The appeal of Inscription ↗ is its cool card game tied to a rogue-lite progression through the story. I found the game to be made of two major parts and, surprisingly, even though the story is interesting, I think that the game establishes a theme which later gets betrayed – let me elaborate; spoilers ahead.
The game starts with you being forced into playing a card game against a dungeon mater (Leshy) who challenges you in an ascension through a map. Throughout the journey you encounter varied places, building and upgrading your card deck. The game becomes harder and harder and you inevitably lose which makes Leshy take a photo of you, killing you in the process.
You start anew and repeat. The game becomes very fun after a few runs as more complete experience opens to you. There are many card abilities, through each run you may be able to build a differently flavored deck, and the several bosses through the game introduce interesting challenges. During a run you may acquire items that can help you win games, but get destroyed after a use. Aside from the game itself you become able to traverse the room – there is the table where the game is played, but also many other things to look around, and quite of them are puzzles to be solved. This adds an ’escape room’ feel to the game. Adding to that, some cards suddenly start talking to you, adding to the mysterious feeling. Overall, this part of the game has one of the best established atmospheres I played through.
In about the middle of the game you win a run. You take a photo of Leshy, restart the game, and the game changes to a pixelart topdown style game where you run around the world trying to collect cards and win some battles. You progress through battles four main bosses of the world, Leshy being one of them. Each boss has a unique flavor so card games differ significantly from one to the other. However, this is where the betrayal happened – even if it is interesting suddenly the game changed so much that I could have been playing a different game. The reason for this change is explained via the plot but still, the game established the uneasy feeling in the first half which gets dropped in the second half. In the end it returns a bit but a big chunk of the game was juts so different that I had to force myself to play through it. Even then, the game is an easy recommendation, if only for the feeling one gets in the first half or the overall story.
The essence of Inscription’s card game was extracted to a more recent Buckshot Roulette ↗ which, even through its significantly simpler mechanics, achieves to invoke a similar feeling adjacent to the one found in the first half of inscription.