History VideoGame / Inscryption

** The alternate game mode Kaycee's Mod likely gets its simple name from ''VideoGame/GarrysMod'', a game that started out as a mod of ''VideoGame/HalfLife2'' before becoming a separate release, and, like Kaycee's Mod, is named after its initial developer (that being Garry Newman).

** In the Archivist boss fight, if you delete one of your own files "in the interest of fair play" after the associated card is destroyed (or else just move the file to another location), in-game P03 will be amused that you actually did it, and an achievement will unlock.

* DeletionAsPunishment: In Act 3, during the Archivist boss fight, you are asked to pick a file from your computer (an actual file from your computer), preferably your oldest and dearest file, whatever that is. Whatever file you pick will have a card made from it (the older the file, the stronger the card). You are warned however that if the card is destroyed, the associated file will be deleted. If said card ''is'' destroyed, if you go check where the file is located, you'll find a .txt file stating that the boss really did want to delete, but its powers weren't strong enough. The file goes on to tell you that in the interest of fair play, you should delete the file yourself.

* ContractualBossImmunity: {{Averted}} in the base game: The Moon is vulnerable to the Touch of Death sigil, which allows you to deplete all 40 health in a single hit. Played straight in ''Kaycee's Mod'' thanks to the Made of Stone sigil. [[ZigzaggedTrope Then averted AGAIN in the same mod by allowing you to use the new brush item on the Moon, wiping out all of its sigils and thus making it vastly less dangerous (and even possible to skip fighting entirely, since it can no longer block flying cards).]]

** ''Kaycee's Mod'' has a number of these, by virtue of the fact that most of the game-breaking roguelike features are turned off. A lot of wacky strategies that would haveblown through act 1 are either heavily nerfed or useless here. Pack Rats are pretty much a must have for any deck because while they have pretty poor health and damage they give you a random item upon placement, which depending on the challenge modifiers may basically be ''required to win the game''.

** In the video where Luke opens the Inscryption card packs, he pulls a Blue Mage, hinting that there are other card types besides Leshy's animal-themed ones.

* TheLostWoods: The game master's aesthetic and card game revolves around a rustic, untamed wilderness, sometimes mixed with GrimUpNorth. Specifically, the game seems heavily based on North American forests, with coytoes, prospectors, and wooden totems of animals. Several of the rare cards, including the Urayuli and IIjiraq, are based on folklore from Native American cultures in northern Canada and Alaska. There is also a rare [[FearsomeCrittersOfAmericanFolklore Hodag]] card. What is odd about this is that Leshy is a slavic name, after a woodland creature of Slavic folklore.

* BoringButPractical: After beating bosses, the player is given the option of adding some extremely strong cards in their deck with a wide and interesting variety of abilities and effects, among which, the Geck, is... a 1/1 card. However, it has no cost, which makes for a generally always reliable turn 1 deploy and potentially great fodder for a death card cost.

* ExcusePlot: In-universe after P03 takes over. After making up the name "Uberbots" on the spot, you are told your mission is to activate the "great transcendence." Even gets lampshaded a bit by it saying that it doesn't matter what it is; you want it. Turns out it's because you've had a thin veneer of a plot put together to put the finishing touches on its own grand plan to upload the game.

* AndIMustScream: Each of Magnificus' students voluntarily inflicted this upon themselves to gain their master's approval. The first one turned himself into a mass of goo (he claims the pain is "bearable"); the second turned herself into a head on a pike, and the third locked himself in a realm of total darkness to experience sensory deprivation. You can free the third in Act 3 by gaining him as a card, whereupon he will express a constant desire for a sensation of any kind, even pain.

** During the Finale Grimora's Pirate boss fight starts with bombastic music and cannons falling from the sky, only to be cut short as her mask is deleted.

* TheBeastmaster: Most of the cards are based around animals both realistic and abstract. It comes with the job description as the Scrybe of beasts.
* BadBoss: Magnificus is not a particularly great master to his pupils. They put themselves through hellish suffering (one turned himself into ooze, one decapitated herself and put her head on a pike, and one placed himself in a sensory deprivation room until he went mad) just to gain his approval (and hopefully be made into a card). And in Act 3, you can convince Goobert to give Magnificus a painting he made of the two of them hugging, but when you see it later on in Magnificus' realm, Goobert has been sloppily painted over, leaving just Magnificus.
* BalefulPolymorph: The talking cards are this twofold. They were Leshy's equals before he took pictures of them, turning them into cards. But on top of being turned into cards, their images were morphed into animals. As you continue to play, they slowly begin to revert back into their old forms (though still remaining cards).

* BodyHorror: Respawn enough times in the cabin, and the Stoat, Stinkbug, and Stunted Wolf all start to look extremely... off, deformed in strange ways compared to their previously on-style animal cards. Though this is a subversion, really, in that they're looking more like ''themselves.''

