Rest assured, thousands of squirrels were harmed in the playing of this video game. You see, each card, except for the squirrel (cards in this act are all based on animals), requires at least one blood sacrifice to be put on the board – the stronger the card, the higher the casualties. Now I haven’t played many deck builders except for a tiny bit of Hearthstone and a decent bit of Slay the Spire (they’re just not my type of game), but even my deckbuilder-averse self immediately fell in love with the ‘sacrifice’ mechanic the tutorial introduces you to.
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You soon discover some of the cards seem alive and talk to you, giving you hints on how to progress, and the fuckery only escalates from there. Right from the very start, it’s obvious Inscryption has some fuckery in store for you – the start menu has the ‘New Game’ option greyed out, forcing you to click on ‘Continue’, which elegantly starts you off on the back foot before the game even begins! Upon doing so, you find yourself sitting down in a spooky cabin, facing this mysterious shadowy stranger with spirals for eyes and deep bass sounds for speech, who strongly persuades you to play a card game with him. It’s where I got the most enjoyment from anyway. It would be a genuine travesty to spoil the twists and turns though, so for now (I’ll hint at them later), let’s focus on the first part of the game which is what’s shown off in the trailers and which makes up the first 40% or so of the game. Come for the Cards…Īlright so let’s start with the core gameplay, shall we? What starts off ostensibly as just another roguelike deckbuilder, soon evolves into something much, much more. Inscryption is a genre-melding, delightfully meta, gleefully unpredictable roguelike deckbuilder (with some puzzle/escape room, and other -redacted-due-to-spoiler elements) that kept surprising me to the very end, though my enjoyment did admittedly wane over time.
Indeed, every so often, in the midst of the Far Cry s, Assassin’s Creed s, Call of Duty s, and the myriad borderline asset flips, an indie game comes along seemingly out of the blue that accomplishes something so ground-breaking ( Disco Elysium, Gone Home), so creatively affluent ( Undertale, Return of the Obra Dinn), and just plain fucking cool ( Inside, Hades) that it refreshes and redefines what videogames are capable of, not to mention brings a tear to my myopic eye.Īnd so it is with Daniel Mullins’ follow-up to 2016’s remarkable Pony Island (which blew me away and instilled newfound respect for the medium in me). From the ever-present annoyance of microtransactions and loot boxes to misleading trailers and broken promises to the irksome conversation around crunch culture and the repulsive frat-boyisms of normalized sexual harassment in the industry, it can sometimes be a challenge to get excited about games when you’re so keenly tuned in to the happenings in the industry.īut somehow, thankfully, the medium of videogames occasionally graces us with unforgettably creative, smile-inducingly fulfilling, and wholly worthwhile experiences that are unparalleled in any other medium, which keeps me coming back to it, excited as a giddy kid on Christmas, and gets me shouting the good word of our lord and savior Gaben from the rooftops to anyone who’ll listen.
Let’s face it, we ‘gamers’ can be a pretty jaded bunch.