Daniel Mullins

Horror as Mechanic in Inscryption

intermechanismcontributor

by Braden H
University of Chicago MADD 14920: Comparative Media Poetics – Horror
Autumn 2022

Inscryption is a very unique game. It found a way to make a found footage horror/haunted media/card game hybrid that’s both mechanically and narratively fascinating. In this post, I’ll be diving into the horror of Inscryption as expressed through its mechanics. And as a structural note, I’m going to be primarily talking about the game’s first act, as the game’s 3 acts are very different both mechanically and narratively. I will be discussing act 3 to an extent near the end, but to cover the game’s entire story and mechanics in a satisfactory, holistic manner would take a whole lot more words than 1 blog post’s worth. 

The Basics

In Inscryption, you’re trapped in a cabin in the woods, forced to play a card game against a mysterious, shadowed arbiter. You travel across an ever-unfurling map on the table, building your deck and upgrading your cards. Cards have blood costs, usually between 1 and 3. This is the game’s most immediate gimmick beyond its genre. To get blood, you must sacrifice squirrels, the game’s only readily-available free card. Thankfully, the corpse-blood exchange rate is 1:1. Inscryption’s battle win condition is also unique. In most other card games like it, your goal is to deal a net number of damage to your opponent (often 20). In Inscryption, you need to deal a net total of 5 more damage than your opponent has done to you. Every point adds a tooth (yes, a human tooth) to a scale next to the board. Swing it 5 in your favor and you win.

There are a number of different relative items and systems also worth discussing for the topic of mechanic horror. The most relevant are pliers. If you use pliers, you get an extra tooth added to the scale for you. Of course, to obtain this tooth, you must retrieve it from your own mouth, shown in a gruesome first-person fashion. The knife, an item you get near the middle of the first act, is even more powerful ‒ it allows you to instantly win any single round of your choosing by putting a human eye on the scale. You can imagine where that eye comes from. Beyond these consumable items, there are also events on the map you can choose to engage with. You can come across campfires surrounded by hungry adventurers. You can warm a card by the fire to enhance its power, but the longer you keep it there, the higher the risk you run of the adventurers losing their patience and devouring it. There are also mycelium surgeons, who will happily cut two of the same card (2 grizzly bears, for example) both in half, stitching them together and combining their power. 

Horror as Mechanic and Player Reactions

Inscryption is very different from most horror games. In most horror games, including many discussed by other students on this blog, you as the player are surrounded by horror. The game may be scary and atmospheric, but the gameplay is nearly always sneaking around, shooting guns, hunting for keys, solving puzzles, taking pictures or some other non-fantastical task. In Inscryption, meanwhile, you are a direct participant in the horror, and more interestingly, much of it is optional. Even if you never die in your playthrough besides functionally-scripted deaths (as I did, not to flex but entirely to flex), you necessarily sacrifice dozens of squirrels, and using the knife at least once is required to beat the game as well. But using the pliers on yourself, risking cards to starving adventurers or handing them over for brutal experiments? Those are actions you choose to perform. 

In a discussion, I asked other students if these actions lost their horror or became second nature over time. Every student who played the game admitted that they did, because of course they did. By the 8th time you use the pliers on yourself, you’re not even considering the action anymore ‒ just its strategic implications for winning the fight. I then asked if they thought the repetition trivialized or contributed to the atmosphere. Interestingly, they said it contributed. One student was put off by these mechanics at first enough that she chose not to use them. But over time and as she kept losing, she forced herself to engage in the horror, and began using the pliers, knife, etc. Even if the mechanics individually lost their bite over time, the decision of whether or not to use them, and her eventual capitulation to optimal play, hung over her for the rest of her playthrough, contributing to the atmosphere.

A different student had a similar experience grappling with the repetition and cyclical nature of Inscryption and its mechanics. There is a mechanic where when you die, you pull stats from many of the cards in your deck to create a “player card” that you can then find in future runs. This student, when she realized she probably wasn’t winning the whole campaign in a particular run, would choose cards she otherwise wouldn’t in the hopes of their specific stats getting put into that run’s player card. However, she was mortified when, in the final boss of the act, some of those player cards came back… in her opponent’s deck. 

This is a different kind of mechanic horror, a more longform action-consequence dynamic that builds up over an entire playthrough of Inscryption‘s first act. Many students expected to see this kind of consequence come from squirrel sacrifices or pulling out so many teeth from their heads. However, Inscryption is a little more clever than that. The consequence of engaging with those mechanics, which is inherently horrific, is simply to witness that horror. However, the face card system seems tame at face value, making it the perfect target for the endgame twist it sets you up for.

Self-Sacrifice and Inscryption’s broader narrative

Clearly, Inscryption’s first act squeezes themes of self-sacrifice or horrifying action-consequence out of nearly everything the player sees. A few of the cards in your deck talk to you throughout the playthrough, and it’s pretty clear they’re people trapped inside of cards by the arbiter across the table. Your overall goal is to set them free, which you eventually do. However, one of those people goes on to become the game’s actual antagonist, taking control of the software, reshaping it in his image and manipulating you into his meta-scheme (he wants to upload this corrupted version of the game to the Steam store). In the third act, where this plays out, themes of self-sacrifice continue. One fight has you look through your real-life hard drive to find large files the game then threatens to delete, and in a different fight, you have to fight and kill enemies that take the form of people from your actual Steam friends list. While less visceral, these more personal actions are effective continuations of the game’s overarching themes of self-sacrifice and self-imposed horror.

