The horror genre is wide and full of creativity, but the recent indie gameInscryptionpushes the limits of both its genre and its medium. Developer Daniel Mullins took inspiration from a variety of digital and real-world card games, Slavic mythology, and his previous titles. The result is anindie gamethat contains layer upon layer of gameplay, narrative, and storytelling. Between its meticulous card game mechanics, multiple ways of conveying a linked narrative, and thick atmosphere,Inscryptionmay be one of the most intricate indie games to come out this year.
Game Rant spoke to Mullins about the way he blended and invertedmechanics, genres, mediums, and player expectations inInscryption, how he pulled off some spectacular moments, and what inspired each segment of the game. Interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
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Q: Can I begin by asking you to introduce yourself and possibly share your favorite horror game?
Mullins: Sure. My name is Daniel, I’mthe developer ofInscryption, and my favorite horror game — that’s actually a pretty good question. I don’t know. In terms of actual fear, maybeAmnesia? Those are pretty scary. Strangely enough, I don’t end up playing that many horror games. It is weird becauseInscryptionis kinda called that and it’s a little spooky, but I don’t play that many.
Q: One thing I did notice aboutInscryptionis that, while it can be very creepy at times, it doesn’t hit a lot of the standard horror game formula notes.
Mullins: Yeah, I think that’s exactly right. I think it wasn’t my first and foremost goal to make it a horror game. I think I wanted it to be creepy and spooky and intense, but not necessarily to be haunting or keep you up at night or give you a jump scare.
Q: In that case, how would you describeInscryption?
Mullins: In the marketing that I did way back when I first announced it — before Devolver got involved — I called it “an inky black card-based odyssey,” and that’s maybe spicing it up a little bit, but I like the idea of calling it a card-based odyssey. You playa lot of cards, that’s the main thing in it, but you also go on a strange adventure.
Q: Could you tell me a bit about howInscryptiongot made?
Mullins: It started at the very end of 2018 in aLudum Dare game jam, where you have to make a game in a weekend. The theme was “sacrifices must be made.” I’m a long-time card game player but I’d just recently got back intoMagic: The Gathering, and in that game, there are some mechanics that have to do with sacrificing cards so it sprung to mind when the theme came up. I was like, “oh, it would be cool if there was a card game with sacrificing being central to it,” and so the squirrels being sacrificed for other creatures kinda came to mind there. Then I took the idea of sacrificing further—what if at one point in the game, you have to sacrifice your own body parts, and if you cut off your hand, what implications would that have? Like—oh, now you can’t hold the cards anymore. Or you cut out your eye, and you can’t see half of the playing field. Those ideas formed the original seed ofInscryption, which was called the theme of the game jam,Sacrifices Must Be Made.
And so, I guess the very beginning in 2019, that was out there, and it was getting very positive feedback from people who were—they liked the vibe of the game, the spookiness of the eyes in the background, and it got more attention than any game jam I had done before, so it kinda made me think that I was onto something there. I had wrapped up my previous game at the end of 2018 so I was looking for what to do next, and it seemed like an obvious step to build that up further. So I did, and I was originally thinking it would be part of a small anthology where it was one of three games, because I didn’t really know how I could flesh it out into a full experience. But then when I got further with it, ideas came and I realized it could be its own thing. I had ideas for how to blow it out into a larger game that you could actually sell on Steam, and ideas came as I went and I worked on it hard, and here we are now, basically.
Q: Did you face any challenges in particular as you were working on this game?
Mullins: Definitely, yeah, lots of different ones come up all the time. I think a big one wasputting video in the game— live-action video and having to be a director for real actors. I’d never really done that in a serious capacity. I think it was a trial by fire and I could’ve done a better job as a director. Forgetting to bring props and stuff, just like being a total amateur. So that was hard, and there were other parts of the development and the design, like difficulty, was very hard. I would have some people telling me they would beat the bad guy in the cabin in 20 hours and it’s amazing they even persisted that long because it was so hard and they were so frustrated. Some people would tell me that they’d breeze through it in two hours, so I had to try and find ways to modulate that so people who find it too easy take a bit longer and get more roadblocks, and people who find it too hard can eventually overcome it. I don’t know if I fully succeeded in the end there. There are people who give it a thumbs down because they find it too easy. That was a big challenge right up to the end.
