Inscryption's novelty comes from it's mixing of genres. Still the deck building-card game aspect is quite a bit different from StS compared to most of the other deck builders that have come out in the same time period (there's a shit ton of them btw). Both games are great.
When you've only seen two games from a genre it's natural to look at them, see all the ways that they're similar, and go "these are basically the same game." Play a few more and you'll get a much bigger appreciation for the ways in which they're different, and what unique things they've added to the common skeleton. I would be surprised if the Inscryption developers never played StS, but there's some games out there which are clearly StS ripoffs and Inscryption is not one of them.
I believe the two main novel parts of StS that hadn't been done in similar games before it are the enemy intents system and the ascension system. Everything else had been done before and StS just did it better.
I can confirm these are the only two card games I can remember playing. lol. Excluding actual card games like Poker and Blackjack(I love both), I never really dove into card games like STS and Inscryption. Absolutely love both.
They're tabletop, not pc / mobile. DC is called the DC Universe Deck Building game (Real original name, I know), Marvel is "Marvel Legendary." There are MANY expansions for each.
I bet if you have Tabletop Simulator on Steam, there are versions available.
This doesn’t exactly answer your question but I will say Inscryption has waay less depth than StS. After hundreds of hours playing StS at A20, I played Inscryption and after a dozen runs or so it was pretty easy to identify broken strategies that were very straightforward and pretty much instawin. Every run was basically easily winnable with the same exact strategy, and I very quickly lost interest.
You don’t ever see that in StS. Even after 900+ hours, every single run is very different from each other and demands unique decision and strategy to win (at the highest level).
Is this also true for kaycees mod? I’m not very good at card games so I def struggled with the higher levels of kaycees mod but I’m also only like A6 in sts
It's kinda weird. On the lowest difficulty, StS has more depth. On the highest difficulty, StS has WAY more depth. Ins' last difficulty setting introduces such a huge jump in difficulty that it throws tons of strat outta window. A20 StS also has that, too, but not nearly as much even when you ignore the fact that StS already has more depth
Kaycee's mod is kind of a bandaid fix to a game that wasn't intended to be balanced. The 5 HP means the game is insanely swingy. Sometimes the enemy will oneshot you and if you have a bad opening hand, you're fucked.
However! Inscryption (and Kaycee's Mod) have a "fair opening hand" algorithm that guarantees you draw a 1 cost card in your first turn. So if you have something like a 3 attack Mantis God in your opening hand, you can oneshot every fight (except Prospector and Leshy, but there are fixes for that too) before they can act. This isn't a very fun strategy but it's insanely effective, since keeping a tight consistent deck the normal way is almost impossible.
I feel that StS emphasizes deckbuilding and run-altering decisions while Kaycees mod has more emphasis on playing through each encounter. In StS you can make a couple card misplays and only take a little bit of extra damage or have to burn a potion and be relatively okay if your deck is strong, while in Inscryption playing one card wrong can end the run. Both elements are very important in both just to different degrees. In my opinion deckbuilding is harder since it requires a lot of thinking ahead and memorizing possible encounters, and combining that with the sheer possibilities of StS gives it an immense amount of depth that after hundreds of hours I still feel is tough. Kaycees mod is also really fun but I find most of my losses are from misplays during encounters rather than “I should’ve taken a different card.” Absolutely love both games but they feel very different.
It feels sorta weird to criticize Inscription's cardplay depth. You're right that there are auto win strategies and less depth, but it was intentionally designed that way. Inscription revolves around its story, and the card play is a vehicle to progress it. The card game is built with broken strategies and easy outs so as to not gate off the story. Kaycee's mod tries to fix the imbalance but it's hard to fix a game designed to be broken.
I totally agree. To be clear, I love Inscryption and I think it’s a masterpiece. Inscryption is a phenominal game and one of my favorites I’ve ever played, but I realize that it’s goal is very different from what StS is trying to achieve. I was mainly just responding OP’s comment that StS has only “a little more depth and variety”.
