Inscyrption is a game that you either love or hate. I hate the game because I think the card game mechanics suck in every aspect. The gameplay ruins all other aspects of the game for me. People who can overlook these issues will be able to appreciate and pay attention to the other details of the game, and have a drastically different experience. This critique will mostly go over why I dislike the card game gameplay.
ACT 1
The card game mechanics of act 1 are extremely frustrating. The clarity of the cards and board are terrible; you can only focus on one section at a time, either the board, the score, the draw pile or your hand. You lack the super important overview that every card game should have; you should have access to all information at once. This means that you often makes bad decisions because first need to check your hand, then go to the board, then check the life, then go back to the hand again and in the process lose information. It is just an awful visual design that creates an artificial difficulty behind a veil of bullshit and frustration. The clarity of the cards could have been much better if the cost was in the left corner such that you instantly saw the blood and bone costs without hovering over every single card for example.
In-between each of the encounters you move throughout a map to build your deck. The map looks excellent with a fantastic horror flavour to the deck building. I would have loved a name next to the encounters or a legend to tell me what the different symbols mean, as I frequently lost track of what the symbols represented. This adds to the frustration of the deck building being made “harder” by even more artificial bullshit.
The bosses you encounter after each of the maps have a fantastic visual and horror flavour to them, but they are designed in such a way that you are going to lose to them a couple of times before you understand what their broken mechanics are and how to deal with them. I don’t like the gameplay loop of playing for 30 minutes before being sent back to start because an overpowered mechanic you don’t know about, it is just frustrating. The bosses sacrifice card game mechanics and balance for the horror narrative of the bosses killing you.
The characters have a very low life total, which means that you kill the enemy character very quickly, but you also die very quickly if you lose control of the board. What this leads to is that strong mechanics and cards ends up breaking the entire game as a single card will have the ability to instantly kill the enemy. The death cards that you get after you die reinforce this mechanic as these cards are typically very overpowered. The important gameplay element is exclusively centred around deck building; how you play the encounters are almost meaningless.
The deck-building aspect was somewhat enjoyable to me when I realised that playing the encounters were not important, only finding broken cards through deck-building mattered.
Every card game will be influenced by the roll of the dice, and how a card game deals with RNG is often what makes or breaks my enjoyment. You will at some point draw terrible at the start and just lose because of it. This poor handling of RNG means that it is yet another source of frustration.
ACT 2
In Act 2 the game completely changes. The game goes from a fantastic horror atmosphere to a dreadful “old Nintendo gameboy” aesthetic that hurts to look at. The new visuals are even worse at conveying what the cards to, and I find most of act 2 to be cluttered and unclear.
The game changes to a card collecting game instead of a rogue-lite. I think the collecting of cards is incredible boring as the cards themselves are boring and dull. There are no interesting aspects to the deck building in the second act.
The card mechanics of act 2 are a disaster. It is either so easy that the game is a joke, or the mechanics in play are so completely bullshit that the game is completely out of your control unless you happen to have a super specific deck and good RNG.
ACT 3
The card mechanics in act 3 changes to yet a another system, but it is still shallow, boring and dull. The game feels very much like a phone game to me at the start of act 3. The game is still about RNG and using time to get a good deck with minimal thought required at any stage. It is at least less frustrating than the previous acts. I did like the unfinished boss somewhat, and it seems to show that the developer is aware of the poor mechanics.
The atmosphere is back to the horror atmosphere and a similar art-style as act 1. However I don’t think it is even close to as good as act 1. I do like the hand being bolted to the table forcing you to play the game though. Moving about the environment however sucks so much, and I don’t understand why they did not allow you to rotate the camera with your mouse instead of only having four directions you can face. It might have been a choice to make the game feel more “retro”, but I don’t like that decision at all.
Overall thoughts
I disliked the card mechanics overall, and found the entire gameplay experience to be poor and very distracting from the rest of the game. The atmosphere and flavour are sometimes quite good, with some neat details, but I can’t bring myself to enjoy them due to the bad gameplay. The narrative is also lost to annoyance and me not caring about it due to the gameplay being bad. I think the game requires you to enjoy the gameplay in order to appreciate the smaller details and nuances that the game does have.
I am very curious about how the game started in the development versus the finished product. To me it almost seems like they initially tried to create four different sections, with the four different scribes and their mechanics. It then feels like the Grimora’s (Undead) and Magnificus’ (Magic) sections were scraped due to time and budget constraints. Their card mechanics are functional, but the map movement and progression does not exist for them. This is very much speculation of course, but it does explain why the second act is so bad.