Inscryption review | computer gamers
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What is it? Part deck builder, part puzzle room, part nightmare.
Estimated payment: 18 USD/15 GBP
Developer: Daniel Mullins Game
Publisher: Return number
Comment time: Windows 10, Intel Core i7, 16GB RAM, Nvidia GTX 1060
multiplayer game? Do not
release date: October 20
Association: Official website
Sometimes the night of board games feels like a trap. Everyone else wants to play the latest Kickstarter-funded smash, which comes with 100 miniature models and takes an hour to set up, or maybe some European worker placement game about farms, power plants, or colonialism. You can also go with the flow, because social pressure works like this. Inscryption turns this situation into an atmosphere of horror, trapping you in a ghostly hut, and you are forced to act as a deck builder.
Its villain is a dark figure, staring with both eyes and slender fingers, waiting patiently at the table for the game to start. Although he wants to play, he can get up and stretch his legs even in the pain of death. There are trinket stands, skulls, safes and cuckoo clocks on the walls. They are puzzles that need to be solved as part of a larger puzzle: How do you leave this cabin?
In the best state of Inscryption, the card game and the environment are in harmony. The answer to the puzzle in the cabin is hidden in a dirty magic book explaining the rules of the card game, and the reward for solving it is a card. Both advance in parallel. But when I get blocked in one position because I need to hit another with my head, it’s not that interesting.
Hut in the woods
The game in the game may be a deck builder, but it is not like Slay the Spire but more like the single player mode of the collectible card game-Hearthstone’s single player adventure is redesigned with the theme of wilderness America, all rattlesnakes and Whee. You have collected a pair of animal friends, bullfrogs and wolf pups, and ferrets with familiar statistics and thematic abilities. The skunk smells bad, and the strength of the enemy cards that attack it will be reduced; the beaver builds defensive dams.
The mechanics of this card game are deliberately uncoordinated and grotesque. Most cards have blood fees, which must be paid at the expense of other cards. (For this, you have a set of individual squirrels, each worth one blood free card.) Instead of measuring by health, the damage to you and your opponent is calculated by teeth, which are divided into a pair of balances . You need to be five teeth ahead to win a round. There is an item on the table that can help you adjust the balance. This is a pair of pliers.
Your opponent does not simulate another player, nor does it follow the same rules. He is more like the dungeon owner or dealer in “Hands of Destiny”, telling the encounter and wearing voices and masks to depict NPCs as you cross the map. “Tal is gold in their card!” He yelled like a prospector, an enemy of a boss, his pick turned the card into stone. Then he took off his mask, set up some mini toys by the campfire, and staged a scene with suspicious, hungry travelers. They offered to warm your beast with fire. He may be a ferocious kidnapper, but he put in so much effort, I respect him a little bit.
I played for several hours in The Elder Scrolls: Legends. Their single-player storyline is very interesting: there is a stone wall in the middle of the table; a pirate ship blown by a storm slides cards back and forth. The twists and turns of Inscryption are equally novel. In a game, every wolf card gains the ability to fly; in another case, a hook drags my cards across the board and then turns them towards me.
You just activated my trap card
In the first few hours, Inscryption is a creepy fun full of mystery. This feeling disappeared long before it was over.
Like most deck builders, Inscryption is based on operations. Failure means a fresh start, although you can design a new card to find in a later run, if you do it right, they can be annoyingly overwhelmed. In addition, any solved puzzles in the cabin have been solved. The initial failure still felt like progress, but after my first successful run, I had to solve another puzzle and then repeat the victory, which is when it became a drag. The multi-stage boss battle is initially full of surprises—for example, swapping animal fur for OP cards—it becomes more trivial every time it is repeated. The cuteness in the game is creepy, in which the cards beg not to be sacrificed. The Mycologist proposes to separate them and stitch them together, but the repetition erodes them.
Inscryption is the work of Daniel Mullins Games. He previously made Pony Island (in which the devil forces you to play an off-road vehicle forever) and Hexadecimal (in which video game characters relive the different types of flashbacks they used to play) . These three games are all about games, more layered than the award-winning Great British Bake Off cake. When Inscryption reveals another layer-I won’t destroy what it is, but it is important-it feels more like a chore than a revelation. In the thin and sharp part of Pony Island, Inscryption is more like The Hex. It is full of ideas, but it is not completely fair.
In the first few hours, Inscryption is a creepy fun full of mystery. This feeling disappeared long before it ended, and now I think I prefer if the board game night continues and we play other things, even if it is some Kickstarter nonsense with five kilograms of plastic figurines and needs to be explained in the middle of the night .