YMMV / Inscryption

All spoilers are unmarked. You Have Been Warned!

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• Adorkable: Luke Carder is a young man extremely passionate about trading card games, even a wellspring of trivia about an obscure local favorite of his in the eponymous Inscryption.
• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • Was Magnificus' grudge against you genuine or was it simply an act to have an excuse to duel with you before Inscryption was deleted? There's enough evidence for both of these options - He acts angry both around the other Scrybes and when he faces you at first, and he only changes attitude when he ends up dying, yet one could also argue his grudge is exaggerated for the sake of making your last fight more dramatic and how he did a complete 180° change in attitude when he is unable to fight anymore, suddenly having enough respect for you to shake your hand before he is deleted. It's also possible to Take a Third Option and believe Magnificus did hold a grudge against the player at first - but his fight against you was enough to give him an epiphany and realize you are not at fault over the end of the game.
  • P03's plan to replicate the data for Inscryption and spread it online presumably replicated the OLD_DATA and the Karnoffel Code as well, which is implied to be part of the reason as to why the other Scrybes specifically tried to work together to stop his plot. Was this also an intentional part of P03's plan, or did he view the spread of the data as simply unimportant collateral damage in exchange for getting to live on through the game online?
• Awesome Music:
  • While plenty of the game's tracks provide a chilling and immersive atmosphere, the one considered the most iconic of all is Leshy's Theme, an atmospheric, booming track that provides equal levels of uncertainty and excitement in your last confrontation against the initial Game Master/Leshy himself.
  • The Trapper and The Trader: An ominous, slow piece consisting of bassy humming, hand drumming and banjo notes punctuated by the sounds of skinning animals.
  • The first track you'll hear beyond the menu screen, Deathcard Cabin, sets the mood properly with a soft, lonely banjo motif. Crosses into Tear Jerker territory with Deathcard Reprise during your final game with Leshy as the game deletes itself.
  Leshy: Please... a few more rounds. We don't need to keep score.
  • The Scrybes' "original" boss themes from Act 2, especially Leshy's and Magnificus', utilizing each Scrybe's leitmotif with the Retreaux theme. The fact that each battle also involves something on the HUD that moves to the beat of the music (including Lonely Wizard dancing to Magnificus' theme) only adds to this.
  • The glitchy and frantic "Uberbots Activate" perfectly sets an oppressive tone for P03's boss fights.
  • The True Final Boss of Kaycee's Mod is a skeletal pirate named Royal Dominguez, and his theme song will make you feel like a pirate too, especially during the second phase in the form a fast-paced sea shanty.
• Breather Boss: While the first phase of the Trapper is a genuine puzzle in its own right, the second phase against the trader is absolutely this trope. There is nothing stopping the player from just trading for the creatures blocking their own and winning with whatever the player already had on the field.
• Captain Obvious Reveal: One of the game's main marketing points was being "from the creators of Pony Island", a game where you control someone playing a haunted video game. If you know that and start Inscryption expecting something similar, you won't be surprised at all. The reveal trailer even has a few seconds spoiling the Game Within a Game and Genre Shift twists.
• Cheese Strategy:
  • The base game is absolutely rife with cards that become turn-one win conditions after a single upgrade, work as hard-counters to the most difficult boss phases, or that allow for virtually infinitely scaling damage. These, as well as the completely non-strategic broken mechanics of the Ouroboros and Death Cards, were intentionally included to make sure that players of all skill levels would eventually be able to advance in the story.
  • Kaycee's Mod does remove and/or nerf several cheese strategies, including abusing the squirrel totem, using the Fecundity sigil for infinite cards, and permanently upgrading Ouroboros between runs.
  • If two cards have Undying and low sacrifice costs, you can infinitely sacrifice them for each other in a single turn. This can be used to massively buff the damage of the Lammergier or Red Hart, rapidly increase the power of Ourorboros, or to abuse Trinket Bearer by generating an infinite number of items.
