Recent reviews by Erina

It's like Danganronpa, Slay the Spire, and Final Fantasy had a baby.

bnnuy

I liked it! The voice acting and music are pretty good. The emotional moments hit really hard in VR. The only thing bringing the game down is that it forces you to replay certain scenes to pad its length.

pretty easy ngl

Better love story than Twilight

TL;DR This game is not awful, but it's *very* overrated. Get it on sale, maybe.

Detailed, non-spoiler review:

Inscryption is at its core, a deck building game with emphasis on story telling. The design of the card game is very dull and repetitive, with a large set of 1-2 card combos that can break it and carry you through its entirety. While the game slowly introduces new mechanics, usually you can ignore them completely on your own deck. In fact sometimes you have to, since by the time the new mechanic is introduced, access to the new mechanic on your deck is too limited to be useful.

For the most part, the game does not let you avoid picking up cards. This means that if you want to try some new combo, you'll have to accumulate a lot of junk on your deck. And there's a lot of junk: there are many cards that are strictly worse. I think this is the reason why the difficulty is so low: the developer had to account for players making a terrible deck and still being able to finish the game.

Most normal and boss encounters feel very same-y and can be defeated by doing the same thing over and over. There are a few more unique ones that introduce interesting twists. Unfortunately, for ~half of those, you cannot tailor your deck to them.

The game heavily features "escape room" style puzzles. I found most tedious and uninspired, and ended up solving a lot of them by trial-and-error. It can be very frustrating to try to find an answer for something you just have to come back to later. Some you need to unlock powerful cards, others to find secrets, and a few to progress the story. Which leads us to...

The plot is very cryptic and would take a forensic team to piece together so that it makes sense. For a "story-rich" game, even a rigorous playthrough leaves the player at best confused and at worst disappointed by all the knots left untied. The characters are one-dimensional and not very developed at all.

Definitely the best part about the game. For the most part, the visual & sound design is excellent and sets the right emotional tone for each act. I can forgive the more... cheesy bits as an exercise of tonal contrast.

Inscryption is an ambitious game that forgot the basics and comes out as pretentious instead. A largely mediocre core of gameplay that has a few very delightful twists, but is IMO not worth the time investment.

5/10

It's *very* good and well designed. Tight controls and gameplay that's tough but fair, plus a surprisingly cool plot for a shmup.

I'm still salty at the final boss tho.

The VR game I dreamed about when I was a little kid playing combat flight sims

Despite being pretty short, this game has one of the best FPS campaigns out there. Recommended.

A cute visual novel. Yuri best doki!