On Completing “Inscryption”

Yesterday evening, I completed Inscryption on PC. It was my first time playing. I streamed the game on Discord for the friend who had introduced me to the game in the first place.¹

It is a very nice gaming experience built on the back of a robust card game with some incredibly well-delivered moment. Still, I found myself losing interest multiple times. For a number of reasons, it didn’t impress me as deeply as I thought it would.

I will go a little more into the details of my random thoughts in a moment. Before that, however, be aware that there will be SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER FOR FOR FOR INSCRYPTION INSCRYPTION INSCRYPTION!!!

You have been warned.

• Act 1 of the game / the Leshy Arc overall was the most evocative hours I spent in Inscryption and, by far, one of the most powerful first acts I’ve ever played. It can seem a little cliché to say this, but I couldn’t stop playing. I was so immersed, so engaged.
  • The downside was that defeating Leshy felt so rewarding that I wasn’t sure I really wanted to play more of Inscryption.
• Act 2 was indeed a nice addition, even though the UI and the board had become so dense with details and colors that playing was eye-fatiguing compared to how comfortable Leshy’s cabin felt.
  • Being able to challenge an enemy as many times as I wanted without having to backtrack made progressing fast enough not to feel a burden.
• On the contrary, Act 3 felt stretched to me for a number of reasons.
  • First, I didn’t enjoy the flow of the battles as much as in Act 1 and 2. Having to wait for my energy bar to fill up in order to play the strong cards meant slowly passing through the first 3 to 4 turns being barely active only for the game to speed up suddenly after turn 5. I felt forced to play insipid runs for half the battle, in other words.
  • Secondly, the enemy’s moves being always the same made the battles feel more like puzzles than duels; as if I had to play the right combination of cards instead of adapting my tactics to what my decks were giving to me and my challengers.
  • Also, I was a little irritated to find out from my friend that her playthrough of Act 3 had been significantly smoother due to her unlocking the Turret Powerup for the Empty Vessels early in the act. I unlocked it at the end, and boy was hard to go through the battles up to the bosses without the turrets.
    • Regarding the bosses, they felt trivial during Act III, like the game didn’t want me to lose against them. Considering P03’s later reveal that we were helping him (her? Them? It???) taking control of our computer, it makes sense for the bosses to be mere puppets. Then, however, why did some of the battles through Botopia were so difficult? I had to fight the same encounter in the upper-right corner of the map at least five times before getting to the Uberbot in the cabin.
  • Lastly, I honestly just wanted to complete Inscryption and move on with other games by the beginning of Act 3. I wanted to know the fate of the Lucky Carder and the truth behind the floppy. Instead of a quick last arc, however, I was asked to defeat yet another series of bosses with the annoying comments of P03 stalking me. That damn monitorhead.
• The Finale was fine, even touching. I had played so many battles by that point that saying goodbye to the Scribes with yet another duel felt incredibly intimate; as if we were old friends meeting for a last conversation. Like with a long, good book, I had established a personal relationship with the game loop. It had become part of me, in a way, imbued with the emotions, the effort, and the frustration I poured into it as I ventured through the game. So, shaking hands with Grimora hit a lot. Not to talk about playing another round with good old Leshy, who only wanted to play with us in the end.
  • Instead, Magnificus was yet another moment that I felt stretched too thin. The battle was so long, and I hadn’t familiarized enough with his gems gimmick.
  • The guy took his damn time even to crawl and shake hands. I mean, please, just get to the credits.
• Eventually, to the final footage we arrive. But I can’t say I came out of it satisfied.
  • The last interactions with the Scrybes and the other NPCs heavily imply for the first time (save the minor references that made sense while playing the ARG) that there is something very powerful and evil lurking deep within the folders of Inscryption.
    • I was excited by this twist. What could it be? What will I see? The ultimate answer is, unfortunately, nothing. Save for the disturbed sequence of documents and pictures that make Luke go mad. The horror beneath remains undescribed.
    • Everything I now know (the Karnoffel Code, Hitler, etc…) comes from the ARG, whom I read a description of while I was writing this post.
    • The entire ARG arc is cool, but I felt that the main game could tell a little more to help in explaining what that horrible thing in the floppy is. The entire concept felt very cosmic horrorish to me, which I liked, but it stayed so vague through the ending that I couldn’t really make anything of it.
    • I’ve read all kinds of theories about what the Karnoffel Code actually is, with a faint consensus that is something between the codes to launch an apocalyctic nuclear attack from Berlin and Satan himself hidden in the floppy. Is this a conspiracy or Satanism?
      • The cosmic horror stories I like hint vaguely while still providing enough direction for your imagination to fill the blanks in the most existentially frightening possible ways.
        • In the case of Inscryption, should I fear a nuclear winter or floppy-disk Satan? I don’t know, and I don’t feel so scared.
  • The cosmic horror theme brings me to the death of Luke Carder, aka the Lucky Carder. That is something I can’t buy myself into and that significantly decreased the impact the entire ending made on me.
    • Every Lovecraft reader knows that the narrator will eventually meet a gruesome, horrible end either physically or mentally. It’s part of the traditional cosmic horror concept: knowledge will destroy you in the end.
    • But we rarely, if never, see (or read) the actual demise of the victim of cosmic monstrosities. The poor chaps simply stop telling their stories, often implying that their end is near.
    • Luke is clearly one such character. But what he gets is a bullet in his face. Which is cool in its own way, don’t get me wrong. I really appreciate how Daniel Mullins told a story of cosmic horror and conspiracy using a cardgame and some found footage.
    • But Act 1 shoots so higher at implying that there is something huge and incredibly deep running behind Leshy’s game. Something so incredibly alien that you can’t possibly see it. Instead, Luke simply gets shot in the face by the evil lady.
      • It’s a down-to-earth, concrete, explicit simple way of meeting your end. If the footage had gone corrupt or disturbed by some kind of malicious interference, it would have been more evocative.
        • But he gets shot. In the face. Watering down the grandeur of the premise, in my opinion.

As I was surfing Reddit looking for theories, I found an interesting comment about Daniel Mullins’ storytelling. It was an interesting comment ². The Reddit user pointed at how Mullins is a master at building meta-narratives which challenge video games implied rules; he credits Mullins also for delivering his narratives through complex yet engaging ARGs. The content of his narrative, however, feels underdeveloped in comparison to how that same content is delivered. This comment describes quite aptly how I feel about Inscryption‘s overall narrative.

Interestingly enough, the conflict between form and content is one of the most debated topic in communication studies. Is it the form of a message or its content to make a difference to the receiver of that message? An engaging debate which could keep you occupied for years, trust me.

Inscryption‘s overwhelming success seems to indicate that the form can reach the heart of the players, even though the content may feel vague or underdeveloped to someone.

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Wow. It turned out to be a much longer post than I expected. I may have spent a dozen paragraphs cherry-picking my least favorite moments in Inscryption, but I’ll concede that the game drove me into some real thinking!

Thank you, Daniel Mullins. I’ll reserve some time to play Pony Island now.

Image credit: Daniel Mullins Games

1. Hi Sara! ↩︎
2. I believe the talking about indie game developers at large is a little simplistic. But I do think the author of the comment got a point about Mullins’ writing, at least in regard to my experience with Inscryption. ↩︎