I’ve spent just under two hours with the demo for Inscryption, the upcoming game from Daniel Mullins Games and Devolver, and my quick preview is this: It’s wonderful, everyone should buy this game on October 19th.
Okay, a bit more detail: Inscryption is a seemingly simple roguelike deck-builder card game with escape-room style puzzles (think The Room series) wrapped in a deliciously dark, unsettling and creepy horror theme. You play against a captor in a dim and dingy cabin. Most of the time, you only see their eyes peering at you from the shadows across the card table. You begin the game with a fairly basic deck of cards and gain more as you play – either by winning them, finding them in the world, or solving puzzles. Cards have basic attack and health stats and, most of the time, it’s just a case of defeating the cards placed by your captor before your cards can then start damaging them. Once you’ve knocked a certain number of points off your captor’s health, you win! Or if they knock off all your health, you lose! Oh, but you can’t just place down whatever cards you like. Cards have a cost and, usually, that entails sacrificing other cards to make way for something better. There are also items found along the way to help you, like a useful pair of pliers, for example, that you can use to pull out your own teeth to then immediately lower your opponent’s health count by one point per tooth. Yep.
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Between card games, you will be shown a map where you can move along and encounter various things like item caches, campfires where you can upgrade your cards, or shops of one kind or another – similar to how you progress in Slay The Spire. At this point, you can also step away from the table and look around the cabin, which is where you will discover the escape room style puzzles. I’m not saying you’ll ever escape the cabin, but solving some of these certainly gets you better cards. You may get hints as to how to solve these puzzles during other parts of the game – like an incessantly talking stoat card who may tell you where to find the combination to a safe, for example.
The demo isn’t massively long, though can be reset, but gives a hint of much more to come in the final game, which I am very much looking forward to. I’d say that if deck builder games aren’t your thing, then give the demo a shot and it might surprise you. The mechanics are relatively simple to get to grips with, but there is clearly an increasing difficulty arc to keep things interesting. For me, this is looking like the kind of game I’d end up getting on a few different systems and enjoy on each playthrough. Now, excuse me while I reset the demo again…
Inscryption is due to launch on Steam on October 19th and you can find the demo and wishlist the game here. Check out the latest developer vid below!
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