This review contains spoilers
Thoughts on Inscryption are a bit complicated, which is weirdly a good start? As someone who straight up did not like Pony Island, I felt like Inscryption might leave a poor taste in my mouth specifically because the "strengths" of Pony Island were, to me, window dressing that distracted from what was otherwise a pretty miserable and uninteresting game to play. Those "strengths" also didn't really serve any purpose to me any different from pop culture references--it was meta for the sake of being meta. [I have not yet played The Hex, for the record.]
Even knowing that it might pivot in ways that I ultimately found uninteresting, Inscryption's forward-facing pitch as a deck-building roguelike played within an escape room was still appealing, and this is far and away the strongest act of the game. The deck-building mechanics are genuinely strong and the cards have great art--aesthetically this act in general is primo. It's refreshing to see a relative health system instead of one that deals in absolutes. Card upgrading can feel satisfying both in that fun sense of breaking rules as well as just exploring what works for your playstyle. Everything just works really well, with interesting "boss" fights and so on, and the escape room adds a great deal of intrigue.
But eventually you complete this part of the game, and of course then it's "more than it seems." At this point there are FMV lore dumps sprinkled across two further acts with "evolutions" of the first act's card mechanics, and the point was lost on me, unfortunate since I would say that first act might have only been like a quarter of my playtime. It adds two significantly different energy mechanics to the two that the first act already had, and card availability gets completely out of hand, I guess in the hopes that one of those energy mechanics will appeal to you? But instead of being a true evolution that makes things more interesting, it feels muddled in a way that I just got the vibe that the developer really wanted to play with all these mechanics.
Suddenly it's an overcomplicated TCG? Is this a critique of how out-of-control card mechanics can get? I can tell you it's not that fun to experience, and that if it's actually meant to be a critique where "you're not supposed to enjoy it" it was probably a bad idea to make it numerous hours. It didn't take long for me to decide to use an auto-deck option in the menu because I was completely uninterested in spending more time here, in an act that is additionally pointlessly placed in a throwback 2D gameplay style.
And then the third act, framed in a similar 3D space to the first, but now with a new aesthetic and instead homing in on the two new mechanics from the previous one. Act 1 has you select branches for encounters similar to something like Slay the Spire, and act 2 has you walk around a mediocre 2D RPG world to find card battles, so how would act 3 frame playing this card game yet again? Apparently a holo-space in which you select cardinal directions to move around ANOTHER map for hours on end, in a completely unsatisfying way, except now there's a shop, encounter respawning and waypoints, a bizarre "recover your souls" mechanic, uh... an outlaw/bounty system where stronger enemies will seek you out sometimes? Yet again, it's just strange noise that doesn't feel transformative at all, just busy as hell and ultimately uninteresting.
It's fun to see devs experiment, but it feels like I'm playing through a design riff session that has no sensible progression. If this was a test for what card mechanics work, hey, I would say any 1-2 put together and expanded upon would probably be fine! I would look forward to a tight version of any of those permutations, or even an extension of the escape room from the initial portion of the game. But of course it's not a mechanics test, because I've played Pony Island and I know that it's really about Shock And Surprise fueled by meta for the sake of meta, which I think is ultimately confirmed by the empty and cynical ending, if it hadn't already been by the "edgy" items from the first act like the pliers and knife.
It did provide a unique sensation for me though. I played the entirety of this game in a single day on-and-off, which I'm not even sure I've played a game for 10 hours in a day in recent years outside of the very rare RPG I get super excited about. But I only kept playing it in that way because I thought, surely, it couldn't be that much longer before it was complete. It was always that much longer. I wish that was exciting to find out.
Even knowing that it might pivot in ways that I ultimately found uninteresting, Inscryption's forward-facing pitch as a deck-building roguelike played within an escape room was still appealing, and this is far and away the strongest act of the game. The deck-building mechanics are genuinely strong and the cards have great art--aesthetically this act in general is primo. It's refreshing to see a relative health system instead of one that deals in absolutes. Card upgrading can feel satisfying both in that fun sense of breaking rules as well as just exploring what works for your playstyle. Everything just works really well, with interesting "boss" fights and so on, and the escape room adds a great deal of intrigue.
But eventually you complete this part of the game, and of course then it's "more than it seems." At this point there are FMV lore dumps sprinkled across two further acts with "evolutions" of the first act's card mechanics, and the point was lost on me, unfortunate since I would say that first act might have only been like a quarter of my playtime. It adds two significantly different energy mechanics to the two that the first act already had, and card availability gets completely out of hand, I guess in the hopes that one of those energy mechanics will appeal to you? But instead of being a true evolution that makes things more interesting, it feels muddled in a way that I just got the vibe that the developer really wanted to play with all these mechanics.
Suddenly it's an overcomplicated TCG? Is this a critique of how out-of-control card mechanics can get? I can tell you it's not that fun to experience, and that if it's actually meant to be a critique where "you're not supposed to enjoy it" it was probably a bad idea to make it numerous hours. It didn't take long for me to decide to use an auto-deck option in the menu because I was completely uninterested in spending more time here, in an act that is additionally pointlessly placed in a throwback 2D gameplay style.
And then the third act, framed in a similar 3D space to the first, but now with a new aesthetic and instead homing in on the two new mechanics from the previous one. Act 1 has you select branches for encounters similar to something like Slay the Spire, and act 2 has you walk around a mediocre 2D RPG world to find card battles, so how would act 3 frame playing this card game yet again? Apparently a holo-space in which you select cardinal directions to move around ANOTHER map for hours on end, in a completely unsatisfying way, except now there's a shop, encounter respawning and waypoints, a bizarre "recover your souls" mechanic, uh... an outlaw/bounty system where stronger enemies will seek you out sometimes? Yet again, it's just strange noise that doesn't feel transformative at all, just busy as hell and ultimately uninteresting.
It's fun to see devs experiment, but it feels like I'm playing through a design riff session that has no sensible progression. If this was a test for what card mechanics work, hey, I would say any 1-2 put together and expanded upon would probably be fine! I would look forward to a tight version of any of those permutations, or even an extension of the escape room from the initial portion of the game. But of course it's not a mechanics test, because I've played Pony Island and I know that it's really about Shock And Surprise fueled by meta for the sake of meta, which I think is ultimately confirmed by the empty and cynical ending, if it hadn't already been by the "edgy" items from the first act like the pliers and knife.
It did provide a unique sensation for me though. I played the entirety of this game in a single day on-and-off, which I'm not even sure I've played a game for 10 hours in a day in recent years outside of the very rare RPG I get super excited about. But I only kept playing it in that way because I thought, surely, it couldn't be that much longer before it was complete. It was always that much longer. I wish that was exciting to find out.