Inscryption review

Need to know

What is it? Part deckbuilder, part puzzle room, part nightmare.
Expect to pay: $18/£15
Developer: Daniel Mullins Games
Publisher: Devolver Digital
Reviewed on: Windows 10, Intel Core i7, 16GB RAM, Nvidia GTX 1060
Multiplayer? No
Release date: October 20
Link: Official site

Sometimes board game night feels like a trap. Everyone else wants to play the latest Kickstarter-funded smash that comes with 100 miniatures and takes an hour to set up, or maybe some European worker-placement game about farms or power plants or colonialism. You may as well just go along with it, because that’s how social pressure works. Inscryption turns that situation into grist for horror, trapping you in a spooky cabin where you’re forced to play a deckbuilder. 

Its villain is a shadowy figure, all staring eyes and long fingers, who patiently waits at the table for the game to start. Though you have to play, under pain of death, you can also get up and stretch your legs. There are shelves of trinkets on the walls, a skull, a safe, a cuckoo clock. They’re puzzles to solve as part of the larger puzzle: How do you get out of this cabin?

At Inscryption’s best, the card game and environment work in harmony. The solution to a puzzle in the cabin is hidden in the smudgy grimoire that explains the card game’s rules, and the reward for solving it is a card for your deck. The two progress in parallel. When I was blocked in one because I needed to bash my head against the other for a while, though, that wasn’t so fun. 

(Image credit: Daniel Mullins Games)

 Cabin in the woods 

source: gamezpot.com