Q: The originalSacrifices Must Be Madeis a lot shorter thanInscryption, but in many ways, it could be considered scarier. I would definitely describeSacrifices Must Be Madeas a horror game, even if I wouldn’t necessarily describeInscryptionthat way. Do you think you have any comments about why that happened?
Mullins: I think the more low-fi graphics ofSacrifices Must Be Mademay have made it scarier in a way. When you lose detail, there’s more ambiguity, and sometimes that can make things spookier. I think the sound, though not as professional—or good—as what Jonah did forInscryptionhad an eerie tone to it. It was just in GarageBand, I found synthesizers and I would press 10 keys down and it would make this horrible sound. But then I used it in the game and that’s pretty unsettling, I think. And then of course there’s a twist inSacrifices Must Be Madeat the end that’s potentiallydarker than anything that happens inInscryption, so maybe those things.
Q: Honestly, the ending ofSacrifices Must Be Madehas stuck in my head for years now, so you made at least one game that just haunts people. In some waysInscryptionbuilds off whereSacrifices Must Be Made left us, so did you have any particular problems thinking of ways to expand that original, simple storyline?
Mullins: Yeah, it’s hard to remember exactly my thought process back then, but I think I just realized that thesmall, self-contained storyofSacrifices Must Be Madewas just gonna need to be tossed aside because it wasn’t going to be substantial enough for the whole thing. I guess at the time I didn’t see the story—I mean, it’s obviously a very simple story, but at the time I didn’t see that as the strong point ofSacrifices Must Be Made. I thought it was more to do with the mood and the vibe that it had, so that was the thing I was trying to recreate rather than any of the story elements.
Q: And do you still think that way?
Mullins: I mean, now that you say it stuck with you it does make me think that maybe I was onto something with that twist, but I don’t know, I don’t know. I think the mood was a big part, for sure.
Q: Another thing that was really important to both games was the card game itself. You mentionedMagic: The Gathering, but was there anything else that inspired the card game?
Mullins: Definitely. As far as thecard mechanics go,Yu-Gi-Oh!, not necessarily the way the game is played but the sort of outlandish story of that show I watched when I was a kid. And how he summons the moon and then someone attacks the moon and then it makes the tides rise up and stuff. The ridiculous logic that has to do with the game somehow I liked inYu-Gi-Oh!, and thenHearthstoneas like a digital game and how it makes everything feel exciting with the animations and screenshake. I thinkHearthstonewas the first digital card game to make it feel good to play, so I think most card games now—digital ones—owe that toHearthstone, so I was obviously taking notes there, too. So maybe those three, but there’s plenty of card games that probably lent little ideas to it.
Q: You mentioned where the theme of sacrifice came from, but what aboutInscryption’s prominent meta elements?
Mullins: I think it just kinda up as I went. At one point I had the idea to do the part two and part three. For a while, it was just in the cabin. I was playing thePokemon Trading Card Gamefor Game Boy Color, a friend had recommended it to me, and the idea of making a pixel art card game for whatever reason was so enticing. And there was another game out at the time, anexpansion forShovel Knight, I forget what it was called—Treasure King or something—and they have a little pixel art card game in it that’s so delightful, and it’s so satisfying to try and fit all that information on a small screen, it’s like a cool challenge. This is obviously a spoiler, but I really wanted to take a turn whereInscryptiongets de-rezzed and downgraded to a pixel art game and have fun with that. Certain things just flowed from that, like going back to 3D after, and then the video stuff—it just felt like it needed one last little thing to tie those three disparate parts together. Something that would be common across all of them, so that’s how it kinda came to be.
Q: The card game definitely works to link all the disparate parts of the game together. On the subject of the mechanics, throughoutInscryptionthe player is repeatedly forced to replay segments of the game in order to make progress, but most of the options that appear to erase the game’s data actually end up driving the game forward into a new segment. It’s kind of an interesting inverted take on advancement, and I wanted to know where it came from.
Mullins: I think part of it might’ve come from lessons I learned from my first game,Pony Island, where I was always trying to think of subversions of typical game expectations. Like “oh, you expect when you start the game, you press New Game, but what if you don’t do that?” Or, what if instead of the save menu—I didn’t do this, but what if instead of an options menu some jump scare happens or something? Just thinking of ways to take common expectations and then turn them around. It probably came from that line of thinking, and then it made sense with the de-rezzed—de-made—part two pixel artpart, where this 3D version is kinda this contraption built on top of this older, simpler game. I think that’s kinda how it came out.
