Inscryption

SPOILERS The first act opens up with intrigue and a genuinely well crafted virtual card game, a card game so good I wish it were real or was available as it's own stand-alone multiplayer package. As you play this creepy card game in a creepy cabin you can stand up from the table and explore the room, solving puzzles within it as a story slowly unfolds and I was itching to play the other acts! The game should've stopped here after you had gotten the new game card. After that amazing first act the game becomes so pointlessly meta, throwing away everything established up to that point, including the rouge-like elements, to give you the most generic found footage nonsense imaginable complete with hokey acting, and it suddenly revolves around cursed video game disk you had dug up in the forest (you can probably guess the entire remaining story from that alone). The game progresses not out of intrigue but because the main character, a sort of a B-tier YouTuber, is a dumbass. If a secret agent acting shady is knocking on your door asking for the game disk back, then just give them the disk since you stand to loose nothing from it; he doesn't do that. If the disk is doing weird spooky things that are concerning, then just take the disk out of the drive and snap it in half; he doesn't do that. Likewise, if the "old_data" is so upsetting that it can collapse a company and kill people then why did the company bury it in the forest instead of just erasing the damn floppy disk? The gameplay in these sections is also not great and is nowhere near as fully realised. Act 2 was budget pokemon and dull, Act 3 against P03 was similar to Act 1 but the mechanics were changed for the worse, and Act 4 with it's gratuitous Yu-Gi-Oh battle was just poor. This game really needed to end after you had gotten the New Game Card.

This is a shockingly deep deck-building game. If you're reading this review before playing, I strongly suggest you stop reading about the game. Unlike most deck-builders, there is plenty of opportunity for spoilers that will hurt the experience. The game mechanics are solid so, if you enjoy deck building games like Slay the Spire at all, you'll probably enjoy this one.

Only play this game, if you can stand copious amounts of RNG (yes, even extreme for Roguelikes and Deckbuilding games) and the frustrating, atmosphere ruining moments that come with it.

Awesome game with amazing atmosphere. Go in blind and it's gonna be one helluva trip, can't recommend it enough.

Inscryption is a game that oozes ambition and creativity, combining multiple genres and turning a simple card game not only into multiple games in itself but also into a whole plot that involves real life characters and all. As the cliche goes though, jack of all trades master of none, and what starts being a captivating and strange games becomes a sluggish experience way quicker than expected, with a series of bad decisions adding up and almost getting magnified as punishment for the extended scope of the project. This game has three acts and I was already weary before the first one ended, even if I could appreciate the effort and thinking behind the entire thing, it just wasn't enough to compensate. The main issue might be how deliberately slow it is, considering how at its core it never stops being a card game, even though it really wants to be a lot more than that. Was it a problem of scale? I'm not sure, but it also feels like different games stitched altogether which hints to a not compelling enough narrative to tie the whole thing. -1 because I had to trudge for more than half of it and -1 because it feels wasted, even if it serves as a good reminder that great ambition and creativity might not be enough.