Typically, when you’re playing a card game, the stakes aren’t that high. Perhaps you’ve got some money on the line. Maybe bragging rights are on the table. But even if you lose, largely speaking, things are going to be fine. Not so in 2021’s Inscryption, a deckbuilder horror game developed by Daniel Mullins Games and published by Devolver Digital, that starts with a haunted card game in a creepy cabin in the woods. But before long, you’ll be eyeing a pair of pliers and wondering which parts of your own body you can live without.
This article contains early-game spoilers for Inscryption.
Let’s set the scene: You wake up. You’re sitting at a table in a dark room. Across from you sits a host who’s mostly cloaked in shadow…except for, unhelpfully, the gleaming whites of his eyes. You don’t get an explanation, yet, as to what’s going on or why you’re there. Instead, he hands you a card and tells you the price. You’re going to need blood, and you’ll get it from an innocent squirrel. Now, think about it: With those eyes staring at you, telling you it’s time to play a game and you need to kill something right now, would you go for it? I hesitated for about three seconds, then went ahead and performed my first gateway blood sacrifice. That’s all — “all” — this game asks from you: Pay for the thing you want with something that can’t say no. (At least, at first.) If you’re good with that, Inscryption is ready and waiting.
So is your host. Leshy, the forest-dwelling hermit across the table, makes his living photographing animals with a magic camera and turning their essences into playing cards. To get out, you’re going to have to beat Leshy at his own game. Just make sure he doesn’t turn you into a card before you figure out a way to escape.
In the first act of Inscryption, you’re playing a tabletop card battler against Leshy, one match at a time. Each creature card has an attack and a health stat. You place your cards in lanes across from his. Determine your play, ring a bell, and your chosen cards attack. Any creature nobody’s blocking deals damage, tracked as teeth on an ominous nearby scale. Earn five teeth, and you win the round. Each card you’d want to play has a price: Blood, usually.
Before you can lay down a card, you’ll need to sacrifice something already on your board. Squirrels are your free option. A separate deck of them sits next to your main one, so on any turn you can draw a fresh sacrifice to fuel your next move. You’ll start to see squirrels (cute, fluffy, innocent squirrels) as chump change, sacrificial pawns. The tally of their bones will stop fazing you, eventually. Each round follows the same rhythm: Draw, sacrifice, play, ring the bell, see whose creatures got through.
Between rounds, the table between you and Leshy turns into a map. As you progress, Leshy moves your wooden figurine across a series of stops, from fights to campfires to altars to a trader who swaps pelts for cards. That map is also where the stakes you’re facing begin to escalate. You begin with animals: Sacrifice anything other than a squirrel, and Leshy will reassure you that the beast isn’t removed from your deck, helpfully informing you that “Its suffering was real. But you will see it again.”
As the fights get tougher, even your best animals won’t be able to keep up. The scale will start to tip against you. That’s when you remember the pliers. And you’ll start to rationalize. “It’s only a tooth,” I found myself whispering. Inscryption makes this trade look reasonable. But how far does that go? Will you pull out a tooth to win a round? What happens when a knife appears? Will you cut out your own eyeball to advance? How did we get here? How much of you will there be left to actually escape?
Polygon named Inscryption its best game of 2021, and the game was nominated for Best Game at the 2022 BAFTAs and won for Game Design. But the awards aren’t really this game’s legacy. What Inscryption truly accomplished was showing us, in horrifying detail, how little convincing it takes before we become part of the horror ourselves. A shadowed host, a blood sacrifice, a squirrel on the chopping block: it turns out that, when asked by the right wide-eyed stranger, I can be talked into nearly anything. That’s a fact about myself I’d happily have gone my whole life without learning.
And this is only the beginning: Leave Leshy’s cabin, and the game flips upside down at least once, becoming a pixel-art adventure that nods to EarthBound and Pokémon, then a factory where your cards are floppy disks, your dealer is a robot, and the thing it wants most is out…but to where? The lines between game and reality may even blur at some point, as you’re directed off the screen and toward real websites and GPS coordinates. Inscryption ups the ante constantly, asking more and more of you in increasingly unhinged ways, and you barely notice the escalation because you’re so entranced. Even with all that, I’d still sit back down at that dimly lit Act 1 table. And that might be the scariest thing about Inscryption: how quickly it pulls you right back in.
Inscryption is available to play on PC, PlayStation 4 and 5, Nintendo Switch, and Xbox Series X.