Why Inscryption is the Best Video Game of 2021

[Ed. note: The following contains spoilers for Inscryption.]

Encryption is one of the most confusing games I’ve ever played.

To call it roguelike would be a disservice. To call it a card game would be absurd. To dwell too long on its horror qualities would be short-sighted, like describing a film based only on its opening scene. Encryption is all of that, yes, just like a book is a collection of paragraphs – there is much more to it.

Even the way we do to speak about Encryption has an air of mystery. One day, a little over a week before Halloween, it popped up on Polygon’s Slack channels. Several writers had tried it over the weekend and showed up on Monday with excitement. “Has anyone else played? Encryption?? ” It spread slowly at first, then all at once: threads formed, spoiler warnings appeared, and groups splintered into DMs to discuss this strange, confusing game with other coworkers who had made it through “this part”.

In other words, Encryption had created Moment, and we all enjoyed it so much that we refused to spoil what makes it so special. We trusted the game to work its magic on newbies regardless of our ardent, whispered praise.

Now in retrospect Encryption At the end of 2021, a long way from that initial zeal, I can appreciate the game more than just the excitement it created. It was released in a year of roguelites, time warp mysteries, and anti-genre breakout hits. But it still towers over its colleagues. His first act effortlessly combines the strategy of a card game for reading cards with the puzzle solution of an escape room. His second act puts us on a pixel art adventure that pays homage to everything from EarthBound to Pokémon. His third act brings us back on the roguelite format of the first chapter, but in a completely different context: the hut in the forest has been replaced by a factory, with holograms instead of parchment and floppy disks instead of cards. The dealer is also a robot.

This is where the whole range of the magic trick comes into play. While we got to know the intricacies of the card game variants, Encryption told his story in front of our noses. On the one hand, developer Daniel Mullins distracted us with some of the more clichéd genre tropes of some video games. With the other, he has formed a whole range of characters, each with their own fears, goals, and insecurities.

None of this to mention are the fake YouTube videos that tie all the plots together, or the Easter eggs hidden in the credits, or the real-life story Mullins is tied to Encryption‘s lore. Some of the most compelling elements of EncryptionThe narration takes place outside of the actual game. Dedicated gamers followed a trail of breadcrumbs to data storage websites and real-world GPS locations, analyzing their path through an ARG that has become something of a signature in Mullins’ portfolio. As Cass Marshall put it on our list of the Top 50 Games in 2021: “Encryption is a game about games, the focus of which is a story with as many levels as that of a Russian nesting doll. ”

not Everyone the story works, to put it bluntly. Mullins tries a little in more than one case also hard to be clever. The live action plot thread focused on the seedy GameFuna company (Encryption‘s in-universe developer) ends with a choreographed murder where neither the assassin nor the victim have the acting skills to make it feel organic. Plus a lot of Encryption‘s second act drags on, and rightly so: the novelty of the pixelated top-down world quickly fades, and the lack of any roguelite elements makes deck building more of a chore than a mandatory gameplay loop.

But I forgive every game its valleys when the peaks are so high. I choose the game that pulls the big swings over the game that rides a constant wave of “good guys” every time. Just like me the temporary perfection of. prefer The sopranos about the consistency of The cable, I can’t help but marvel at how sublime Encryptions goals are – even if it falls far short of the mark every now and then.

Because when Encryption is at its best, and its genre-mixing systems flow into its narrative, and its deck-building mechanics tell a story that can only be told through interactivity, nothing like it. Encryption is a symphonic homage to video games as a whole, and even when a violin or two is slightly out of tune it develops into an amazing crescendo.