Deck builders are a hard sell for me, which makes what this game was able to do even more impressive. This is the most engaged I've been with a game in a while and the fact that I completed the whole thing in the span of like, 2 weeks should be a testament to that. I was hooked. The game never felt like it was getting too repetitive, the mechanical depth was just right for a beginner, the environments were great and the escape-room subgame was a really nice touch. That all said there were a few minor things that did bother me while playing, but we'll get around to those shortly. This game was also pretty much 3 games so I'll try to compartmentalize my review into sections.
There are a few things that reasonably apply to all acts of the game so I'll make notes on that here.
I really liked the way the "health" system works in this game. Watching the scales and trying to optimize your play around them was quite fun (albeit it took me an embarrassing amount of time to embrace this meta).
The difficulty was perfect for a 1st-time deck builder player. I liked how it sort of self-scaled to adjust to your skill level as you played. I do think that even at it's most difficult, this game probably isn't that difficult for an experienced roguelike player, but for me it was great. I'm quite interested in attempting Kaycee's mod to see how I do without the game making itself easier for me. My only issue was that the game may have become a bit too easy too quickly. Every time I failed the game got a bit easier, but I also got a bit better at refining my strategy. I think that I missed the happy middle-ground in my case, but I still had fun for the whole time, so who's to say?
I will say, I was somewhat disappointed at the end. Something about the game still felt, incomplete? I guess if you were super into the ARG elements, that could be just the beginning, but if you're just in it because you're having a lot of fun with the card game/escape room mechanics it's kind of a bummer. I guess it works story wise? It seems like Grimora just wants to get rid of the Old_Data, but Old Data doesn't have any significance to anything before literally the game ends, so it just feels kind of anti-climactic in that way. Like, yeah maybe if I did the ARG I'd think it was cool but tbh it kinda felt like a nothing-burger of an ending. I just wasn't super invested. I guess I felt all the emotions they wanted me too watching the game get deleted, remorse that I'd never get to play a flushed out Grimora game, Nostalgia and sorrow that I wouldn't be seeing Leshy again, Gratitude that I didn't have to play a whole act of Magnificus... But the entire thing culminating with Luke Carder seeing some files he wasn't supposed to see and then getting shot just didn't do it for me.
Act 1 was absolute dynamite. The tutorial was comprehensive but not overly hand-holdy. It explained everything I needed to know to play the game correctly, but was still relatively short due to the extremely low bar to entry for this game. I will say that the bear wall as a means to enforce a scripted death is maybe not the best move, as if my chat hadn't told me I was going to go back in thinking that I'd get bear-walled again, which I think is a common misconception for those who do well on their 1st run. It might be better to have a card named "Scripted Death" for these sorts of situations to make it abundantly obvious to the player what's happening and that they don't need to somehow build a deck powerful enough to kill 8 grizzlies before reaching prospector.
The gameplay itself was super fun, I did have some difficulty remembering what all the map icons meant at times, but I think that's more my fault than anything else. The rare cards were cool and interesting, I liked how they often would have hidden mechanics that the player may or may not discover during play. I know I probably missed some, but the ones I did stumble into felt really cool to discover. The core loop was interesting and I liked the weight of the card choice each turn. There were genuine moments where I felt I had to make a tough call of which deck to draw from.
The bosses were fun to learn and fight, I liked the additional mechanics they tossed in and figuring out how to play around them. They all broke the mold for how a fight is typically played and required a unique mindset when putting together a strategy.
Reflecting on my own play, there are certainly things I could've done differently. I definitely could've gotten away with using more items, I don't really have much to say about the item system because I used items quite infrequently. I will say that they all have unique strategic applications and when I did eventually decide to start using a few of them I enjoyed contemplating the best way to use them/if they could prevent my demise. None of the items felt like they were so good it didn't matter how I used them, I had to be willing to asses strategically the best use case, even if it was easy it was fun.
Strategizing which path to take on the map felt meaningful, I had to asses the way I wanted my deck to be shaped before picking a direction to travel. Deck-size management was critical to a good build, so once I had a fair amount of cards, I tried to prioritize paths that would not result in accruing more. To that end, I think it was a good design choice to make drawing a card mandatory at card pickups. I've seen other deck-building games offer a "skip" or "pass" option if you don't like the choices presented, and I think that omitting that here was a good call. It adds a layer of depth to map navigation: "I really want to upgrade a card at that bonfire, but it might not even be the buff I want, is that really worth adding 2 forced cards to my hand when I already have a very strong build?" Making all map stops mandatory interactions made it so that every routing choice had real consequences to your build, which I 100% can get behind.
The escape room subgame was well put-together and fun to mess around with. It was nice to have something to play with when I wanted a brief reprieve from the core gameplay. The puzzles were a good difficulty and I liked how they tied into not only the card game but also unlocked story progression.
A grievance I did have with this act is the final phase of the Leshy fight feels pretty anti-climactic. The visual aspect of it is awesome, but the actual moon fight is just not very difficult or interesting. I guess it could counter a build that doesn't pick up enough cards, seeing as it can slowly chip away at anything that opposes it and gets more damage if you somehow manage to run out of your squirrel deck, but ultimately it's just not much of a threat, especially because the player is always dealt a Stink Bug at the start of the game, which completely negates all damage the moon would do and just lets you whale on it (even without the smelly sigil this fight was still pretty trivial). Maybe it's because I failed the game so many times before reaching moon that the fight felt this way, I just wish there was a little more,, anything to it. I don't know how anyone would realistically lose this after beating the 1st 2 phases. It was just a very underwhelming fight to end act 1 for me.
