Inscryption

Overview

Inscryption is a digital collectible card game and adventure game developed by Daniel Mullins Games and published digitally by Devolver Digital for the PC on October 19, 2021, with Mac and Linux support added on June 23, 2022.

Based on an earlier game concept the game's director made for the December 2018 Ludum Dare game jam (with the theme of "sacrifices must be made"), Inscryption has players playing rounds of a tabletop collectible card game against the mysterious gamemaster Leshy inside a locked cabin, where losing the game leads to death.

The game blends several different gameplay genres for its main story, which is mostly set in a first-person perspective. This includes deck-building rogue-lites (in which players must proceed forward through a procedurally-generated, branching path while collecting and upgrading cards, with defeat causing the player to start from the beginning) and first-person "escape room" puzzles (which are required to solve key points throughout the game).

As players progress through the game, the story takes several plot twists about the game itself and who's playing it, sometimes changing the game's overall genre and theme entirely (while still using the same core gameplay of the card game, albeit with their own unique game mechanics). It later received a free epilogue "mini-expansion" on March 17, 2022, known as "Kaycee's Mod".

It later received releases for both the PlayStation 5 and PlayStation 4 on August 30, 2022, for the Nintendo Switch on December 1, 2022, and for both the Xbox Series X|S and Xbox One on April 10, 2023.

Gameplay

Inscryption Card Game

Throughout the game, players play rounds of a fictional collectible card game known as "Inscryption".