![]() ![]() ![]() That’s good too, because it’s not too difficult to stumble upon exploitable strategies that feel great in the moment but ultimately reduce any tough choices substantially, meaning certain sections might start to wear thin if they went on for too long on their own. Without spoiling any surprises, the skin and bones of Inscryption can change just as dramatically as its meat, but the heart at its center always keeps everything pumping to a familiar beat. Similarly, while it starts off using a branching roguelike structure recognizable to anyone who has played Slay the Spire, picking between paths and upgrading your deck as you go, it doesn’t stay that way the whole time. Later sections even explore systems closer to something like Hearthstone or Magic: The Gathering, which keeps Inscryption’s relatively simple fundamentals constantly fresh. But before long you’ll also get cards that instead spend “bones” generated when a friendly creature dies, adding another layer of planning to each decision. For example, the resource for playing stronger cards starts out by forcing you to sacrifice smaller creatures to fuel bigger ones, which can make for some tough but rewarding choices. That’s the core of Inscryption that always stays constant, but the creatures you’ll use, the way you play them, the extra mechanics they have, and the structure of the metagame around each match all shift drastically as you progress. Exciting bosses can also challenge you with prolonged encounters and unique twists, ranging from a miner who turns your creatures into chunks of gold to some later ones that broke my expectations in legitimately jaw-dropping ways. That makes each fight a fun strategic tug-of-war, where taking a hit one turn could mean you’re just out of reach of winning the next. If it’s the latter, any damage they would have done is instead added to your opponent’s side of a tipping scale, but any damage you take will tip it back toward your direction – once one side of that scale is at least five damage heavier than the other, the match is over. That game takes the form of head-to-head battles against an AI opponent: you play creature cards onto your side of the board which will automatically attack whatever is across from them each turn, be that opposing creatures or nothing at all. It took me about nine hours to reach the end of Inscryption, and it’s a proper campaign that tells an interesting and spooky story, takes a few justified jabs at card game culture, and stands as a genuinely fun card game of its own. In this case, you start off playing a roguelike card game against a mysterious adversary shrouded in darkness, but the overall structure isn’t actually one that’s meant to be infinitely replayed. Much like developer Daniel Mullins Games’ iconic Pony Island, Inscryption plays with meta themes in more ways than one.
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