The hit indie game Inscyption is a lot more than meets the eye. Even if you’ve finished the game, you may not be 100% certain of what it all meant, so let me explain the lore of Inscryption for you.
This will not only briefly summarize the game’s events, but explore the story surrounding the main game and what the Inscryption ARG told us about the truth of the game’s ending.
Inscryption: All lore, explained
Inscryption’s main game plays out in three acts containing three different types of games. Act 1 begins in a spooky cabin after Luke, the main character you’re playing as, boots up the game for the first time. Instead of making a new game, you can only continue an old one. You’ll have to solve a myriad of puzzles in Act 1 to beat the Game Master and find the New Game button that they were hiding from you.
You soon learn that this Game Master was named Leshy, but you also get your first glimpse at Luke Carder, which we’ll get to later on. You now reset the game and get to Act 2, which introduces you to the four Scrybers: Grimora, Magnificus, P03, and Leshy. The three other Scrybes besides Leshy were the three talking cards that helped you escape Act 1, which were the Stunted Wolf, Stinkbug, and the Stoat.
Throughout Act 2 you learn about the Scrybes’ search for the Old Data as it holds unimaginable power. This data is somewhere on this floppy disc and holds malicious code that was able to bring sentience to these characters. By the end of Act 2, you defeat Magnificus, which then leads you to learn more about the real-life copy of Inscryption. Again, more of that soon.
Act 3 centers around P03 and their attempts to spread the Old Data across the internet after finding a piece of it. You’ll soon be able to defeat P03 before they can upload everything to the internet…or so we thought. Luke also took one look at the Old Data before screaming, having seen too much already.
The Lucky Carder
As you may have realized, this entire time we’ve been playing the video game version of Inscryption, which is actually a card game. We find out through videos you can watch between acts that Luke Carder is a Youtuber of sorts who enjoys opening new card packs on camera. He and his sister used to love card games when they were younger but in the mid 2000s his sister unfortunately passed away.
His online platform now serves as a way for Luke to deal with his grief and connect with his sister. At some point, Luke purchases a vintage card pack at a garage sale for a game named Inscryption. There’s some information online about the real card game and how it failed to do well on the market. But on the back of one of the cards Luke opened, he found coordinates.
Related: Inscryption guide: Finale, ending, and New Game+ mode
Following the location of these coordinates led him to a box buried beneath the ground containing a floppy disc for the video game version of Inscryption. This somehow has no record of existing online. Luke goes so far as to contact GameFuna, the company behind the game, about it. The company ends up demanding that Luke bring them the floppy disc with threat of legal action if he doesn’t. We soon see more videos of a woman showing up at his doorstep asking about this disc, but Luke feigns innocence and lies about not having it.
Luke finds the woman who sold him these cards at the garage sale and she told him that her daughter, Kaycee, used to work for GameFuna, and these were her cards. Kaycee had somehow died in an accident while she was working on Inscryption.
After you beat the game, you see a video of Luke answering the door once again, but he’s shot in the head by that same woman who was stalking him. So what was this Old Data, and why did GameFuna want it back so badly?
The Old Data and the ARG
After the game’s launch in real life, dedicated fans dove deep into the game to find anything they could about the truth. Daniel Mullins Games, the developer of Inscryption, had an Inscryption ARG (Alternate Reality Game), which was an interactive online game that helped Inscryption fans figure out the deep lore of this game.
Players found out that the Old Data contained the Karnoffel Code. This code was the malicious batch that was able to somehow make the four Scrybes sentient and evil. But where did it come from? Well, a man named Barry Wilkinson was able to make his way into the Soviet Union to discover and steal the Karnoffel Code.
This code relates to Adolf Hitler, because apparently when his body was discovered he had a deck of cards on him for the game Karnoffel, which is an extremely old card game. The order he had the cards in dictated the Karnoffel Code, which the Soviets used to create this terrible code.
After Barry stole the disc, he hid it, but it somehow made its way into GameFuna’s hands. GameFuna presumably was planning to release this game with malicious intent, but Kaycee was able to steal and hide the disc, probably after learning the truth behind it.
There are some clues within Inscryption that someone named the Blue Man visited the studio during the game’s creation, and something called the Triangle had powers to help Kaycee create Inscryption. We still don’t know much about what the Triangle or the Blue Man is. GameFuna likely got Kaycee killed because she hid the disc, which then led to Luke finding it himself.
Interestingly, one of the fans who was able to decode much of the ARG was able to solve the last piece of the puzzle. “DaBigKahuna” ended up finding a YouTube link that showed a secret ending. The video shows proof that P03 did end up getting Inscryption uploaded onto the internet in a form of a video game…which is the video game we played!
Seems like it was all for naught in the end. Hopefully, I’ve easily explained all the lore of Inscryption for you so you better understand the secrets this game has to offer.
