the game are simply only playable thanks to the huge effort on part 1 to hook you into the world and story.

Reviewed on Apr 02, 2022


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