Code Like It's 198x

Inscryption

A card game that will not stay a card game

Classic GamesSource-checked

Daniel Mullins's card game, released by Devolver Digital in October 2021, grew from a Ludum Dare entry of 2018. It opens in a dark cabin where the player builds a deck of woodland creatures and sacrifices them to play stronger ones against a figure called Leshy, then keeps changing what kind of game it is. It sold over a million copies in under three months and in 2022 became the first game to win the top prizes at both the Independent Games Festival and the Game Developers Choice Awards.

Inscryption begins at a table in a dark cabin, playing cards against its owner, Leshy. The player’s cards are woodland creatures, and the stronger ones cost blood: to play them, creatures already on the table must be sacrificed. Between hands the player can get up from the table and search the cabin for clues, like a player in an escape room. Its store page calls the result “an inky black card-based odyssey that blends the deckbuilding roguelike, escape-room style puzzles, and psychological horror”. That is only the start. The game does not stay in the cabin, or stay the same kind of game, and much of its reputation rests on how it keeps changing.

Fast facts

  • Developer: Daniel Mullins Games, led by Daniel Mullins, who also made Pony Island and The Hex.
  • Publisher: Devolver Digital.
  • Released: 19 October 2021, for Windows; later for Mac and Linux, PlayStation 4 and 5 (August 2022), Nintendo Switch (1 December 2022) and Xbox.
  • Origin: Sacrifices Must Be Made, Mullins’s entry for Ludum Dare 43 in December 2018.
  • Sales: more than a million copies in under three months, according to Devolver.
  • Awards: the Seumas McNally Grand Prize at the Independent Games Festival and Game of the Year at the Game Developers Choice Awards, both in March 2022.

From a weekend jam

Ludum Dare is an online contest in which people make a game from scratch around a theme in a weekend. In December 2018 the theme of Ludum Dare 43 was “Sacrifices must be made”, and Mullins answered it with a small card game of that name, in which creatures are sacrificed to pay for other creatures. That prototype became Inscryption. Mullins told the story at the Game Developers Conference in 2022, in a talk called “Sacrifices Were Made”, which covered how a short game jam prototype grew into what the conference described as “a 14-hour experience”.

The cabin

Leshy acts as the game master, as in a tabletop role-playing game, and the player’s side of the table is summed up on the store page: “Acquire a deck of woodland creature cards by draft, surgery, and self mutilation”. As in other roguelike deck-builders, each attempt builds a new deck as it goes and can end in defeat. Wireframe, discussing how to design card games in December 2021, pointed to Inscryption as a game that “runs on its mysterious, shifting narrative as much as the card gameplay, but includes some neat – and thematically appropriate – mechanics around sacrificing creatures”.

Interfaces that unsettle

The games Mullins made before Inscryption already played tricks on their players. In Pony Island, the player fights for their soul on an arcade machine built by Satan, and the game reaches outside its own screen with an imitation desktop and fake system messages, including a fake Steam message. Mullins told Wireframe in 2020 that he wanted the player “to keep ‘digging’ deeper into the system from the high-level game down to the most basic code of its innards”, and that “archaic interfaces are good at creating discomfort and even horror due to their unintuitive, sometimes unfriendly, and ambiguous nature”. Inscryption uses the same idea on a larger scale. Its later sections change style, rules and presentation, and the story spills out of the game itself. Mullins’s post-mortem covered an alternate reality game, played across the internet and in the real world, which ended with floppy disks mailed to fans.

Reception

Inscryption sold more than a million copies in under three months, according to Devolver Digital. At the Game Developers Conference in March 2022 it won the Seumas McNally Grand Prize, the top award of the Independent Games Festival, and then Game of the Year at the Game Developers Choice Awards, held on the same stage straight afterwards. It was the first game to win the top prize at both ceremonies.

Mullins went on to a sequel to Pony Island. In October 2026 he opened a public test of Pony Island 2: Panda Circus, announcing a release date of 27 April 2027.

Sources

See also

Checked. Verified against primary sources and signed off by a person.