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Q: I’ve never seen a game quite likeInscryptionbefore. Did you set out to do something like that or did it just kinda happen?
Mullins: Probably a bit of both. I definitely—because of my past two games, I feel that there are certain expectations to have something that doesn’t just play it straight. I think fans would be disappointed if it was exactly what it looked like. That’s not what they’re looking for from me. I wanted to have some twist that would be surprising, but what the twist is and why and how—I think one thing led to another, that’s the best way I could put it.
Q: There are a lot of memorable characters inInscryption. Is there anything you could tell me about them?
Mullins: My favorite character is not explicitly named—it’s the goo person. In the Discord, the beta testers named that character Goobert, so that’s what I’ll call him. That’s probably my favorite, and Goobert was just an NPC in the pixel art part, the goo wizard, and the idea was that the wizard boss kinda tortures his students by making them go through ridiculous tests and the test of Goobert was just to be turned into goo and live that way for a bit. Just seemed like a fun character to make more of, so I got my friend who’s in the credits, Sean Karemaker, he’s an artist in Vancouver. He works in the same office as me and he had some spare time so I asked him, “Can you make a 3D Goobert? Maybe he’s in a bottle?” So that Goobert was born and I put that goo in abottle character in part one, and then of course Goobert had to make an appearance in part three. People like Goobert.
Q: Concerning the Scrybes, could you tell me a bit about your inspirations?
Mullins: Leshy, the spooky eyes forest guy, was just—“How do I explain the creepy eyes in the game jam game? Who’s behind those eyes?” I think it was even during the game jam that, when I was trying to find inspiration, I was googling “forest demon.” Like, what’s a forest demon? I found the leshy, which is a Slavic mythical monster man that lives in the woods and eats people and stuff, and there was this haunting painting that was in some Slavic magazine that you can find if you google leshy. I was like “That is a scary-looking thing, and maybe I can recreate that,” so I showed that picture to David Hagemann, the main 3D artist of the game, and he concocted the Leshy we know. I recreated the pixel art in part two to kinda make a pixel art rendering, and then… how did I get the rest of them?
The idea was that they’rekinda like Pokemon Gym Leaders, and what is their Gym type? Well, Leshy is a forest monster so he deals with woodland critters, but then a robot kinda made sense as a theme, undead, and a wizard—I don’t know why that made sense, but I kinda just thought about those tropes. “Well, it’s a robot, so the face is a screen and it can communicate through that.” Grimora is kinda like a vampire-zombie woman, kinda just makes sense with her theme. Magnificus is a little weirder. The original idea was that he was a wizard that had such a big beard that it covered his entire body, and then the 3D version came out looking not exactly like a beard but I still liked it. Now he’s just this Christmas tree monster with a weird reptilian hand that kinda comes out of the Christmas tree. It was kinda a back-and-forth between the idea and the artwork.
Q: Speaking of Magnificus, he and Grimora don’t get quite as much focus in this game as Leshy and P03. Is there a story there?
Mullins: There was kinda a development constraint. I liked the idea ofgoing back to 3Dafter the 2D part and it made sense to have another of the Scrybes take over, but I just didn’t think people had the stomach for three more different 3D sections, and I wasn’t sure if I did, either. I didn’t know if I wanted to push this game another year or two years to make them. So what I tried to do was have those Scrybes play a greater role in influencing the events, even if they didn’t get as much screen time. Like, Grimora is the one that at the end—obviously spoilers—triggers the deletion of the game, so I guess she has one of the most consequential roles in the story. But her and Magnificus, I just didn’t have the will to a full 3D part for either of them.
Q: The visual styles of bothInscryptionandSacrifices Must Be Madeare very distinctive. You did mention what inspired the retro pixel art sections, but what about the 3D sections?
Mullins: I’d been interested for a while in down-rezzing 3D art to a sort of pixel art resolution and then doing effects on top of it. I had seen it done really well—not exactly in Celeste, but I loved in Celeste how they’d have a pixel art canvas but then there’s, like, higher-resolution effects on top of it. The UI, but also there’s a bloom for each pixel that’s higher rez than the pixel itself, and I just find that really interesting and cool looking. I have a friend in Vancouver who’s working on an indie game called Brass Bellow and he does some really interesting stuff by taking 3D art and crunching it down to a smaller canvas.
