Inscryption is a deckbuilding rougelite card game in the vein of Slay the Spire, where you start out with a weak deck, then build an increasingly powerful one as you go through the game. However, unlike most such games, there’s more of a sense of narrative, and a room that “you”, your character in the game, can stand up in and move around which contains a number of meta puzzles that carry over between playthroughs, unlocking additional cards for your deck, as well as various tools that you use.
The core of the game is similar to many online card games – you have creatures with an attack power who deal that damage every turn, a toughness that ticks down when they take damage, and special abilities that alter their attacks and defense.
You start out with two decks – one is a deck full of “squirrels”, cards that cost nothing to play but have no attack power and only 1 defense, and the other is a deck full of actual cards that can fight, but which require a “sacrifice” – you have to sacrifice one creature per “blood” of cost.
You start the game with three cards from your main deck and one squirrel, and each turn you get to draw an additional card from either deck.
On the other side of the board, each encounter has a pre-set sort of pattern of cards played for no cost from the enemy; you can see the cards that will be coming out the next turn.
When a creature isn’t blocked, it deals damage to the opponent; when you get hit, you take damage. However, the “twist” is that players don’t have health totals; instead, you must unbalance an old-timey balance scale in your favor by dealing at least 6 more damage to your opponent than your opponent did to you.
In addition to the cards, you have up to three items which affect the course of the game, which you can activate at any time. These abilities range from cutting up an opponent’s card (removing it from the battlefield) to skipping the opponent’s turn to adding weight to the opponent’s side of the scale, to things like cards in a bottle you can add to your hand at will.
As you go through the game, you get to choose which space to go to next on a path that leads inexorably forward, allowing you to add extra cards to your deck, delete cards from your deck for bonuses, and otherwise improve cards in myriad ways before ending up in the next battle.
However, unlike most such games, there is a meta-story here, and as you go through the game, the game will evolve not only in terms of story but also in terms of mechanics, with new cards being added with different mechanics, and eventually, very different approaches to the core game.
As you get further in the game, that Inscryption is in some ways as much a puzzle-narrative game as it is a roguelite card game, with the out of game meta puzzles and metanarrative playing a significant role in advancing the core card game.
This is one of those games that it is best to avoid spoilers about, and that is worth exploring as blindly as possible. Overall, I’d recommend it; it can suffer a bit from being a bit repetitive, as some of the later mechanical twists aren’t as engrossing, but the game is neat and it has some fun ideas.
3.5