5 Years On, One Game’s Blood Sacrifice Mechanic Still Haunts Me

Most of the time, a card game doesn’t carry much weight. You might wager a little money, or you might just be playing for bragging rights. Even a loss rarely does any real harm. Inscryption (2021) is different. Daniel Mullins Games developed this deckbuilding horror game and Devolver Digital published it. It opens with a haunted card game in a eerie cabin deep in the woods. Before long, you’ll be staring at a pair of pliers and weighing which parts of your own body you could do without.

Picture the opening. You come to at a table in a darkened room. Opposite you sits a host, almost entirely swallowed by shadow. Only the pale glint of his eyes gives him away, which doesn’t help much. Nobody tells you where you are or why you’re there. He simply slides a card toward you and names the cost. You’ll need blood, and it will come from an innocent squirrel. With those eyes fixed on you and a voice insisting that a game is starting and something has to die, would you go through with it? I hesitated for roughly three seconds, then carried out my first blood sacrifice. That is all the game asks of you: pay for what you want with something that can’t refuse. (At least in the beginning.) If you can live with that, Inscryption is waiting for you.

The same goes for your host. Leshy, the hermit who lives in the forest across from you, earns his keep by photographing animals with an enchanted camera and distilling their essences into playing cards. If you want to leave, you’ll have to defeat him at his own game. Just be sure he doesn’t turn you into a card before you find a way out.

Act one of Inscryption is a tabletop card battler, played against Leshy one match at a time. Every creature card carries an attack value and a health value. You set your cards in lanes opposite his, settle on your move, and ring a bell to send your chosen creatures into combat. Any attacker left unblocked deals damage, which is measured in teeth on a menacing scale beside the table. Collect five teeth and the round is yours. The cards worth playing all come with a price, and that price is usually blood.

Placing a card requires sacrificing one that is already on your side of the board. Squirrels are the free option. A separate deck of them sits beside your main one, so on any turn you can draw a fresh victim to pay for your next play. Before long you’ll think of those cute, fluffy, innocent squirrels as small change and expendable pawns. Eventually the growing pile of their bones stops bothering you. Every round settles into the same cadence: draw, sacrifice, play, ring the bell, and see whose creatures slip through.

Image: Devolver Digital

Between rounds, the table separating you from Leshy becomes a map. As you advance, Leshy shifts your wooden figurine from one stop to the next: battles, campfires, altars, and a trader who exchanges pelts for cards. The map is also where the stakes begin to climb. At first the cost is only animals. Sacrifice anything other than a squirrel and Leshy cheerfully assures you the creature won’t vanish from your deck, reminding you that “Its suffering was real. But you will see it again.”

As the battles grow harder, even your strongest animals can’t keep pace, and the scale starts tilting against you. That’s when the pliers come to mind, and the rationalizing begins. “It’s only a tooth,” I caught myself murmuring. Inscryption makes the bargain feel perfectly reasonable. But where does it stop? Would you pull a tooth to win a round? What happens when a knife shows up? Would you cut out your own eye to move forward? How did things get this far? And how much of you will be left to make it out?

Polygon crowned Inscryption its best game of 2021. It was also nominated for Best Game at the 2022 BAFTAs and took home the award for Game Design. Still, trophies aren’t what define this game. Its real achievement was demonstrating, in unsettling detail, how little persuasion it takes to make us complicit in the horror. A shadowy host, a blood sacrifice, a squirrel waiting on the block: it turns out the right wide-eyed stranger can talk me into almost anything. I would gladly have gone through life without knowing that about myself.

And that’s just the start. Step out of Leshy’s cabin and the game turns itself inside out at least once. It becomes a pixel-art adventure that tips its hat to EarthBound and Pokémon, then a factory where your cards are floppy disks, your dealer is a robot, and what it craves most is a way out…but out to where? At some point the boundary between game and reality may begin to dissolve, as you’re steered away from the screen toward real websites and GPS coordinates. Inscryption keeps raising the stakes, demanding more of you in ever more unhinged ways, and you hardly register the escalation because you’re so thoroughly captivated. Even after all that, I’d gladly take my seat again at that dimly lit Act 1 table. Perhaps that’s the most frightening thing about Inscryption: how swiftly it draws you back in.

Inscryption is available on PC, PlayStation 4 and 5, Nintendo Switch, and Xbox Series X.

Source: Polygon