I was just experimenting with that and it really came together when I got Tomasz Stobierski—he’s in the credits—who did this shader. It was an idea that I had but I couldn’t make it myself, where the darker colors posterize, which means they lock to the nearest color, but the lighter colors don’t. Which is how it ended up with these very hard shadows, but if you do that to all the colors, it’s hard to see the lighter stuff, and you may’t read text, and it looks bad. It looks like a certain Instagram filter that just makes things hard to see. So when that shader got in there, it connected with the down-rezzed pixel art 3D stuff. It really just came together.
Q: Can I ask why you decided to give even the found footage portions that retro aesthetic?
Mullins: So the idea was, it was cooler if it was on ahand-held video camera, and if the technology was not quite 2021 technology. I wanted it to be a bit ambiguous ‘cause I knew people would poke out certain things, be like “Why does this monitor look like a 1080p monitor?” and stuff, but I was trying to go for 2010 or maybe 2009 or something. So he’s still using a video camera instead of a smartphone. The aesthetic on the video was partially to obscure it, to make it a little creepier and feel more found footage, but also to explain that it’s a camcorder and not, like, high-rez cell phone footage.
Q: Speaking of the found footage stuff,Inscryptionis kind of a multimedia experience. Where did the idea for that come from?
Mullins: It’s hard to say exactly. The video stuff came in later, and it felt like—you’re making a soup and you taste it and it’s missing a certain spice, and it just was the last spice needed in that soup. That’s the best way I can say it. Just felt like the final layer to complete it.
Q: For a bit of disclosure, horror webseries are kinda related to alternate reality games or unfiction projects, if you’re more familiar with those terms. One impression I got when I was playingInscryptionwas that it kinda felt like you had set out to make an entire alternate reality game on a single platform, where all of the hidden secrets and videos were just in one place so I didn’t have to go about trying to find them all over the internet.
Mullins: Yeah, those terms for sure. I definitely like thevibe of a creepypastaand this idea that you’re seeing things that you weren’t meant to see or that were private for someone else. I definitely was trying to capture something like that.
Q: Some of the videos, particularly towards the end, started to get really unsettling. Could you tell me a bit about them?
Mullins: I was definitely going for that, I wanted to raise the stakes and make it feel like Luke Carder, the character, is finding things that he wasn’t supposed to, thicken the mystery, and explain why the disk that he found is more consequential than just the game that was on it. There’s higher stakes. I was trying to make them disturbing to add intensity, raise the stakes, and I think part of that was doingmore hands-on sound work, where it’s not just the audio of the events going on. I actually got help from Jonah at times to add glitchy sounds or haunting, humming melodies in the background. Maybe that contributed to it.
Q: And of course, the ending was—quite memorable, shall we say. The game’s ending sequence is also quite powerful, separate from the ending of the found footage. Could you tell me a bit about what went into it?
Mullins: It was a pretty time-intensive thing for the amount of time you spend playing it. I mentioned earlier that I wasn’t sure I wanted to do full 3D sections for the other two Scrybes, but I sure wanted to hint at them and suggest that they existed, kind of, so I built out 3D scenes for both of them and put more effort into Grimora’s because at her point in the ending, not as much is deleted. Whereas with Magnificus, the final Scrybe,so much is deletedthat it made sense that he’s in this kinda stark white background because his world is mostly gone at this point. It was mostly finding ways to use the models I had and use the systems I had and create something that felt new without totally reinventing everything for a few minutes of gameplay.
Q: Speaking of the game being deleted, can I ask what inspired that?
Mullins: It’s one of those things where it just felt right. There weren’t that many other endings I could think of that just felt conclusive in that way. It is a little similar to my previous games, maybe I’m falling back on old tricks. There’s something similar inPony Island, and inThe Hexthere’s a differentthing of theInscryptionendingthat’s kinda similar, so maybe I’m just pulling from my older experience. That’s the only thing that made sense. It’s conclusive—the characters are gone, the disk is over.
Q: Was there something you were trying to convey with this final moment with each of the Scrybes?