* BrokenBridge: Happens frequently in Act 2 and 3. Lampshaded by Rebecha, who explains that the bridge will be done around about the time you beat a different boss.
* ByTheLightsOfTheirEyes: Your opponent is constant shadow, but his eyes are always plainly visible. This is also the case for the Lonely Wizard, who is encountered in total darkness with only his eyes and hat visible.

* TheDarknessGazesBack: Your mysterious opponent is seen only as a pair of glowing eyes in the darkness. You can also see their hands sometimes, but their face is permanently shrouded in shadow. As the game progresses, there are moments where the darkness retreats to reveal that Leshy is a humanoid mass of plant matter resembling a bearded old man.

* DeathAsGameMechanic: If you lose a run, you get to create a death card, combining the cost, stats, and sigils of different cards in your deck, before your photo is taken and you are turned into a card. This card will be available in future runs.
* DeathSeeker: In the last act, Grimora is revealed to be seeking death, usurping P03's access to the player's hard drive to delete the ''Inscryption'' disk, saying that death is a freedom and that the contents of the disk must be destroyed.

* DiscOneFinalBoss: Defeating the mysterious man in the cabin is just the first part of the game.

* EasterEgg: It's brief, but every opponent in Act 2 is connected to a card symbol that can be seen when their battle begins; [[CagedInsideAMonster the Melter]], for example, has the Frozen Away sigil, which summons a new card on the board when it dies.

* EvilVersusEvil: None of the named characters in the game seem like terribly good people, with your host holding you captive as a KillerGameMaster and the stoat, in particular, somewhat of a standout {{Jerkass}} among your allies. In the "New Game" section, none of them come off terribly kindly either, clearly being a bunch of ambitious infighting figures, with Leshy having turned his allies into cards, P03 taking things over after, and Grimora not hesitating to wipe all of them from existence. Magnificus doesn't do anything to screw over the player, but the abuse he heaps upon his students makes him just as hateable as the rest of the Scrybes.

* ForegoneConclusion: Even without watching the final part of the ARG, the fact that Inscryption's able to play online is a clear sign that P03's plan was successful after all.

* GameplayAndStoryIntegration: The theme of both the story and gameplay is "sacrifice."

* GenreRoulette: Per usual for a Daniel Mullins game. Act 1 is deckbuilding RogueLike in the vein of ''VideoGame/SlayTheSpire.'' Act 2 switches to a 2D exploration game very similar to the first generation of ''Franchise/{{Pokemon}}'' but with cards instead of monsters.. Act 3 goes back to the 3D of Act 1, but ditches the RogueLike structure. Changes made to your deck are permanent and instead of requiring you to start over, losing a game drops all your money on the ground and teleports you to the last waypoint. There's also a mechanic where defeated enemies can respawn. It comes across as if a deckbuilding roguelike had a baby with ''VideoGame/DarkSouls''.

* ItsAWonderfulFailure: Kinda. Should you run out of lives, the entity will "Sacrifice You". This entails throwing you into some kind of closet, and allowing you to make a card of yourself, from a few random cards in your deck. They then take a photo of you, and the game starts anew, but this time, you have a much stronger deck.

* KillerGameMaster: ZigZagged. The shrouded entity you face in this game has ill intent, and it shows in the tutorial with some of their actions, but they are equal parts fair and cruel. One notable example, is upon reaching a boss fight with [[VideoGameLives more than one flame on your candle]] for the first time, the entity will extinguish all but one flame, leaving you one shot to beat the boss. However, for every flame they extinguish, you gain a "The Smoke" card, a 0/1 card which grants 4 extra bones upon death which can be permanently upgraded into "Greater Smoke" by solving some puzzles in the cabin. Much later in the game, his replacement isn't any more accommodating.

* MechanicalAnimals: The third boss The Trapper uses mechanical frog cards. When defeated, these cards turn into animal traps that do no attack damage, however they turn any creature in front of it when it dies into an animal pelt, killing it in the process and returning the pelt to the player's hand.

* NoNameGiven: Subverted. You eventually learn, and the developers have revealed out of game, that your mysterious opponent's name is Leshy. You also get to name every victim of their game regardless of how your run goes, and can see the names of other victims through pre-existing death cards of them.

* OptionalBoss: The final optional challenge modifier in Kaycee's Mod replaces Leshy with a different FinalBoss: [[spoiler:Royal Dominguez and his ship the Limoncello.]]
* OutOfFocus: Magnificus's beheaded student barely gets any screen time, while Goobert and the Lonely Wizard are named characters who appear throughout the game and have a far more significant impact on the plot. In Act 3 she's reduced to a filler NPC on the path to Magnificus's tower.

* PostClimaxConfrontation: After P03 is dealt with and Grimora decides to delete the game itself, the three remaining Scrybes each challenge the player to a card match as the world ends...which are each unfortunately cut short when their files are removed. Magnificus doesn't even get the chance to shake your hand farewell.