  • Two one blood cards with Undying and Nourishing can be used to infinitely sacrifice each other, boosting their stats to ridiculously high levels.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome:
  • The Mantis God starter deck in Kaycee's Mod is a ridiculously good start and can easily carry a player through all twelve challenge levels with the same strategy. Namely, feed the Ring Worm to the campfire survivors to kill them and then buff the Mantis God at every following fire. So long as the other Ring Worm is removed and no other single blood cards are acquired, the Mantis God will be pulled in every starting hand and can easily clear every non-boss encounter in one turn.
  • The Worthy Sacrifice deck is also a mainstay in beating the Mod. By building the deck to ensure the Goat is always drawn in the first hand and then building a roster of powerful but expensive cards, it's easily possible to create a deck that can clear any encounter in one turn. This can be further enhance with either the Magpie's ability to search for cards, ensuring you always get the ideal card first round, and Undying, to make it possible to summon multiple expensive cards.
• Cry for the Devil: Neither of your hosts are terribly good people, but the game gives plenty of moments worth feeling bad for them. Seeing P03 outright brutally broken by Leshy and the rest, even after forcing a takeover of its own, is difficult to watch, and after that, each of the rest have a final moment of this. Grimora is truly jaded enough by the Awful Truth within the game that she believes destroying everything to have been the right move, Magnificus clings desperately to life and tries desperately to shake your hand as he's erased, and just before that fight, the second-to-last match in the game is simply a zero-stakes game against Leshy again, reflecting on the terrible state of things and truly expressing gratitude for your company.
• Dry Docked Ship: P03 and Leshy have a particular animosity for each other even compared to the other Scrybes (likely stemming from their complete opposite approaches on the games they design), with P03 showing up at Leshy's cabin after his Act 2 defeat just to rub it in his face and Leshy insisting on being the one to off P03 at the end. Because of this, some fans like to joke that they're exes, an interpretation casually supported by Daniel Mullins himself.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Amongst the game's colourful (and ghastly) characters, one of the most beloved by the players is the Prospector from the first boss fight, even though he only appears in a single fight at first, his Large Ham tendencies, wild west mannerisms and quirky design has engraved the minds of many players. The fact that he was the first boss introduced to the players through the demo helped that too. Him appearing again in the 8-bit world as an opponent and helping you out when P03 takes over as the game master wasn't bad either.
  • Magnificus' students, specifically Lonely Wizard and Goobert the goo mage, are among the most popular of the Scrybes' subordinates—Lonely Wizard due being a hyperactive Sense Freak making him very entertaining whenever he shows up and Goobert due to his affable-yet-miserable personality. Part of their popularity also comes from how easy it is to feel sorry for them in their current states, especially since Magnificus himself doesn't seem to care about them much.
• Fanfic Fuel:
  • Players are likely to wonder what games with Grimora and Magnificus as game master would have been like, and what the game would have looked like without the malign influence of the OLD_DATA, and if GameFuna hadn't created the game purely as a front for studying it.
  • Another common plot explored in fanfics is either Luke or Kaycee physically entering the game itself.
  • A small fraction of fans also like to use the game status as a Stealth Sequel to The Hex to create crossovers between the two games.
• Fan Nickname: Leshy is sometimes affectionately referred to as Forest Grandpa/Forest Peepaw by fans.
• Fanon: Leshy doesn't have a full body 3D model like the other Scrybes (only his head, chest, and arms are modeled as he nearly always appears in shadow) and his 2D sprite only vaguely defines his lower half, so it's difficult to tell what it's intended to look like. However, the shape of his legs in said sprite has led people to interpret him as having goat legs.
• Game-Breaker: Has its own page.
• Genius Bonus: The card "Child 13" counts as one. While it's less obvious when it's in its sleeping state, when it's aggravated it's clearly the Jersey Devil, which in some tellings was the 13th child of the Leeds family, cursed into being born a devil by their own mother.
• Goddamned Boss: The Prospector is the first boss in the game, and is rather easy... except for his board-wiping pickaxe that replaces all your creatures with useless Gold Nuggets.
