I can’t stop thinking aboutFaith, that lo-fi horror gamethat came out a few weeks ago.
Well, I call it “lo-fi” but frankly it looks old - like, really old.
As though it came out on a BBC Micro 35 years ago.
And that’swhyI keep thinking about it.
It’s not meant as a criticism, I’m not trashing it for looking dated.
We know what they were capable of, and the answer is not a lot.
It’s not their fault, technology was primitive back then - charmingly primitive, but still.
So we feel safe in the knowledge that Faith can’t pull one over on us.
We’ve got it figured out.
Except, Faith does pull one on us.
It shows us what we want to see while sneaking its surprises around the back.
We didn’t know it could do that; we will never forget that it did.
I’m lulled into a false sense of security and it leaves me vulnerable.
Inscryptionis rooted in this kind of thing.
A cursed object from our gaming past: it’s playing with those expectations again.
The whole second act of the game is a twisted version of Pokemon.
I wonder how many childhood memories will that poison?
Inscryption finds a way to play with more modern expectations too.
It finds a way to play around with popular tropes or templates.
We’ve playedSlay the Spire, we’ve played Magic: The Gathering.
There are no surprises left for us.
And at no point does Inscryption seem to worry about comparisons to them, those other games.
So why not use their dominance to your advantage instead?
Let them become the template that you might mess around with.
Let them set our expectations so you could tear them apart.