The last thing I want to talk about for this act is the enviroment. I liked the ambiance and asthetic of everything in the room. It fit the game really well. The card art was cool and the ambiance was great. I really liked Leshy's character, he was well-written and the dynamic that created was great.
In retrospect, Act 1 is really the hilight of the game, which is a shame because it's right off the start and we never get to see it again.
My initial response to seeing Act 2 was very negative. It still had a lot of the aspects I had liked about Act 1, but it just felt like a fundamentaly worse game. For as much as it kept, it removed a lot too. And it was somewhat difficult to get the ball rolling with the first few card packs. I will say that in the 2nd half of Act 2, once I had started getting my deck together and learning how to play, I warmed up to it a bit. It was still my least favorite act but at least it had it's place in establishing the lore you needed to understand the ending? I also definitely feel like I may have had a much better time had I taken literally any other starter deck. Magik is by far the worst and least fun game style so I'm glad that I wasn't forced to use it.
I did think it was cool that you could kind of re-experience the journey described in Act 1 on your way to challenge Leshy, but the other 3 preambles didn't really have that much going for them. Even when we get to take a peek at what a Grimora room may have looked like, the parallels aren't really there. Same with P03. I will say that if the Magnificus mechanic didn't suck so much I would've had a better time overall, but fighting up his tower was actually kind of fun for me as I was finally beginning to understand how I wanted to shape my deck.
Dislike it as I may, it was also the shortest act, so I can't shit on it too hard. And on that note, I have little else to say about it.
While a significant step up from Act 2, Act 3 still comes up short of Act 1. I think it's interesting enough mechanically but it really lacks the charm of the 1st act, which I guess is kind of the point? I think this act was partly an extension to the story and a way to interact with the other gameplay mechanics, and partly a commentary on how important external elements can be to a game. P03 aims to create a great deck-builder, but fails at every turn to capture the same spirit that Leshy's game has. There really is something to it.
Aesthetics aside, the P03 section of the game just kind of feels like, too easy? Like, I know I still died a few times, but dying was largely inconsequential in this act. There were a few cool moments in there, but I feel like the bosses were pretty much jokes by comparison to the Leshy bosses, and I felt quite disappointed that there was no final encounter for the area. I mean, this is all laid bare in the story and definitely makes sense given P03's character motivation, but it just seems kind of,, lame? Like, it's just not worth it to hurt gameplay for story reasons in my opinion.
That being said, I still really like the mechanics explored in the P03 section, and I still had a lot of fun in this act of the game. It may not have matched the charm of the 1st act, but it definitely had a cool little aesthetic going. If this had been the whole game, I probably still would've liked it, it really just pales in comparison to Act 1. The bosses were cool, even if they did feel less "real" and I liked the mechanics they introduced. The way that the Mox mechanic was implemented was neat, I liked that it was kind of there as a supplement to the main mechanic.
Navigating the map itself was a little annoying, as it was very hard to keep track of where I'd been, partially because I'm dumb as hell. This largely wasn't an issue, but I would've gone back to buy more pelts if I had any degree of confidence I could find the things. It sucked away the element of strategizing on the map, now instead of carefully picking a path, I kind of just milled about until I bumped into something. Additionally, after I had a half decent deck put together, I no longer had reason to pick up new cards I came across, so I probably missed out on some content because I would just ignore the card pickups. There weren't "rare cards" like those in Act 1. Frankly, there wasn't anything that felt as rewarding as getting a rare card in Act 1.
All in all, this was just a less fleshed-out version of Act 1, which, once again, while it makes sense from a character and story perspective, that still doesn't justify it for me. I had fun, but the magic was gone.
Yeah I kind of already talked about this, I think the game leaned into this a bit too heavily, I would've had just as much fun with only the card and escape room mechanics, and I think the story would've been better for me without having so much content that was simply nonsensical without extra context. I am curious about some of the puzzles I missed, but chat didn't even seem super interested in what they had in store for me. I'll probably learn about the rest of the content for this by watching a YouTube video. I think I'll really enjoy the video, but it just doesn't seem like something I'd much care to go through the effort of figuring out for myself. Albeit it could be fun if I really put my mind to it. Maybe I'll regret sleeping on it once I find out, who's to say?
WOW this is a long one.
Inscryption was a banger game that blew it's genera wide open. It showed me how much fun a deck builder can be and I may even go on to try other roguelike/deck-building games in the future (I don't think I'd have any interest in a game like Peglin, but I do think there are probably some other games I'd have fun with just from a strategic perspective). It redefined how I think about similar games, and I was absolutely hooked on it, especially at the beginning. Acts 1 and 3 easily compensate for my feelings of disdain for Act 2, and all in all it was a great time and I think it made great content as well.
This was a game that I didn't watch any YouTube content of, not to avoid spoilers, but simply because I was convinced that there was nothing in it for me, I didn't think it could be interesting. Needless to say, it blasted my every expectation out of the water. I am now glad I didn't spoil it for myself by watching videos on it. I'm really glad that this was recommended to me and that I gave it a shot, it would've been a shame to never experience this game. I would recommend this game to anyone who likes games, even if it doesn't seem like your style.