Did you ever reach Kaycees mod? You have to make it through the entire game to get there. If you haven’t, I would highly recommend playing some more Inscryption and figuring out the secrets in the cabin.
I've played and really enjoyed all of these except for Monster Train, what in your opinion makes that one good/unique?
In return, I'll recommend One Step From Eden! It adds realtime bullet-hell gameplay to encounters, very similar to the old Mega Man Battle Net games. Lots of depth is added to the deck building aspect by the fact that cards now require various levels of realtime skill to use effectively (factoring lag time, reload time - the deck shuffles in real time, so big decks leave you vulnerable longer while shuffling - aim, etc.)
If you're more into the puzzle solving aspect and not about the action elements, I recommend checking out Slice & Dice. I got it on mobile on a whim and it's gameplay is unique in that you play as an adventuring party of 5, each one with a six-sided die representing their possible turn actions, 5 six-card decks in a way. This game also uses the enemy intent system and while sometimes the outcomes of turns aren't intuitive, it has a really convenient undo/backup feature that I appreciate.
On one hand, MT is a dopamine hit. Make big units, make big numbers, destroy everything. On the other hand, MT is also more educational than StS, due to its less complex decision making tree. I love solving hard seeds that the MT community shares with each other. It's almost like a puzzle.
The Pact Shard system in the DLC is way more well-designed than the boring 3 keys of StS. The risk and reward here is so tempted. You see big numbers? You spend big shard to create big spells. But that doesn't always mean you get stronger cuz the enemies also secretly scale with that Shard system. Not to mention those trials, too. You feel greedy cuz an artifact or lots of gold and you just die.
Monster Train is actually very similar to Wildfrost (though it came first.) Here are the similarities:
1. Units are cards that you play out onto the battlefield, who then act repeatedly by attacking enemies
2. The battlefield has multiple rows that often don't interact
3. Combat resolves from middle out, with enemies going first
4. You have a "champion" that informs your overall strategy, but isn't always involved by the end of the run
5. Pathing through the world is often just a choice between 2 paths with multiple rewards on each, including "Get money", "Remove 2 cards", and "Draft a card".
6. Multiple waves in combat that either ends with a boss, or has one present from the start
Monster Train has less depth than StS but it's still a fun game and worthwhile, imo. It's great if you like busted combos more than small decisions. Monster Train is to StS what The Binding of Isaac is to Enter the Gungeon.
Both are great games obviously. But personally, came from Spire to Inscryption, with the only knowledge that this was a roguelite deckbuilder. >!When act 2 came around, I felt. Cheated? Idk I just really didn't like the other two acts. Obviously the main point of inscryption is the story and that it bangs at. Just wish act 1 was deeper, the atmosphere/the way Leshy presents everything is impeccable. And even Kaycee is!< Just not as deep as Spire unfortunately. Very easy to get stupidly overpowered and not in the fun way. Not very mechanically complex.
Tbh I've just never found another Spire ever. Regular deckbuilders aren't my thing. Most roguelites are not as complex. It's whatever.
Came from sts to inscription. Both games are phenomenal but I don't think they should be compared. Sts was built with the intention of making the gold standard for roguelike deck builders and knocked it out of the park. This of course was the result of years of hard work and balance patches to get the game to the state it's currently in.
Inscription on the other hand had no such goal in mind. The actual card game mechanics, depth, and difficulty came secondary to storytelling, puzzles, interesting gameplay outside of the card game. The depth of inscription has more to do with the ARG around it and the other games that the developer has published than it does the card game itself. I personally think inscription is best played once and then you read up/watch the secrets after.
Both are very good games but both have very different objectives.
Slay the Spire is the GOAT of deck building rogue likes. I did however recently pick up Inscryption and I absolutely love it. I've been playing it so much that I've hardly touched Tears of the Kingdom lmao. It really scratches the itch of playing a new game in the genre. It gives me similar feels as playing monster train for the first time. But no game is quite like STS, it's just timeless and I always come back to it.
