Inscryption - Game Theory: The Secret Game You Didn't Find
Finally, after many battles you've won, you defeated the game within a game within a game. Your reward is a mysterious file called "old data," but something doesn't feel right. We see that whatever was hidden here was not meant to be seen in the brief flashes we get. We see that it's led to war espionage.
It's tied to massive government conspiracies. What begins as just a game suddenly transcends beyond The game becomes real. Should we accept this challenge? Should we try to solve the mystery? Probably not, but curiosity gets the better of us and the clues are there. This game within a game has one more challenge in store for us.
So let me explain to you all the games that you didn't know were there. The games that go beyond mere digital cards and cabins Today we reveal the deepest secret hidden in the inscription. That way, if they come for me, others will know the truth. Hello internet Welcome to game theory. This is the show that feels like a Yu-Gi-Oh fan stuck inside of a creepypasta.
Because today we're continuing down the rabbit hole that is Inscription, the roguelike card game that begins as a funny animal goes, and ends with homicidal game developers on your doorstep. I suppose you could say that this game is more than meets the eye. Get it because you have to shove a knife into your own eye in order to win.
If you don't get that, well, chances are you haven't watched our previous theory. To kick things off today, you should probably make a blood sacrifice. Yeah, to briefly summarize, what you need to know Inscription begins like a typical card game but slowly reveals itself to be a article captured by aspiring YouTuber Luke Carter.
While opening a pack of retro cards, he discovers coordinates that lead him to a game disc buried out in the woods. Left there by one of the game's creators, Casey Hobbs, A woman who is now dead after a tragic fire Luke's articles start to uncover a conspiracy centered around something hidden on the disk.
A mysterious file titled "old data." By looking closely at details from the game, we learned that the inscription was made to seal away the old data because unleashing it would be too dangerous for the world, and it does appear to have powerful abilities. One piece of the old data, something called the karnaufl, code, is able to grant sentience to the game's main characters, the scribes.
But what exactly is this ancient power and where does it come from? Luke starts to get close to the answers, but his research is unfortunately cut short by the game's developer. And that's it. That's the game in a nutshell. Every story beat was followed and deciphered, with more cliffhangers left for Daniel Mullins's next game to explore, I suppose, but what if I told you that wasn't the end of the game?
In this three-act game, there's actually an act four. What if I told you that his next game was right in front of us all along? That's right, the entire game of inscription is itself a cover for a much bigger game that Daniel Mullins has crafted for us, one that leads no joke to a real disc hidden out in the woods for us gamers to dig up.
So grab your shovels, friends; it's time to dig both literally and figuratively. When you start this new game, though, the more observant among you may have noticed that what you get looks like an old Windows command line and that this prompt can actually become responsive. If you hit control c while it's on screen, by using some basic coding language, which you can figure out by using the help tool or you just know because you're a pre-internet boomer, you can navigate into a new file directory, specifically the one at the heart of the mystery old data.
There we find a log. But when attempting to decode it, the command line prompts us for a cipher. After throwing valorem characters at it, that guy from the matrix, and famous twitch streamers at it, it got nowhere, so it's back to the game for some clues, specifically, back to the guy who's been doing a lot of the legwork for us.
Last time we talked about Luke's story, we mainly focused on the articles that moved the plot forward, but there are a few others that have been broken or corrupted. These error articles are a bit of a mess, but you know that they have to be here for some reason, right? And indeed, they are. Perhaps, bloodletter box, could this possibly be the cipher that we need?
Going back to the command prompt, we try it and, that is a big ol nope. However, it is a clue that'll help us find the ciphers that we need, so we start with the first section, mycologist 12. The Mycologist is actually one of the bosses from the main game. During that fight, we encounter a card that has this really odd name.
It's just a random assortment of numbers, but loyal theorists will know that nothing in an arg is ever truly random. These numbers are the first part of our cipher, but how many of them do we use? Well, it's right there in clue 12. The second clue, perhaps, is a lot trickier to find. In fact, it's such a generic word that you could probably link it to anything within the game itself, but that's where it gets ya because it's not actually in this game.
It's really a reference to Pony Island, a previous Daniel Mullins game. In it there was a mysterious soundbite that when reversed sounded like the words beeper perhaps. Can that one word really be the thing that's connecting these two games? Yep, it is if you watch the credits of Inscription closely.
Already a monumental task, the game credits someone for the design of Beeper. To be fair, I don't know much about game development, but I don't think Beeper is a real job there. That someone is named Louis Nathis, which is weirdly similar to the name of a character from another Daniel Mullins title.
Hex Lunatis, a man who, if you play that game, is revealed to be the CEO of Game Funa, the same company that killed off Luke in Inscription. YEP, it appears that we are fully immersed in the Daniel Mullins connected universe. If we look at the credit for Lewis Nathus, we see what appears to be an asset link, but that url doesn't lead anywhere.
It does, however, provide us with the next part of our cipher. After the word beeper, where perhaps he would be in the phrase, we find eight three-three-nine three-four-question marks. That's solution number two. Now for the third and final clue, the blood letter box, things hit a bit of a roadblock.
You see, in the weeks after the game's release, the Daniel Mullins games discord was leading the charge and ripping through all these secrets with jek zero underscore zero 7272, consolidating them all down into a single running document, but at this point, even dedicated members of the community weren't really able to follow the clue.