 Inscryption, especially in its first act, is a game that challenges you, the player, to answer a question more explicitly than most others ‒ “To what degree are you willing to engage with the game?”

Hacker Aesthetics and the Factor of Frustration

intermechanismcontributor

by Alina K
University of Chicago MADD 14920: Comparative Media Poetics – Horror
Spring 2022

Last week, we contested the necessity of the fear factor in the genre of horror, particularly as it pertains to the case of “haunted interfaces” as the primary antagonist. In our previous discussions, we experienced how mediums can terrify us due to how the artists and producers exploit the fact that we take mechanical functions for granted as we navigate virtual spaces. For instance, when we played P.T., the player and their audience felt unnerved listening to technological objects in the maze-like hallway. I recall us mumbling, “Oh, God, nooooo” when Lisa sobbed through a grainy-sounding phone call—we expected Lisa to jump-scare us or at least send another creepy sound our way through the radio. Even when we knew that at the game’s climax we had to follow her cries to track her presence down, I think we hesitated because we feared approaching her terrifying presence.

The movie Unfriended also took advantage of glitches within digital interfaces to haunt Laura’s former friends and by translation, to unsettle us as witnesses to the computer’s malfunctions. We saw through Blaire’s screen that the Facebook “block” button mysteriously vanished; while we might have quickly dismissed that as a bug in Facebook’s programming, we came to slowly accept that Blaire and her friends were cursed to die through Laura’s haunting of their digital devices. After all, an anonymous phantom entered their Skype calls without permission, and when their screens “froze” or “glitched,” the next frame showed us (and Blaire) that the friends died grisly deaths at Laura’s hands. It was almost as if we were trained to anticipate death after glitches interrupt the normal flow of computer interfaces… In other words, we expect glitches and digital unreliability to manifest on-screen scary, horrifying, and disturbing consequences to those who bear witness to the technology’s deviance from standard function.

The two games we played last week subverted these experiences somewhat. The Uncle who Works for Nintendo indeed started off creepy in my initial playthrough. When the Uncle appeared for the first time to eat my character, I jumped at the successive knocking sounds, then at the cacophonous noise that accompanied the glitching, “erroneous” Twine commands, which made clear that my character faced certain death. However, as I progressed through different endings of the game, the “haunted interface” took on a contrasting tone—rather than anticipating the Uncle, I found myself eagerly awaiting the malfunctioning interfaces because I knew it meant I would progress in the story. At that moment, the “fear factor” that I would have felt toward the Uncle transformed more into a feeling of curiosity: unlike the anxiety-induced hesitation we experienced bracing ourselves for Lisa’s appearance, an urge to “find” the alternate endings trumped any notion of fear. 

My anticipation was answered by the final “secret” ending of the game, when the Twine layout itself transformed as the Uncle threatened to take away my friend’s life. As the Gameboy/Uncle became deadlier and stranger, as the player I began to not fear a threat on my own avatar’s life, but on my friend’s life. Hence, when I unlocked the final ending, in which I saved my friend from becoming a missing child (as other endings implied), I came to see The Uncle who Works for Nintendo as a game about friendship that contained horror elements. In its use of untrustworthy interfaces, I found a narrative about love between friends—how far is one friend willing to go to brag about how “special” their own video games are, and how far am I willing to go to save an annoying, but beloved, friend? 

Pony Island’s subversion of the fear factor is more clean-cut. Upon its first clicks, immediately my group sensed that the hacker aesthetic was not curated to necessarily scare us with its devil antagonist, unlike the historical Satanic Panic incidents we talked about in class (backmasking, etc.). Rather, we were laughing at the interface’s whimsical tone, and we thought that the self-awareness that Lucifer and his demon horde possessed actually enhanced an otherwise mundane game. At its core, Pony Island is a platformer game—and a tedious, repetitive, uninspiring one at that. The player controls a pixelated unicorn who can only jump over obstacles in a mostly horizontally-scrolling environment. There are no enemies to take down, no power upgrades to look forward to, and no change in the speed or intensity of the scrolling. 

This dramatically changes, though, as Lucifer attempts to make the player’s gameplay unbearably impossible to conquer—the inclusion of enemy targets and bosses, demons who play Tic-Tac-Toe-like puzzle games, and hidden glitches within the virtual desktop that the player can exploit to gain hacks (like the laser). Suddenly, the game ramps up its stakes, but in the process of creating harder game “challenges,” the more Pony Island felt like it was creeping closer to something as enjoyable as the Super Mario Bros franchise. Thanks to my classmates who spoke during my presentation, we concluded that Pony Island was a playful, mischievous parody of both the horror and platformer genres, reminding us that fear may be a sufficient feature of scary video platformers, but not mandatory. Indeed, as gamers, we constantly worry about “failing” the level by falling off a platform or getting overwhelmed by enemy targets. And as horror fans, we also feel scared as we brace ourselves for a horrifying villain to lunge out and kill our beloved characters. Somewhat departing from both, Pony Island’s addition of fun, new mechanics as the Devil tried harder to inhibit us from entertaining ourselves with the game ironically felt less stressful and terrifying, yet still retained a sense of stimulated excitement by introducing something new the moment we sensed tedium in the mechanics. Strangely, in a way, I felt like I was “hacking” the horror genre to disturb its conventions of utilizing “fear.” Playing with and counter-hacking Lucifer’s malicious intentions, then, questions horror game’s conventional reliance on fear, but I do wonder if the future of unreliable interface games will lean toward it again…