• Heartwarming Moments:
  • The Scrybes playing one final game with you for fun in the finale. Best exemplified by Leshy himself, who despite having been threatening and mean throughout the game, proves to be the best sport of them all.
  • In her final DevLog in Kaycee's Mod, Kaycee (channeling the game's creators) says she dreams of a world where thousands of people play the game and her mod and love it in spite of its imperfections, make fan works and continue to engage with it. In-universe it's heartwarming to think her efforts weren't wasted when the game was pulled, and out of universe it's heartwarming to see how touched the creators of Inscryption were with the reaction to their game.
  • On the subject of Kaycee, the Scrybes seem to very much remember and respect her, as each act references her in some way. Leshy can use a death card bearing her name in his boss fight in Act 1, Grimora has her engraved as a ghoul in her crypt in Act 2, and P03 can name one of his Bounty Hunters after her in Act 3.
• Jerkass Woobie: P03 is definitely a complete bastard, but its desire to leave the other Scrybes behind is at least a little bit understandable given that one of them had spent who knows how long using it as a plaything in his version of the card game, where it likely had to experience the feeling of dying an uncountable number of times. It might have gone better if he wasn't such an Ungrateful Bastard to the player who helped him, though. He's become a bit of a tyrant about it, but his desire to take over as the new game master instead of becoming the challenger's side character makes a lot of sense for this reason. Grimora and Magnificus spent most of their time as cards safely stored away; the Stoat is in every challenger's starting deck, and, as Leshy reminds the player, the cards' suffering is real. Given that P03 is used to living as a machine, experiencing the pain of death and sacrifice as an organic creature in Leshy's game is also probably more unfamiliar for him and harder to take than it is for the other Scrybes.
• Like You Would Really Do It: Despite P03's warnings, the computer files you use to create a card during the Archivist battle do not get deleted when they die. It simply creates a text file on your hard drive, saying that P03 could not get clearance to modify the file, and that the player should delete it themselves if they really respect the game's rules. Funnily enough, if you actually do delete it during the fight, P03 will be surprised that you actually did it.
• Love to Hate: P03 is easily the most dickish of the four scrybes. He's rude and callous, but fans adore the guy because of his over-the-top condescending personality, which also makes him the funniest character in the game.

• Magnificent Bastard: Amid the myriad of gambits that form the central narrative, each of the four Scrybes manage to stand out for their own cunning intellect and strong personality.
  • Leshy, Scrybe of Beasts, is your macabre, yet accommodating Game Master for the first act of the game. Prior to the events of the game, Leshy obtained a piece of the nefarious OLD_DATA lurking in the game's code, and with it in tow, trapped his fellow Scrybes into cards using his magical camera and overhauled Inscryption to his liking, while purposefully leaving his magical camera empty of film when unused to avoid having the same thing done to him. An artist whose number one objective is giving the player a fun experience, Leshy sets up a creepy game involving gruesome mechanics and the stealing of the souls of the player's vessels, all while making his campaign heavy on lore and detail, all of which comes together to make for an immersive, if disturbing, experience. Assisting Grimora and Magnificus in shutting down P03's eventual takeover of the game, when the game starts being deleted Leshy uses his final moments to play with you a little more, having one last fun, casual game together until he shakes your hand farewell.
  • P03, Scrybe of Technology, is first introduced as the condescending and ungrateful "Stoat" that is content to allow Grimora and Magnificus to work to free them from Leshy's control. In truth an arrogant yet quirky robot, P03 uses its factory to dredge up a piece of the OLD_DATA and assume control of Inscryption to draw Luke into its own version of the game. Valuing mechanics over performance, P03 creates a series of meta-breaking Uber Bots to serve as creative and enthralling boss encounters all to district Luke while it works to connect to his Wi-Fi and access the internet. Masterminding the Great Transcendence, P03 seeks to upload itself and Inscryption to the web to finally give itself true freedom and never fall under anyone's control again. Ambushed and beheaded by Leshy before its upload can finish, the ARG reveals P03 had the foresight to upload a copy of itself as a precaution and is shown to have survived the final deletion and ultimately win out in the end.