* RealityWarper:
** The opponent seems to have shades of this especially in the final boss. One moment you are staring down at the map and suddenly you ''are'' the piece on the map.
** Whichever of the four Scrybes obtains the OLD_DATA becomes this, allowing them to take control of the game world and become the new game master.

* DownerEnding: Grimora successfully destroys the game's files after she, Leshy and Magnificus put a violent end to P03's takeover, and you're left playing one last meaningless game with each of the three of them as the world dies around them. Meanwhile, Luke sees the AwfulTruth in its remains, having spent the real-world sections of the story increasingly obsessed over some dark secret at the core of its development and the company behind it, and is shot in his own home as he tries to bring it to light.

* InstantWinCondition: In the final battle against your captor, on his final life he will summon a giant field-sized card representing the moon that has a massive amount of health and will grind you down pretty fast if you cannot destroy it quickly. But if you play a card with the venomous trait, that card will instantly destroy the moon just like any other card, causing your victory.
** A similar win condition can be found if you've played a card with the stinky trait, like Stinkbug, which will completely neutralize the moon's attack. It won't be as fast, but all you have to do is sit and wait as your cards wear down the moon and eventually destroy it with no contest.

* BigBadEnsemble: Leshy is just one of the four Scrybes, though he is the most ambitious of the four. While two of them are fairly calm and accept that the ToBeAMaster aspect means they will be replaced by a successful player, P03 goes ''absolutely apeshit'' upon realizing it might be DemotedToExtra again and does a HostileShowTakeover, turning the game back into a three-dimensional AloneWithThePsycho game again, this time with it being the KillerGameMaster.

** In the third act, you later get into a similar situation, but this time with P03 after its takeover of the game instead of Leshy. Only this time it's taken UpToEleven, because it's ''handcuffed you to the table.''

* DoubleMeaningTitle: At first glance, the game's title appears to be the game's fictional-world version of "inscription", and inscribing itself happens quite often: the Scrybes creating their cards, Luke Carder creating his video series, and the [=GameFuna=] developers creating the game itself. However, the ''crypt'' in ''Ins-crypt-ion'' can refer to all of the deaths that occur, from Leshy taking the player's photo to the deletion of the game and Kaycee and Luke's deaths, as well as how ''cryptic'' all of the game's secrets are, including the attempted ''cryptography'' of the Karnoffel Code.

* AlternateRealityGame: Roughly a month before the game's official launch, a Youtube account known as "[[https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJRJ0UymMLfutSy0RBxYH4w Lucky Carder]]" was created and started uploading videos connected to ''Inscryption'', hinting at secrets "Beneath the Surface." When ''Inscryption'' was actually released, it took on an entirely new level involving the game's prototype and Daniel Mullins' other works, most of which has been cataloged [[https://docs.google.com/document/d/1faTHC2Yp9ep7apKoVOj-DR6Gj8MvgK680D5UHvxlh8U/edit# here (SPOILERS)]]. [[AllThereInTheManual Alongside several backstory relevations]], it ends with the reveal that P03's online upload of ''Inscryption'' somehow restarted and finished, putting the game out in the open just as he intended.

* PunnyName: Magnificus is a humanoid Ficus plant.

* TheseAreThingsManWasNotMeantToKnow: The OLD_DATA, whatever it may be, is something the characters in the ''Inscryption'' game are too scared to talk about, and for which the company that made the game is willing to kill over. Snippets of what may be the OLD_DATA are shown sporadically - photographs of a woman, a page from the passport of a man, a series of photographs of a brother and sister, and possibly fragmented video footage of Luke Carder playing with a scale from the ''Inscryption'' game.

* AnachronismStew: Being able to store a complex game with 21st-century graphics on a floppy disk shouldn't be possible.

** In a gameplay sense, the player cards can create a lot of these situations. The final boss of Act 1 uses player cards against you, hoisting YOU by your own petard if you managed to create some GameBreakers, but the boss's Trader effect can let you steal them and reverse that hoisting right back at him.

* FreezeFrameBonus: In the final video when the [=GameFuna=] representative shoots Luke, for one brief moment her head is replaced with that of...'''[[VideoGame/TheHex Sado'''.]]

* AllYourPowersCombined: During the final boss battle of Act 1, Leshy uses the powers of every of the previous 3 bosses, constantly switching between their masks while doing so.

* WeaksauceWeakness: Leshy's ultimate card is the Moon, a massive card with 40 health and attacks on all lanes at once. Playing the humble Stink-Bug or any card with the Stinky Sigil will reduce the Moon's attack to zero, making it completely ineffective. If you do this, Leshy [[DevelopersForesight will have special dialogue]] complaining about how moons do not have a sense of smell and how he didn't expect the battle to go like this.

** If you find the Bonelord in Act 3, he promises to tell you what the OLD_DATA is, before asking Luke to turn off his recording device. Whatever it is is enough to shake Luke and P03.