You play on a board of 12 spaces, four for you in a row, with four for the stranger, and the middle four where his cards come to attack. Cards have hit points and damage points, and there’s usually a cost involved in using them that scales depending on that card’s power. At its core, the card game follows the same rules as most. Inscryption ’s card game is based on woodland creatures and cryptids, so you get squirrels, wolves, otters, ravens, and the like alongside some unsettling, unspeakable creatures. To descend any deeper into that hole would take away too much from the experience, so let’s just head back to that table in that cabin and examine that a bit more, shall we? So now you have a card game, a board game, and an escape room bundled into one, and even this barely touches the opening of that aforementioned rabbit hole.įor now, though, this is as far as you need to go. Soon it becomes clear that while you’re imprisoned here in a seemingly endless loop of rogue-lite death you are not confined to the table, and can move around the log cabin the game is situated in, and are able to interact with objects contained within it that could prove useful in getting out of the cabin. Some of the playing card critters can talk, and they’re looking to escape this situation just as much as you. With the deck stacked against the player in more ways than one, it’s no surprise that sooner or later, failure is coming, and that’s when you start to figuratively creep towards a very deep-looking rabbit hole of the weird and the unsettling.

When you fall to the mysterious stranger in card-based battle, you find yourself back at the table, and back at the start of the game. Oh, and it’s also kind of a board game too, with a playing piece moving across paper maps, choosing paths to battles, bonuses, and hungry men huddled around a campfire.

With almost nothing in the way of preamble, Inscryption plops you down across a table from a pair of eyes lurking in inky darkness, and has you begin a card game you know next to nothing about, and not-so-vaguely threatens mortal punishment for failure.

Hell, don’t read another word here if you want the optimal experience. I’ll say this right now, go into Inscryption as cold as you can. ‘Not everything is at it first appears’ is a common tool in horror-led storytelling, but in Daniel Mullins’ folk horror-styled Inscryption, it’s less a tool, and more the entire toolbox.

Left 4 dead mod