Note: This article is, quite obviously, full of spoilers for Inscryption. You should absolutely finish the game on your own first before reading further.
There's a lot more to Inscryption than first meets the eye. When you start the game, you find yourself in a mysterious cabin, forced to play a deck-building card game with a shadowy figure. Lose, and your opponent claims your life; your only goal is to stay alive long enough to solve the mysteries of the cabin so that you might find a way to ultimately escape.
But even if you do escape, that's only the beginning. Between the strange puzzles, the talking cards who appear to be other characters trapped in some sort of limbo, and the monstrous opponent who runs the show, there's much more to uncover about Inscryption. Once you've made it to the end, you might still find yourself confused about what's going on with the game's plot--lots of hints and tidbits are hidden by secrets you'll have to uncover, and there's actually a whole ongoing alternate reality game outside of Inscryption that players are still trying to puzzle out.
We haven't uncovered everything about Inscryption--and that ARG is still ongoing--but we have delved pretty deeply into the story of the game to uncover some of its secrets, particularly to get a sense of what's going on with its tense, abrupt ending. Here's everything we've uncovered and what you need to know to make sense of Inscryption's story, as well as a look at what's waiting to be uncovered.
Luke Carder, The Lucky Carder
Luke is a card game fan who makes videos for the internet and stumbles on the only known copy of the video game Inscryption.
Outside of what's going on in the cabin with the shadowy opponent (who we later discover is Leshy, named for [and drawing a lot of inspiration from] a Slavic forest deity), there's actually a meta narrative driving Inscryption. The first act ends by showing you some videos, recorded by a card game fan streamer who calls himself "The Lucky Carder." His real name is Luke, and his videos at first are standard YouTuber-esque fare, in which he opens card packs and talks to the audience about his good pulls.
It's not long before Luke discovers some vintage card packs at a garage sale for a game called Inscryption, which was apparently a physical card game that didn't last long in the game's universe. Opening one pack, Luke discovers that someone has written coordinates on one of the cards. They lead him out to the woods, where he discovers a box buried just under the ground. Inside is a red floppy disk, which Luke discovers has a video game version of Inscryption on it.
So when we're playing Inscryption, we're actually taking on the role of Luke, trying out the game while also recording his exploits for his Lucky Carder channel. Occasionally, when intense or weird things happen in the game, you can hear Luke reacting, and the focus of the game's camera shifts a bit to reveal the video camera interface. He's literally filming his computer screen as he plays, and you're simultaneously sort of taking on his role and watching the videos of Inscryption that he's made. The protagonist you embody in Inscryption is Luke, and he's a central point of the game's narrative.
Later in the game, we learn a few bits about Luke's backstory and why he's so serious about his card game video channel.
Later in the game, you can uncover more of Luke's backstory. He was a card game fan with his sister in the mid-2000s, and the two would go to conventions and play together quite a bit. Luke's sister died sometime before 2006, and it was his grief and an attempt to connect with the memory of his sister, seemingly, that led him to start doing videos as the Lucky Carder.
Investigating Inscryption
Once he finds the game, Luke not only starts playing it (once he procures a floppy disk drive, that is), he also starts digging to figure out what the deal is. While Inscryption was a short-lived physical card game, there's no record of a video game version anywhere that Luke can find. There's no mention of it on the internet and seemingly no one has ever heard of it before, let alone played it. Intrigued, he reaches out to the company behind Inscryption, GameFuna, to inquire about the disk he found.
Things get a bit sinister from there. GameFuna replies by demanding that Luke send the game back to them, threatening legal action. He also says that a woman, ostensibly from the company, has come to his house twice. In one video, he talks with her, lying that he has no idea what she's talking about when it comes to the Inscryption game. She leaves, but clearly doesn't believe him, and things get creepier from there--in another video, Luke suggests that he hears someone creeping around his house.
As Luke investigates further, he gets in touch with the woman at whose garage sale he bought the Inscryption cards that led him to the video game. Luke finds out that the woman's daughter, Kaycee, previously worked for GameFuna. If you're paying attention as you play Inscryption, you might notice that Kaycee's name pops up more than once--on cards. She's a "death card" you can get from Leshy in the first act, and she's mentioned later in the game as well. The woman explains that Kaycee died during some kind of accident while working on Inscryption, which makes the situation even stranger.
Ghost Game
As Luke gives P03 more access to his computer, Inscryption starts to dig into his files, mixing information about his past into the game.
As you might guess playing Inscryption, there's more going on with the game than is first apparent. Something about the code has allowed the characters within the game to gain some kind of sentience--they're aware that they're in a game and they're aware of you as the player. There are four major characters in Inscryption you'll deal with: the Scrybes, a group of card-creating bosses who control different aspects of the game world.
That sentience is what creates the conflict of Inscryption. The characters aren't just aware they're in a game, they're vying for control of it. In Act 1, you find yourself in Leshy's version of the Inscryption, and he's used his card-creating camera to trap the other Scrybes as cards. He has also stolen the "New Game" control from the main menu, locking it behind a door in the cabin--that's that flashing thing you keep hearing through the door, and the thing you ultimately steal back from Leshy once you've defeated him. Using the New Game button allows you to reset Inscryption, which takes you to Act 2, the original 8-bit version of the game.
Working through Act 2, Luke accidentally gives the power to take control of Inscryption to another Scribe, the robotic P03. You're then taken to a robot factory location, much like Leshy's cabin, to face off against the computer character in a similar game.
P03's game isn't just some sadistic torture to occupy himself, like Leshy's was. It's actually a series of ways in which P03 tricks Luke into giving him control of his computer. P03's goal is to release copies of Inscryption onto the internet, making him impossible to control and spreading his power out into the world.
In the end, though, Luke cooperates with the other Scrybes, who murder P03 before he has a chance to fully execute his plan. Grimora, the Scrybe of the Dead, then uses the access P03 has attained to delete all the data on the Inscryption disk, destroying the world and the characters before any other awful things can happen. In the end, you watch as they're all slowly annihilated and their world is erased. But Luke's last action allows him to look at something horrific that's also on the disk--the Old Data. We don't know what it is, but Luke seems to scream upon comprehending it.
Haunted By The Old Data
Bring holo pelts to the Trader in Act 3 and you'll uncover bits of information about the Inscryption's haunted creation.