This was a very competitive year for Game of the Year. Unsighted, a phenomenal Zelda-like adventure game, blew me away. Unpacking managed to both relax and deeply move me. Mundaun brought the spare aesthetics of A24 to gaming in a thoughtfully terrifying survival horror game. Psychonauts 2 improved on a classic and offered some of the finest writing and visual design of the year. Metroid Dread! Returnal. Fuck, man, Returnal. That was my game of the year — until I played Inscryption.
Inscryption is the best video game of 2021. And honestly, it wasn’t even close.
“Another challenger… it has been ages.”
Inscryption reminds me in some ways of 2019 cult film One Cut of the Dead. Both are phenomenal, towering works. I love them both dearly. And, unfrotunately, both fall under the ‘best if you go into it blind’ category. In this section, I’ll do my best to avoid spoilers, but I highly recommend that you check the game out the core idea and aesthetic appeals to you without reading too much further. After this? All bets are off.
At its most base level, Inscryption is a familiar beast: A roguelike deckbuilder. Slay the Spire didn’t invent the genre, but it did polish it to a mirror shine with some of the finest gameplay I’ve ever experienced. The gist of roguelike deckbuilders is simple: You start off with a simple deck. Each time you win a fight, you get to add a new, more powerful card to that deck. But if you die, you go back to the start, losing all progress you made in the map and losing the shiny new cards you’ve acquired.
Slay the Spire is…sparse, though. Part of polishing the genre to perfection involved eliminating all extraneous elements. The game has functionally no story. You have the map of encounters and your deck and that’s it.
Inscryption, on the other hand, comes alive pretty quickly. There are two very early-game moments that signal that Inscryption is trying to do something different. The first comes when the mysterious figure playing against you asks you to stand up from the table. Realizing that you can walk away from the game and explore the cabin you play in feels small at first, but becomes a major part of the game.
The second happens when you recruit the Stoat card — and it begins speaking to you.
“Perhaps you have forgotten how this game is played.”
Just to reiterate my warning: Full spoilers from here on out.
As with One Cut of the Dead, there’s a good reason people suggest that you go in blind. Inscryption isn’t telling the kind of horror story you thought. It initially seems like a creepypasta — you’re trapped in a cabin with a serial killer who is making you play D&D with him, and if you die in the game, he kills you in real life. There are hints that the game is more than that; literally the first thing you hear when you first boot up the game is the voice of a man saying “Let’s see what’s on this thing.” And there’s no ‘New Game’ option, only continue. Huh.
But you don’t hear anything about that for awhile. For the most part, the game is exactly what it appears to be. You build a deck. The mysterious game master throws increasingly difficult challenges at you. You die. Start over. As you play, you’ll find hints that will help you unlock various mysteries in the cabin, escape room style. Some of these will introduce more talking cards. One gets you a roll of film that doesn’t appear to have any use.
And then you win. Maybe it’s the first time, maybe it isn’t, but beating Leshy, the game master, while you have the roll of film in your inventory… changes things. See, Inscryption isn’t a cabin-in-the-woods slasher story.
It’s found footage.
“Allow me to remind you.”
Here we meet ‘the Lucky Carder’, a guy named Luke who runs a card game YouTube channel where he does things like pack-opening videos. Through a series of acted video clips, we learn that Luke found packs of an old, out-of-print card game called ‘Inscryption‘, and is opening them on video. This leads him to discover a floppy disk with, he learns, an unpublished video game version of the cult card game. He plugs it in. “Let’s see what’s on this thing.”
So begins Act 2 of Inscryption. The 3D cabin has been replaced with an 8-bit, Pokemon-inspired overworld view. The same characters are there — Leshy and his bosses, the Stoat, the other talking cards — but they’re in new and unfamiliar forms. The rules of the card game have changed too. Previously, you were playing an animal-themed horror game. To play more powerful creatures, you had to ‘sacrifice’ the lives of ones you already controlled. Wolves and praying mantis’ were among the most powerful cards.
Now you have a choice between four different core mechanics. The animal deck is still there, but there are no others. One uses ‘bones’ — creature death, however it comes — to play creatures. One manipulates gems, and another plays with energy currents. Inscryption lets you mix and match between the styles as you go, defeating the different ‘gym leaders’ and building a more powerful deck as you solve puzzles around the island. Your goal is to replace one of the four ‘Scrybes’ and take over their domain.
But something is very wrong.
“Play the squirrel card.”
Rather than describe the game’s further twists and turns, I want to delve into why I think they’re impressive. Any game can throw in meaningless, tasteless, ‘shocking’ twists — look at Twelve Minutes, from earlier in 2021. Why did Inscryption‘s twists set it apart?
When discussing why I named Hades my Game of 2020, I wrote:
Zagreus is a staggeringly rare kind of protagonist in video games: He is a good person. He’s thoughtful, polite, and complex. He has real relationships with characters, and he actively tries to make the lives of his friends better.
Hades summed up 2020 for me. In a year with so much misery, I saw so many people trying to help, trying to fight, trying to build a better world. Zagreus was the hero I most connected to then. What he went through sucked, but he was willing to put himself on the line to make Hades a better place to live. He fought to build a healthier community.
2021 was a worse year than 2020. The pandemic spread like wildfire, and those in power lost interest in even trying to help. I watched neighbor turn against neighbor, communities split and shatter over vaccination and masking. I was forced back into the office against my will to do a job I could do better and safer from home. Guess what? Now I get asthma attacks constantly. That didn’t happen two years ago. I wonder why.
This was a year where I felt more strongly than ever how trapped in abusive cycles we were. With Trump out of office, any pretense by liberals that they cared about racial justice, economic justice, climate justice — it all went out the window. 2020 changed some minds, woke some people up, but it was hijacked by the bickering of people in power.
This is the feeling Inscryption captures. As the game’s twists and turns hit, you realize that these different figures are all trying to steal control of the game for different reasons — and, you learn, they’re playing with profoundly dangerous forces in order to do so. The figures at the heart of Inscryption don’t care about the consequences of their actions, they care about making their slightly different visions come across. The villains of the game are deeply petty, but the effect they have on the world is profound and lasting.
I found the core gameplay loop of Acts II and III a bit less satisfying than that first creepy act — but I also found the game more meaningful. Inscryption, it turns out, isn’t trying to be the new Slay the Spire. Its card game mechanics are not rigorously balanced. Instead, the changes the game makes to its aesthetics and worldview as it progresses paint a vivid picture of a game about creativity, collaboration, and ego in a surprisingly rich and subtextual way.