INSCRYPTION

Cards of darkness

You are sitting at a candlelit table in a wooden cabin. You are playing cards. You can’t make out your opponent’s face in the darkness – only its large, hungry eyes and the masks it puts on and takes off with enormous, leathery fingers. The card game – summarised by Inscryption’s creator Daniel Mullins as “a deck-building Roguelike in the vein of Slay The Spire” – sees you lining up cards to inflict or block damage, as measured by a pair of golden scales. Cards have a blood price: more powerful varieties require you to sacrifice others for points. Between card battles you move a figurine around a dotted parchment map. It’s not clear what you’re playing for, but the stakes are obviously high.

Sometimes other things appear on the table. There are knives, skulls and sinister goat-heads that seem to affect where cards can be placed. There are pop-up altars where you can burn a card to pass on key traits – the Sparrow, for example, has the ability to bypass the enemy row and strike directly at the shadows across the table. Sometimes the cards whisper things, their snarling animal portraits coming alive in your hand. And sometimes – after winning a round, perhaps – you are able to get up and examine the other objects in the cabin: mechanical statues, locked safes and a door framed by tempting light. “I’ve called it a card-based odyssey,” Mullins observes. “Because that cabin is the beginning of an adventure that will go places that you won’t expect. But I will say that it always remains a card game, primarily.”