Mullins: There were feelings I was trying to get across. I really wanted the Leshy goodbye to be a bit of a heartstring-puller, but acknowledging the strange fact that this is a character that was repeatedly killing you. I thought it would be interesting if you actually felt sorry for him or felt empathy with the character. I also knew at that point, which was not obvious the entire time, that people were in love with part one, and they only kinda liked the rest of the game. I’m still getting that feedback, but it wasn’t obvious at the time. I worked hard on all of it, and I get that people have their favorites—they loved part one, andthey loved the cabin, and knowing that, I thought it would be cool if that scene pulled at their heartstrings ‘cause it was almost nostalgic for the point in the game that they liked the most.
Q: Maybe one of the reasons people ended up feeling bad for Leshy in the end is that in part one, you don’t yet realize exactly how meta the game is going to be so it feels like it matters when he kills you. But by the end, you’ve realized that technically speaking, even for the sake of the game, none of the people he killed were technically real.
Mullins: Exactly, there was another layer. And I guess he also contrasts with P03, who is ruder to you and doesn’t really care about making an interesting story. He’s just trying to ram you through his weird card mechanics. People tend to hate that character, which is intended. In that light, maybe even a murderous forest demon is someone you’d wanna be friends with.
Q: Is there any chance you’re able to tell me why Grimora decided to delete the game? Because it does seem a bit sudden.
Mullins: I can say that there are fans right now who are trying to solve passwords to decrypt a hidden file in the game. Thehidden file reveals the dark secretthat is at the bottom of the disk, the reason why people are trying to get the disk back—are even willing to kill for it. Grimora is actually a good character who wants to make sure that data never sees the light of day. She also has a sort of serene attitude about death where she is just totally fine with the idea of being at peace instead of living in this world.
Mullins: Well, now it is, yeah.
Q: Were you forced to cut anything from the game?
Mullins: Not really. I tend to not like doing that—I feel like if I worked on it, it’s got some value. I can de-emphasize it, maybe, but not completely remove it from the game. The only things that were cut were things that were not completed fully. There are a few cards in part one that didn’t always work because of bugs and it was easier to cut them. There were a few part three mechanics that were reworked, so I guess they were cut and replaced with something else because they weren’t enjoyable. Pretty much everything is in there.
Q: You’ve been bringing up fan participation throughout the interview. Can I ask you to expand on that?
Mullins: It’s something that I think they’ve come to expect from my past two games. In both of those games, there’s the experience of playing the game and then there’s a secondary experience afterward where there are things that are so hard to understand and crack that you can’t do it yourself,you need a community effort. Because it was kinda expected, I’m doing it again, and it’s basically—without spoiling too much—there’s encryption you need certain passwords to crack that reveal text that gives more context to the story. They’re probably in the Discord channel discussing this. The clues are very cryptic, but you know the format of the password so, eventually, you can use the clue to find the password are read more of the text.
Q: And one of the steps was to go dig up the original floppy disk.
Mullins: Strangely enough, that’s not one of the steps they originally had to do. I wasn’t expecting anyone to do that. That was because when Kevin, the actor, and I were out in the woods filming the disk scene, we thought it would be fun to leave it buried there in case someone did come to dig it up. He made a note of the coordinates and I put the real coordinates in the game, but it turns out they were off by a little bit, and those people were never gonna find it. So that’s where I just was.They were live-streaming it, trying to find it, and I saw these poor guys in the woods and thought I should help them out. Kevin lives right near there—that’s why we shot there—so I went and got him and we both went out and met them just now. We helped them find it and then we staged a little scene I’m hoping I can watch somewhere soon.
Q: You mentioned that you wantedInscryption’s ending to be conclusive, but it still seems like there’s a number of loose ends. Do you have any plans to continue expanding this story in the future, possibly into other mediums?
Mullins: Never say never, but I think I’m happy with the combination of the ending you get as an average player—it does leave many loose ends, but it is conclusive, so you could call it an ending. But also, if you do care to look deeper, there’s the further context that makes some loose ends tie up. I think between those two things I’d be pretty happy with calling it, but you never know.
Q: Where do you see yourself going next as a developer?
Mullins: I think I just wanna keep doing what I’m doing. I’m not bored of it yet and I don’t think the fans are, so I think the next game is going to do—it’s like, expect the unexpected, but you may probably expect to expect the unexpected. It’s gonna be the same kinda bull that you’re used to, probably.
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