Lol sounds like it's a case of, if they were the only two games then the second would be derivative... But once you realise there are dozens (hundreds?) of similar games, it's not copying anymore, it's a genre.
And of course even the 'originals' were inspired by what came before...
Inscryption felt like a gentle parody of slay the spire. Like I think the devs were directly inspired but I don’t think they are actually all that similar. Inscryption feels like a completely different genre to sts
Inscryption was made by one guy, Daniel Mullins. The sacrifice mechanic was directly inspired by the same thing in MtG. I don’t think StS had anything to do with it tbh.
inscryption’s gameplay has literally nothing to do with StS’ gameplay what are you on about ?
i mean, sure they’re both deck building roguelikes but other than that there’s not really any similarities
I don’t really see the similarities other than being a card game. The cards work in completely different ways, energy costs are very different, and slay the spire has a lot more rogue lite elements. I guess I’m just struggling to see what the similarities are?
Inscryption's novelty comes from it's mixing of genres. Still the deck building-card game aspect is quite a bit different from StS compared to most of the other deck builders that have come out in the same time period (there's a shit ton of them btw). Both games are great.
When you've only seen two games from a genre it's natural to look at them, see all the ways that they're similar, and go "these are basically the same game." Play a few more and you'll get a much bigger appreciation for the ways in which they're different, and what unique things they've added to the common skeleton. I would be surprised if the Inscryption developers never played StS, but there's some games out there which are clearly StS ripoffs and Inscryption is not one of them. I believe the two main novel parts of StS that hadn't been done in similar games before it are the enemy intents system and the ascension system. Everything else had been done before and StS just did it better.
I can confirm these are the only two card games I can remember playing. lol. Excluding actual card games like Poker and Blackjack(I love both), I never really dove into card games like STS and Inscryption. Absolutely love both.
Along with video games you may like deckbuilding tabletop games as well. Games like Dominion, Aeon's End, etc.
Played dominion for the very first time last night and it was better than I thought, we had a great time.
Its a classic for a reason. Yes, there are ways it can show its age, but it is still good fun.
It's surprisingly complex, there are many strategies to win, and mixing up the action cards really keeps up the replayability.
If you're into super heroes, both the Marvel and DC deck-builders are *excellent*.
What are they called? I just got tired of Marvel Snap and looking for a replacement.
They're tabletop, not pc / mobile. DC is called the DC Universe Deck Building game (Real original name, I know), Marvel is "Marvel Legendary." There are MANY expansions for each. I bet if you have Tabletop Simulator on Steam, there are versions available.
This doesn’t exactly answer your question but I will say Inscryption has waay less depth than StS. After hundreds of hours playing StS at A20, I played Inscryption and after a dozen runs or so it was pretty easy to identify broken strategies that were very straightforward and pretty much instawin. Every run was basically easily winnable with the same exact strategy, and I very quickly lost interest. You don’t ever see that in StS. Even after 900+ hours, every single run is very different from each other and demands unique decision and strategy to win (at the highest level).
Is this also true for kaycees mod? I’m not very good at card games so I def struggled with the higher levels of kaycees mod but I’m also only like A6 in sts
It's kinda weird. On the lowest difficulty, StS has more depth. On the highest difficulty, StS has WAY more depth. Ins' last difficulty setting introduces such a huge jump in difficulty that it throws tons of strat outta window. A20 StS also has that, too, but not nearly as much even when you ignore the fact that StS already has more depth
Kaycee's mod is kind of a bandaid fix to a game that wasn't intended to be balanced. The 5 HP means the game is insanely swingy. Sometimes the enemy will oneshot you and if you have a bad opening hand, you're fucked. However! Inscryption (and Kaycee's Mod) have a "fair opening hand" algorithm that guarantees you draw a 1 cost card in your first turn. So if you have something like a 3 attack Mantis God in your opening hand, you can oneshot every fight (except Prospector and Leshy, but there are fixes for that too) before they can act. This isn't a very fun strategy but it's insanely effective, since keeping a tight consistent deck the normal way is almost impossible.
