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Fridge Brilliance
- During Chapter 1, your stoat card will continuously fall asleep if not put in play, and admonish you for playing him once woken up. Later, it's revealed that the stoat was actually one of the original four Scrybes in the game, and furthermore, it was a TV Head Robot. What happens when a computer is left idle for too long? It enters "sleep mode"!
- If the player manages to reach Grimora's boss battle during her session in Act III, she tries to initiate a pirate boss battle before being cut off short by its assets being deleted. Go back a bit earlier in Act II and there's a character in her crypt named Royal Dominguez, a pirate who died of scurvy. Looks like she would have planned to used the deceased from her crypt for her boss battles!
- It also reflects how Leshy and Grimora, both on the right side of the Act 2 map, are A Lighter Shade of Grey from the leftwards Scrybes; they are both willing to incorporate their allies into their games willingly, whereas P03 reduced the Dredger to a bit part (and was only still included at all due to finding OLD_DATA) and Magnificus always treats his students as completely disposable.
- The red X on P03's screen as Leshy tore his head off could have been more than a design choice; if his head had the electronic power to display an image, then he could have also finished uploading the game, explaining how the upload was completed even if we hadn't seen it.
- The main trope page mentions that the game's size far exceeds the capacity of the Magic Floppy Disk to store. However, the game we play is actually bundled with all of Luke's camera footage, which is likely in an uncompressed and unedited state, meaning it likely makes up the bulk of the game's size.
- According to Kaycee's devlog when she found P03's card he told her who he was and asked for help. She laughed and handed him over to Leshy since she saw him as a friend. This may well be why P03 keeps his true nature to himself in the main game.
- Kaycee's devlogs indicate that The Woodcarver used to speak during Leshy's games and told her about the OLD_DATA. Given that Kaycee ends up dying this may explain why the Carver is so hesitant to share anything and tries to warn Luke Carder away from the OLD_DATA in the main story.
- Of course Act 2 is in an 8-bit format: it's a story about the Scrybes' distant past. For them, this is the equivalent of film footage fading into grainy black-and-white.
- As Leshy welcomes you for the final round of in his cabin in Act 3, he wistfully reminisces: "There never seems to be enough time to do the things you want to do, once you've found them." This is an (almost) exact quotation from Jim Croce's song ''Time In A Bottle''
. If he's such a big fan of the song, that probably explains why some of his bonus items follow a "_____ In A Bottle" format. - The cards Leshy imprisons his fellow Scrybes in all hint at their true nature:
- P03 as the Stoat - an animal known for its aggressiveness when cornered and its solitary nature (note P03's general disdain for his fellow Scrybes in all three Acts);
- Grimora as the Stink Bug - after all, the undead aren't known for their fragrant body odour;
- Magnificus as the Stunted Wolf - in Act 2, you discover that Magnificus' method for "training" his apprentices is to physically disable them.
- It's more than likely P03 is named for Edgar Allan Poe. A recurring pattern of Poe's work is unwanted and loathsome creatures (The Black Cat, Madeline Usher, the Tell-Tale Heart) being buried underground where the protagonist hopes they'll lie forever - only for said creatures to break out at just the worst possible moment. Similarly, all through Act 3 the other Scrybes - and the Mycologists - have been in hiding, ready to undermine P03's "perfect" game.
- Another parallel is of course the game itself - hidden beneath "The Great Transcendence," the game is waiting to emerge and infect the world with its' horrors.
- The title for the 'pilot' of the game was Sacrifices Must Be Made. This theme carries on throughout the gameplay, where you can only play certain cards by sacrificing others. It then becomes the ending - to save the world from the OLD_DATA, the Scrybes themselves are sacrificed.
- The only difference is that it's Grimora destroying all of them for the world rather than a simple quid pro quo. When you start to play her game as Act 3 winds down you can see why - she has created no mechanics to allow a player to remove a card once it's played. As the Scrybe of Death, it is in her nature to make the competition all-or-nothing.
- The commonality between Leshy's bosses is that they're all hunting for something - gold, fish, animals - which is revealed in the notes for Kaycee's Mod to be a cover for Leshy's own pursuit of the OLD_DATA. It's not unlikely that he created them and/or invited them into his game for precisely that purpose. (Note that the Woodcarver, the only character of his game who isn't hunting for something, is also the most self-aware - and the only one to warn Luke against looking at the data.)
- This foreshadows the climax of P03's game - where Leshy was looking for the data, he was intent on releasing it, and his bosses are all focused around that goal.
- There is a small physical resemblance between the Lonely Wizard and Leshy (two bulging eyes in the dark). This makes more sense when you remember that all the Scrybes seem to hate or resent each other, and that it's not above them to try and capture people in their games - e.g., Grimora's pet zombies, or Leshy's deathcards. The Lonely Wizard is Magnificus' attempt at mocking Leshy.
Fridge Horror
- As is made rather abundantly clear in The Hex, GameFuna is run by Satan. It's implied that he himself created the Inscryption video game as a means of decrypting the OLD_DATA which contains, among other things, the Karnoffel Code, heavily implied by the Kaycee's Mod dev notes to be the activation sequence to a Nazi doomsday device which could easily wipe out over half of Europe in the blink of an eye. Now remember that, by the time Amanda murders Luke and takes the disk, the game's purpose has been fulfilled: the OLD_DATA has been completely decrypted and unpacked, and now that unlocked data is back in GameFuna's hands. In case it needs to be spelled out: Satan now has the key to exterminating hundreds of millions of people instantly, and many, many more in the long term as the fallout likely leads to World War III... and what's worse, he could do so at any time. So remember that bumbling, incompetent game developer from way back in Pony Island? He's finally stopped fucking around, and he's a single press of a button away from getting all the souls he could ever want.
Fridge Logic
- If Kaycee Hobbes was the one who buried the copy of Inscryption that Luke finds, then how is it possible that the Kaycee character from Grimora's area (clearly modeled after Kaycee and the way she died) would be in that copy of the game? Did the OLD_DATA program her in after the fire? Or had GameFuna already planned to axe her before that point?
- In addition, if Grimora session wasn't cut off short, that also possibly means we would have fought Kaycee, and with her knowledge about OLD_DATA, who knows what it could be like?
- The in-game Kaycee is a red herring. It doesn't represent the real Kaycee or how she died - it's just an easter egg she most likely added into the game herself, because she worked in QA. Ironically, the in-game Kaycee died from ice-related causes - the exact opposite to how she died in 'real' life. P03 even lampshades this by having her melt the ice in the Grimora section of the holoworld.
- In Kaycee's Mod, the developer notes that Leshy was using her ghoul's skull to store the victory teeth, so it existed before she died (it's not unheard of for developers to put little cameos and references in their games).
- How and why was the digital copy buried where it was in the first place, and why was the location written on what's assumed to be a piece of paper in a resealed "Inscryption" booster pack that was sold at a garage sale? Given that the company that made the game is so paranoid about not wanting it to be found at all to the point of sending someone to kill Luke just for finding it and not giving it back, one would think that the location would never have been written down.
- Given that the cards belonged to Kaycee, presumably she's the one who buried it. We also know she had at least some solid idea about OLD_DATA, which may be why she wanted it buried. As for why she wrote down the coordinates, you never know when it might need to be retreived or even just moved.
- How is G0lly able to access friends lists across the web and send custom cards to other people playing the game if there's only one known copy of the game during the story?
- G0lly isnt trying to access the web to communicate with other games - she's trying to access the internet and upload Inscryption. That's why she takes so long, since the upload takes so long - and also explains how PO3 survived - He didnt upload at the end, he already had golly upload everything.
