The bad news is that this may not be enough to save you, because every lawyer of the game-within-a-game is brutally punishing. The good news is that you can see your opponent’s moves ahead of time. Inscryption takes the card battle mechanics from Sacrifices Must Be Made and expands massively on them with new creatures, new environmental effects, and entirely new games tossed in for flavor. Inscryption captures pretty much everything else: the tension, the secret messages, the urgent and creative puzzle-solving, and the uncanny realism of watching someone’s low-budget, down-to-earth YouTube channel slowly transform into a horror movie. The main differences are that everything is all in one place, so you don’t have to scour the internet for the next part of the game–and you probably won’t have to decode anything written in base64. Playing Inscryption feels a lot like immersing yourself in a horror webseries, alternate reality game, or unfiction project–projects like the Slender Man mythos, Everyman HYBRID, Ben Drowned, or Catastrophe Crow, to name a few. Part Retro Horror Game(s), Part Horror Webseries On an unrelated note, the noise used to mark your opponent’s speech reminded me a lot of the monsters’ voices in Undertale, but this didn’t make Inscryption any less creepy. The game’s soundscape is generally quite subdued, which adds to the general air of unease. It’s definitely drawing on a retro aesthetic, but it uses its retro graphics and sound to evoke the uncanny instead of an old-fashioned charm. When it’s not eerily polished and metallic or imitating the pixel art graphics of a very old-school RPG, this game has an antique and grimy feel to it that reminds me of both old VHS recordings and yellowing linoleum. Basically no one in this game is trustworthy, which really adds to the feelings of ambiguity and dread. He struggles to figure out where it came from in found-footage style cutscenes, all while things around him begin to spiral out of control-both in the game and in his real life. While this was going on, I was also gradually unlocking tantalizing live-action videos dedicated to exploring the game Inscryption from the perspective of a card game vlogger discovers a digital copy of the game buried in the woods. Then the ‘New Game’ button unlocked on the menu and I was confronted with a totally new retro-style game to play, one that added even more options to the fast-paced and brutal card mechanics I’d gotten used to while tasking me with something more ambitious than just staying alive.
The first few hours of Inscryption are dedicated to a tense struggle for survival, but after a certain point, it appeared that I had beaten the game. It is also one of the creepiest games I’ve ever played, period, and that’s saying something. This game is a testament to the storytelling potential of video games as an art form. Inscryption blends genres, and eventually mediums after deciding to throw some found-footage horror videos into the mix. What follows is a genre-crossing meta adventure the likes of which I’ve never seen before. That’s how the game begins, but as things continue, events rapidly spiral out of control. All you know is that if you want to survive, you must defeat them, no matter what victory costs you. You don’t know how you got here or who the shadowy figure seated across the table is. Sacrifices Must Be Made has a special place in my cold, dead heart, but Inscryption is something truly special.
But can this new version step out of the shadow of its predecessor? As it turns out, yeah, it really can. Now, Mullins is ready to unleash Inscryption, a massively expanded version of Sacrifices Must Be Made with enhanced graphics, revamped mechanics, and what may be an even darker storyline than the original. Its combination of charmingly rough graphics, a creative card game, and a deeply disturbing psychological horror story that was slowly revealed over the course of the game won hearts around the world. Once upon a time, game developer Daniel Mullins put together a short, rough game prototype called Sacrifices Must Be Made for a game jam.
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