  • Grimora, Scrybe of the Dead, starts out as the amicable "Stinkbug," freed from her prison inside Leshy's safe with the help of P03. With her at your side, Grimora will give you advice on how to progress, which will eventually result in Magnificus gaining freedom and setting into motion the events that lead to Leshy's downfall, all while Grimora is nothing short of pleasant towards you and her fellow Scrybes. Conspiring to take down P03 alongside Leshy and Magnificus, Grimora triggers the end of Inscryption by swooping up P03's control over Luke Carder's computer and deleting it, in the hopes of ending the Scrybes' infighting and destroying the OLD_DATA that lurks within. Playing one final game with you, Grimora laments that the two of you could have had so much fun together, and gives you a handshake goodbye.
  • Magnificus, Scrybe of Magicks, is first depicted as the one-eyed "Stunted Wolf" and the mastermind that set in motion the series of puzzles that allow Luke to overcome Leshy and free them all from their card prisons. A Plant Person with a long Wizard Beard made of leaves, Magnificus is a seer that foresaw Leshy's takeover and P03's Great Transcendence and took precautions that led to the end of both their plans. A calm and collected being on first glance, his dark side is shown in his tower as he challenges his disciples to horrific and painful tests to prove themselves worthy of being painted into cards for his deck. After Grimora initiates the deletion of Inscryption, Magnificus uses his sheer force of will to hold off his deletion and give Luke one last game before they both meet their makers and is deleted while struggling to shake hands in a final show of respect.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • Bad play / Total misplay. ^Explanation Some of the Stoat's many quotes. These stuck out for being concise yet distinct.
  • "8 fucking bears" ^Explanation During Act 1, should you progress past the first phase of the fight against the Angler or the Trapper/Trader without having uncovered enough of the game's story and mechanics, the game will glitch for a bit before spawning two full rows of Grizzlies on your opponent's side, all of them being equipped with the Mighty Leap sigil. A single Grizzly on its own is a 4/6 unit, so having eight of them guarantees that most players, if they don't have the means to brute-force their way through this phase, would be instantly defeated come the opponent's turn.
    • "TOO FAST, TOO SOON"^Explanation What Leshy says whenever the above happens often becomes part of the meme
  • "Stupid, stupid, idiot gamer." ^Explanation What P03 calls the player during Act III.
• Moment of Awesome: In his final boss battle, Leshy demonstrating just how powerful his camera is by using it on the moon and fielding that against you. Maybe it's just as well it's permanently night around his cabin...
• Narm: The battle against Magnificus in the finale, while likely meant as a dramatic gesture, is nigh-impossible to take seriously. It starts with Magnificus giving you a Duel Disk straight out of Yu-Gi-Oh, replacing the scales with insanely high life totals that you could never hope to get through, and the fight having constant dramatic camera swings that look ridiculous as you and him mash your units together. This all being a joke wouldn't be too bad if it didn't take so long for things to move on. It can become Narm Charm if you see this as Magnificus doing whatever he can to stall for time and finally get the duel he wanted to do using assets that are already more than halfway gone, but it can be absurd in the moment.
• Play the Game, Skip the Story: Unlike previous games by Mullins, wherein gameplay has an element of Stylistic Suck so it doesn't overshadow the meta plot, the eponymous card game in Inscryption is considered to be extremely fun in its own right, to the point that many would rather just replay Act 1 endlessly rather than advance the story. The story decision to downright gloss over the potential for campaigns for Grimora and Magnificus became extremely controversial within days of the game's release, especially with the story ending on a fairly dour and unsatisfying note. Fortunately, fans were able to construct mods for them, and even made a Kaycee's Mod mode for P03.
• Replacement Scrappy: P03's run as Game Master in Act 3 is criticized for not being as atmospheric or interesting mechanically as Leshy's in Act 1, due to P03 having little interest in lore and flavour and simply breaking the fourth wall to explain mechanics rather than narrating and providing an in-universe basis for mechanics.
