Inscryption is a game about saying goodbye

At the risk of annoying a former co-worker, the selection of Inscryption for a look back article is as much about revisiting a game I really enjoyed in 2021 as it is proving a point.

See, 2021 was the first year that I served on Polygon’s Game of the Year committee. We were a group that not only tallied up the votes of our fellow colleagues, but vowed to play most of the big hitter games each year. The goal was then to organize our top 50 and then top 10 GOTY not just by votes, but also by taste. We were supposed to fill in the gaps, and had the freedom to nudge things up and down based on the taste of the smaller group.

If that sounds like a kind of shadow government ignoring the will of the people because they think they know best … well it’s hard to refute when you put it that way. But really, it was more about unburdening the rest of the staff from having to play as much stuff. I got on the committee, for example, just because I played pretty much everything major every year. I was already doing the work. So I was given the honor of being one of the select few with the ability to … put my thumb on the scale a bit. 

Anyway, I remember looking through the games of 2021 and being excited by Inscryption. I mean, we all were. But it was relatively new to the scene. It launched in the middle of October, and we typically deliberated toward the end of November. So there was a recency bias. Still, the game felt so new and inventive and surprising that most of us felt very comfortable placing it at number 1 for the year. But there was a feeling among  one of two members that the game wouldn’t age well. Or that, say, five years from now, folks might not even remember Inscryption at all.

Well, I remembered Inscryption. And since you, our audience, voted for us to revisit it, I think you did too.

Having finished Inscryption for the second time, nearly five years after my first play through, I’m happy to report that it does, in fact, hold up.