
In the various games within Inscryption, the player can pull some weird cards that just show white noise, encounter strings of binary text, or see strange references that don’t add up. In Carder’s videos, the player can spot secret codes that have no resolution in the game itself. Carder, a YouTuber who posts under the handle The Lucky Carder, is hopelessly enthralled by this strange title he found on a floppy disk, the analog card game it’s based on, and the secret data at the heart of it all.Ĭlues to a bigger mystery pop up continually throughout the game(s).
#Inscryption puzzles series
Protagonist Luke Carder, a fictional character who is within “our” world, shows up in a series of video clips when players reach specific points in the narrative. All four of the Scrybes - Leshy, the antagonist from the game’s opening Gamora, a Scrybe of death Magnificus, a brilliant but cold mind and P03, a robot with a love for min-maxing - are the gods of this digital realm, focused on creating the perfect decks, cards, and games through their unique talents.Īll the while, we watch that protagonist explore the digital copy of Inscryption through our copy of Inscryption purchased from Steam. While the analog card game seems innocent enough, the cursed digital adaptation in the woods (which is what players are using to deck-build, with special cards awarded for solving escape room-style puzzles) seems to be more than just a game - it’s a world unto itself.Īs the player goes through these multiple iterations, they come face to face with Scrybes - sometimes as a friend, sometimes as a foe. But this iteration of the game is nested within others: There’s the retail copy of Inscryption that we as players buy on Steam and play through by building decks and winning matches, which is an avenue from which we see someone else play a digital copy of Inscryption, which he discovered from an analog card game named Inscryption. What players see, at first, is a deck-builder where the player uses an array of beasts and cryptids to beat a mysterious jailer at his own game. Inscryption is intentionally multifaceted and dense with interpretations, thanks to its many gameplay layers it’s a game about a game that’s really about games. Image: Daniel Mullins Games/Devolver Digital But that hasn’t stopped fans from creating videos and Google Docs that dig into the game’s secrets and link them back to Mullins’ previous titles - making solving the mystery a kind of game unto itself. In fact, the game might be better without all of that extra stuff. Is all of this additional information necessary to enjoy Inscryption? Definitely not. There’s a larger mystery at play, and it’s an alluring one.įans have already tracked down all the clues, solved all the puzzles, and even found an extension to the game’s ending.


That’s the trick to Inscryption, and it’s present within all of developer Daniel Mullins’ games. But if you pay attention, there are little clues and hints that seem to have no real conclusion. Inscryption has lots of secrets lurking beneath the surface, and players learn pretty early on that something is amiss with the card game they are playing and the opponent who is testing them.
