Xbox has just added one of the best indie games of 2021 to Game Pass. It’s a horror, too, so it’s just in time for Halloween.
Inscryption is a roguelite deckbuilding game where you play a mysterious tabletop game against a creepy gamemaster. It blends elements of escape rooms, turn-based strategy, and puzzle games. On top of that, its spooky and unsettling design makes it a horror game, perfect for Halloween.
It won a 2022 Game Of The Year award at the Game Developers Choice Awards and won Best Indie Game and Best Sim/Strategy Game at The Game Awards 2021. It launched on October 19, 2021, and by January 2022 it had sold more than one million copies.
At launch, Inscryption was widely beloved by critics and fans alike. It has an 85 on review aggregator Metacritic. IGN gave it a 9/10, writing: “Inscryption is as consistently fun as it is surprising, with a wonderfully creepy story cleverly tying its ever-evolving mechanics together.”
Game Informer also gave it a 9/10, writing: “Inscryption is an oddity of the best order. It’s a horror game that isn’t aggressively trying to scare you. It’s also a clever card system wrapped around a compelling mystery that plays with video game conventions. Like a bat out of hell, Inscryption came out of nowhere and quickly became one of my favourite games of the year.”
Edge gave the game a 7/10, writing: “Were Inscription half as long, it would probably be twice the game,” and PC Gamer had a similar sentiment with its 69/100, writing: “In its initial hours, Inscryption is an eerie delight full of mystery. That feeling fades long before it ends, and now I think I’d prefer if board game night moved on and we played something else, even if it is some Kickstarter nonsense that comes with five kilograms of plastic figurines and takes half the night to explain.”
Inscryption is not available on Xbox Game Pass Core, but is on the Console, PC, and Ultimate tiers.
In other news, Ghost In The Shell Megatech Body‘s iconic soundtrack has finally been released.