“Inscryption”, the video game that likes to confuse the subject

Encryption is a card game released for PC on October 19. The two players are invited, each in turn, to place up to four cards from their hand on the game board: each one represents an animal and has a certain number of characteristics (strength, hit points, cost and possible powers special). At the end of the round, the animals touch the cards in front of them or, in the absence of a defense card, on the player you are facing, who then loses a life point. The first player to lose six fewer lives than his opponent.

Pixel Review

We liked it:

• an easy to learn card game;
• fast games and always a new challenge;
• omnipresent humor.

We liked least:

• a deliberately crude realization based on ugly 3D and deliberately old-school resolution that hardly flatters the eye;
• inability to play two;
• repetitive at the end.

It is more for you if:

• Do you like “TCG” (“Trading Card Games”), these card games to trade and collect;
• you like me Pony island, one of Daniel Mullins’ previous games;
• you like to go beyond appearances.

Rather, it is not for you if:

• You are looking for a game with significant tactical depth;
• You don’t have a PC (the game is not designed for console);
• You are afraid to embark on an adventure that is beyond you.

Pixel classification:

5 of clubs over 9 of diamonds

You’re still here ?

Wasn’t it enough for you?

Are you really sure?

However, we assure you that it would be best for you if this test stopped there. Each additional word would be one word too many, revealing the content of a title whose main interest lies in its ability to surprise us.

But as you insist …

If you’ve played previous Daniel Mullins titles, you know the Canadiens like it, we’ll forgive the pun, muddy the waters. Carry Poni Island, for example, so seemingly innocent: if it started as a simple straight-line obstacle course game where you led a cute baby unicorn, you would quickly go off the rails and squint in the puzzle game, the coding game (you had to “code” your own weapons yourself) and even ultimately towards narrative play.

Then we won’t betray any secrets by saying thatEncryption plays on the same springs. Unlike a classic TCG, the player is not just an anonymous hand fighting. Because soon, between two rounds, our opponent, a kind of old wizard wrapped in a shadow from which only his gaze emerges, turns to the character we play to suggest that he take a break.

Stories to scare

Our avatar then looks up from the gaming table, before kissing the room. To his left, weapons hung on the wall. Behind her (our hero is a heroine), an old Swiss cuckoo clock whose three hands do not move. A little further on, a safe, wooden chess pieces, a caged wolf statuette, or even a painting that represents two cards, always different every time you look at it. And then, above all, a tightly closed door.

First surprise, first broken wall. Then we realize that the heroine ofEncryption He doesn’t just play cards: he also plays his life. As a escape room, the young woman is trapped in a cabin where each object is a tool that will eventually allow her to escape. And the card game, to which he will always return, is in the end only one enigma among many.

Nothing loves Daniel Mullins more than joining gaudriole and horror

In the image of Pony island, an obstacle course that transforms into a programming game, Encryption Navigate between the card game, the escape room, the gentillet clone of Pokemon and the “meta” story, multiplying the radical changes of the situation without forgetting the permanent microscopic reinventions that make it all the salt and all the comic genius.

As already in Pony island, Daniel Mullins loves nothing more than uniting gaudriole and horror. An adventurous a priori cocktail, whose humor is systematically victorious (it is not uncommon to burst out laughing in front of your screen, broken by a brilliant idea or a well-rounded valve), but which allows the game to appropriate and regurgitate some of the mythologies of the dark corners of the internet, the famous “creepy pasta”, you never really know if they are true stories or legends that you tell yourself to scare yourself.

After, say, half a dozen hours, we’ll finally get out of that damn shack. Does this mean the end of the game? Or, on the contrary, would it be just the beginning of an adventure that will take us much, much further? Attention, the real revelation It happens: know that to discover the “real” ending of the story, some players have also had to, like our heroine, raise their eyes from their screens and leave their homes. Riddles in their pockets and a shovel in hand, they set out to attack a treasure hunt that has little to envy the “golden owl” of the Frenchman Max Valentin.

Rest assured, you won’t have to come to this for fun Encryption. But it would be a mistake to dwell on its simple appearance of a card game.

The pixel classification (actual):

8 of hearts over 9 of spades