• Ron the Death Eater: Magnificus is the one who saves everyone from Leshy's cabin, was in the middle of planning a way to beat P03's Grand Transcendence plot before being glitched away, and most of the time he's quite cordial with both the player and the other Scrybes, even surviving the deletion of the game through sheer will just so he can try and shake your hand. Despite these fairly clear-cut positive qualities, fans generally home in on the brutal tests he puts his students through, and use that as basis to frame him as a sadistic monster, with some going a step further and reinterpreting his final moments as the act of a cowardly narcissist trying to save his own skin.
• Scrappy Mechanic: Blood and Bones are generally considered to be interesting, well-designed features that synergize well together, and Energy is seen as, at worst, slightly boring and inoffensive, even if generally considered a downgrade. Mox, meanwhile, can't really stand on its own as a playstyle like any of the other three, relying on taking up about half of your limited play space on worthless cards just to be capable of summoning anything that can fight, and is by far the most aggravating and difficult to get going with little relative reward. P03's campaign can only salvage it by inherently tying it to already-existing energy cards, providing capacity for interesting synergies while already having a much-needed larger board than the other chapters have. Little surprise, really, since the Scrybe representing Mox gets by far the least focus and playtime, too.
• Self-Imposed Challenge:
  • Kaycee's Mod introduces a set of optional modifiers you can use to make the run more difficult, and you're encouraged to complete runs with increasing numbers of challenge points. Some just increase enemy difficuly or take away elements (fewer items, no rare boss rewards or extra lives etc.) but others introduce additional challenges like giving your Squirrels the Waterbourne sigil (so they can't be used to block attacks) or making every boss summon the two rows of bears that would normally only appear if the player went through the story too quickly.
  • The Curious Egg Starter Deck in Kaycee's Mod is very challenging, starting you with three zero-attack egg cards that only gain any useful effects if very specific conditions are met (have cards with health and attack values from 1-5 as well as at least one card from every tribe). Since they only cost one bone you can still get some use out of them by adding some sigils (e.g. Unkillable for tribute fodder) but it's far easier to use any other starter deck.
• Sidetracked By The Golden Saucer: It's not unheard of for people to ignore the puzzles in the room and focus entirely on the card game itself. Under normal circumstances this doesn't qualify, but since the main point of the game is to go through the story...
• Tear Jerker: See here.
• That One Achievement:
  • Collecting every card in Act 2 can take some time, but what really takes the cake is "Devil's Play," which requires you to deal over 666 damage with one attack. The requires setting up an elaborate combo to boost a card's attack and letting it repeat for a long time.
  • "Skull Storm" requires you to complete a Kaycee's Mod run with every challenge modifier enabled, meaning you have to deal with boosted difficulty encounters with totem bonuses for an entire run with only one life. Worst of all the boss bears modifier means that every boss's second phase is replaced with two rows of bears with Mighty Leap (preventing you from cheesing the fight with Flying). This is tough to deal on its own but especially so when the other challenges prevent you stealing a bear with the Angler's Hook or using squirrels to block their attacks.
  • "Bad Moon" requires you to beat the final boss in Kaycee's Mod without destroying the Moon. There are two ways to do this, both of which involve some measure of random luck.
    • First, you can acquire the Magickal Bleach to remove the Moon's anti-flying protection and then use Flying cards to attack Leshy directly. Seeing as Bleach must be unlocked via the portrait puzzles and the majority of cabin puzzles are disabled in Kaycee's Mod, the player may not even realise these puzzles exist.
    • Second, get Undying on two different cards with Trinket Bearer on at least one of them. Set up a combo at the Moon where you can repeatedly sacrifice-cycle these cards to generate a constant flow of items. While this can generate Bleach, you can also use pliers to pull five teeth and tip the scales.
• That One Attack:
  • The Prospector's Pickaxe is a nasty attack for many reasons: First, it wipes out your entire board. Any cards you were planning to use as sacrifices? Gone. Then, it replaces them with useless Gold Nuggets, which deal no damage, are fairly weak, and are unsacrificable. The only saving grace is that it only happens once during the Prospector's battle... until Leshy's first phase, that is.
