This is part of a continuing series of old rants/essays/snark/thoughts/etc/etc/etc from years back that I figured I might as well throw somewhere other than a decrepit and deleted Discord server. This one comes from a “video game book club” that I played with some fellow traveler nerds.

As Always, Assume Spoilers

Finished Inscryption. My opinion remains about the same as I reported earlier. There’s a few too many horror themes going on that clash, and the meta-story is far too cute for no real payoff. Also the ending is both somehow too terse (OLD_DATA has no payoff) and too long (a long padded goodbye to EVERYONE). I was left both vaguely confused, unsatisfied, and very tired.

Spoilers will inevitably follow, though I’ll try and black them out.

My perspective, in (roughly) three acts

Act 1

  • Act 1 is creepy and is basically what I wanted to be refined throughout
  • I fucking love the cards talking to you
  • There are so many stylish and clever things here that I take a massive delight in
  • The escape room puzzles actually add quite a bit of macabre tone as well as teaching
  • The death loop of creating new cards is just fun and “cute”
  • High point: a picture of the moon
  • Low point: the dark room before the New Game, it didn’t work the first time I went to the menu for some reason so I spent too long there
  • I haven’t played the mod that turns this into a proper roguelike, but I imagine it need a lot of rebalancing - this is built around a slow power creep into breaking the game
  • In case I hadn’t praised this enough, I goddamn love every single stylistic thing here. Legitimately creepy and unnerving and yet so fun and creative. Fucking genius cosmic horror vibes, straight up.
  • If the game was just this, but the design was pushed further, I would call this an A+ amazing experience.

Act 2

  • The meta story first appears here via the Youtuber. It’s cute, but shallow so far. It is jarring to me because it feels completely disconnected on a thematic level
  • Well shit, I get the gaming references, but what the fuck is this Final Fantasy shit
  • So we went from Roguelike to CCG, which is always a bit jank in digital games. Look, I like MtG, but this UX is not especially good for it.
  • After all the previous creative style, this felt very standard-issue rote to me
  • This section felt . . . Very long to me.

Act 3

  • Well, at least we get some plot here, pity it’s from the least colorful character. I know that’s the point, but come on. My frustration and dissatisfaction is probably the point, but it’s so long (4 repetitious zones again) with relatively little break it up.
  • Weird choice to introduce a bunch of Dark Souls reference mechanics explicitly for the “mechanics over style” section since Dark Souls is just as if not more famous for it’s style than mechanics. I get the idea, but it feels like a strong miss - which is odd, because the game is usually pretty coherent on it’s themes, even if they don’t go together.
  • The more explicit meta elements of interacting with Steam or the filesystem were cute, if not especially clear. I don’t love the odd blurring of who the user is again, but upon consideration I think it’s net a good addition. After Doki Doki Literature Club, it feels weaker though.
  • Holy shit, this also feels really padded and drawn out.
  • I do love the neck snap

Finale

  • Holy Shit, did every Scrybe need a five to ten minute farewell sequence? It feels extremely padded, and I barely knew two of them
  • I love (sarcasm) how the game calls such attention to the Old Data, building hints into screams, climaxes on the discovery, and then gives no context. I like the unknowable in horror, but I need to know what the unknowable thing represents at least. And the game doesn’t tell me this at all, it just says “look at the scary evil thing” and I think it’s supposed to be the source of sentience, but that’s never actually implied. It’s just the only guess that makes it relevant.

Fucking ARG

  • Yes, that’s a pun.
  • I looked up the ARG, which I found trying to Google what the Old Data was. I did not try to solve it.
  • I’m not sure the value of dropping a huge question mark on the plot at the end after hinting at it for so long (Old Data). I’m less sure of it when it’s actually answered in a completely different piece of media. I’m completely disinvested if it feels like the answer I got has nothing to do with the main game, and is very silly to boot.
  • Fuckin’ Soviet Hitler computer magic. I think it’s supposed to be 90s style syncretism, but it feels disconnected from everything else in the game thematically.

Misc

  • I really question the value of “non-diegetic diegetic elements” - For example, the game interacts with the player as if there’s a player-meta component, but actually the game has a main character who is Luke, who the game treats as either the player or a character at various points of convenience. So are WE playing the creepy game or is HE? The game seems to fall on the latter pretty heavily for anything to make sense, although that seems to defeat the point of the overly-clever meta elements.
  • I think the story’s indecision between the “the game is self aware and trying to replicate while talking to the player” and “the story of Youtuber who learned dark secrets and was killed for it” is a real weakness because they clash rather than reinforce each other. Made worse by the ARG effectively continuing the story to a different place that supports one of the stories but confuses the other.
  • I kinda appreciate the interest in contrasting approaches of game design ( technique vs style ), but I’m not sure that I needed a full “four corners” map twice. It took too long to reveal that theme, and spent too much time. Either cut two Scrybes or develop a perspective for each. It doesn’t help the theme either that the “style” section is just better and also technically excellent, thus undercutting any point.
  • Rule of 3 instead of 4 of everything would have substantially improved the pacing.

Summation

  • I liked some parts a fuckton, was left cold on others, although I didn’t particularly dislike anything
  • It really just felt overstuffed with too many things that didn’t always gel. Which is odd for the dev’s third game?
  • I’m glad it exists as a fun set of experiments, but I kinda wish it had picked a lane
  • On the other hand, have you seen this word count? Clearly it gave me a lot more to dig into than most games. So that probably justifies it’s place as some kind of art.

Personal Verdict, based on why I play games

  • Story - It really just failed to grab me? The lack of real payoff doesn’t help.
  • Aesthetics - Act 1 is goddamn amazing, the rest is . . . Eh.
  • Flow - There’s something here that kept me hooked to finish, but I think the back two thirds was cruising hard on the strength of the first third. I
  • Exploration - Eh, it technically exists, but it feels weak to me
  • Discovery - There’s a decent amount here and there
  • Emotional Invocation - Yes, strongly for the first Act, no for after that.
  • Player Expression - Some, but nothing to hang your hat on