  • The Grizzly Bosses modifier is the biggest hurdle for the "Skull Storm" achievement. The standard boss fights are changed to replace the second phases with Leshy glitching the game to spawn eight Grizzly Bears with Mighty Leap. The sheer damage output of the bears will likely wipe your board clean on their first turn, so you usually need to win on that first turn. That means either enough high damage multi-attacks to kill the frontline and then hit the boss or getting lucky with the right set of items.
• The Scrappy: Luke "the Lucky" Carder. Even with the ability to skip the raw footage for his card pack opening channel, he leaves a bad impression on the people who were interested in this game for what it was presented as. His over-the-top reactions to getting a good card or flubbing a play (that is, when ''you'' pick a good card or flub a play) can be very grating, and his blase gamer commentary during Act 3 tends to take you out of the drama of the situation. There are even some fans who either dropped the game or never want to replay it because of him.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character:
  • Compared to the first act of the game versus Leshy and P03's Hostile Show Takeover in the third act, your confrontations with the other two Scrybes are extremely brief, consisting of little more than a single round. Due to their circumstances, both can't even be said to be played out in full; Magnificus' barely even gets to properly start due to the world collapsing around you.
    • Similarly, the three side characters associated with each Scrybe, save for Leshy's. The Prospector, The Angler and The Trapper/Trader appear as the bosses of Leshy's act of the game. Unfortunately, the other side characters don't get the same treatment. Instead of repurposing the three bots running his production line, P03 has the Uberbots fill the roles of bosses^note The Dredger even reappears near the end of Act 3, questioning why he wasn't repurposed as a boss before P03 cuts him off. Grimora's ghouls and Magnificus's students only make brief cameos as NPCs in other acts, since neither of them ever get an act to their selves. Grimora even dons a pirate mask resembling Royal Dominguez for a boss fight during the Finale before its immediately deleted. At the very least, Royal Dominguez gets his chance to shine as the True Final Boss of Kaycee's Mod.
  • Even P03's campaign in Act 3 feels like a letdown given that it's an intentionally stripped down version of the game created by a Munchkin who sees all of Leshy's theatrics and worldbuilding (i.e., what most people loved the most about Act 1) as a stupid waste of time.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: Likewise, the entire game can be said to be hit with this, being extremely fun in its own right but suffering from Too Many Cooks Spoil the Soup. Act 1 and 3 are very memorable, but both are too short to qualify as their own game. Act 2 could have also been its own game, but is less complex and enjoyable overall than the other two. The myriad Genre Shift elements mean the most interesting parts of the game don't get as much development as they could have, as the game constantly pulls the rug out from under you and abandons aspects that barely get enough time to shine. While the game is still very enjoyable, it's hard not to wonder what an entire game of just Leshy's cabin or P03's Hostile Show Takeover would have been like. Some particularly disgruntled players have even gone so far as to accuse Mullins (and Devolver, by extension) of outright false advertising due to this.
• Underused Game Mechanic:
  • We only get to see the slightest glimpses of what a game run by Grimora would have been like, but the rules and aesthetic seem like an interestingly defined pseudo-chessboard system, and even less from Magnificus, after Leshy and P03 each get to show off a full campaign informed in fun and interesting ways by their characters.
  • Act 2 fully introduces the four "currencies" — Blood, Bones, Energy and Mox — and has them all interact at once. Act 1 focuses on Blood and Bones, while Act 3 focuses on Energy and Mox. The game never gets the chance to spotlight any other interesting combinations of currencies, such as Bones and Energy, Mox and Blood, etc. in their own dedicated acts.
  • Some players are disappointed that the deck-building gameplay in Act 2 was not more fleshed out. You have one-time battles against the Scrybes and around three of their minions each, but the fights can't be repeated, skew on the low end difficulty-wise and there aren't any hidden encounters or bonus bosses to make players master the mechanics.
• The Woobie: Luke Carder is the only main character that's 100% guilt free and not responsible for anything that happened in the game, and yet he's murdered simply because he found a secret nobody was supposed to find.

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