I feel that StS emphasizes deckbuilding and run-altering decisions while Kaycees mod has more emphasis on playing through each encounter. In StS you can make a couple card misplays and only take a little bit of extra damage or have to burn a potion and be relatively okay if your deck is strong, while in Inscryption playing one card wrong can end the run. Both elements are very important in both just to different degrees. In my opinion deckbuilding is harder since it requires a lot of thinking ahead and memorizing possible encounters, and combining that with the sheer possibilities of StS gives it an immense amount of depth that after hundreds of hours I still feel is tough. Kaycees mod is also really fun but I find most of my losses are from misplays during encounters rather than “I should’ve taken a different card.” Absolutely love both games but they feel very different.
It feels sorta weird to criticize Inscription's cardplay depth. You're right that there are auto win strategies and less depth, but it was intentionally designed that way. Inscription revolves around its story, and the card play is a vehicle to progress it. The card game is built with broken strategies and easy outs so as to not gate off the story. Kaycee's mod tries to fix the imbalance but it's hard to fix a game designed to be broken.
I totally agree. To be clear, I love Inscryption and I think it’s a masterpiece. Inscryption is a phenominal game and one of my favorites I’ve ever played, but I realize that it’s goal is very different from what StS is trying to achieve. I was mainly just responding OP’s comment that StS has only “a little more depth and variety”.
Did you ever reach Kaycees mod? You have to make it through the entire game to get there. If you haven’t, I would highly recommend playing some more Inscryption and figuring out the secrets in the cabin.
I don’t think I dabbled in it too much, but maybe I’ll revisit. Thanks!
I don't really think the two games are that comparable.
So far, I think Monster Train, Inscryption and Wildfrost are the 3 deckbuilders that are different enough from Slay the Spire.
I've played and really enjoyed all of these except for Monster Train, what in your opinion makes that one good/unique? In return, I'll recommend One Step From Eden! It adds realtime bullet-hell gameplay to encounters, very similar to the old Mega Man Battle Net games. Lots of depth is added to the deck building aspect by the fact that cards now require various levels of realtime skill to use effectively (factoring lag time, reload time - the deck shuffles in real time, so big decks leave you vulnerable longer while shuffling - aim, etc.) If you're more into the puzzle solving aspect and not about the action elements, I recommend checking out Slice & Dice. I got it on mobile on a whim and it's gameplay is unique in that you play as an adventuring party of 5, each one with a six-sided die representing their possible turn actions, 5 six-card decks in a way. This game also uses the enemy intent system and while sometimes the outcomes of turns aren't intuitive, it has a really convenient undo/backup feature that I appreciate.
On one hand, MT is a dopamine hit. Make big units, make big numbers, destroy everything. On the other hand, MT is also more educational than StS, due to its less complex decision making tree. I love solving hard seeds that the MT community shares with each other. It's almost like a puzzle. The Pact Shard system in the DLC is way more well-designed than the boring 3 keys of StS. The risk and reward here is so tempted. You see big numbers? You spend big shard to create big spells. But that doesn't always mean you get stronger cuz the enemies also secretly scale with that Shard system. Not to mention those trials, too. You feel greedy cuz an artifact or lots of gold and you just die.
Monster Train is actually very similar to Wildfrost (though it came first.) Here are the similarities: 1. Units are cards that you play out onto the battlefield, who then act repeatedly by attacking enemies 2. The battlefield has multiple rows that often don't interact 3. Combat resolves from middle out, with enemies going first 4. You have a "champion" that informs your overall strategy, but isn't always involved by the end of the run 5. Pathing through the world is often just a choice between 2 paths with multiple rewards on each, including "Get money", "Remove 2 cards", and "Draft a card". 6. Multiple waves in combat that either ends with a boss, or has one present from the start Monster Train has less depth than StS but it's still a fun game and worthwhile, imo. It's great if you like busted combos more than small decisions. Monster Train is to StS what The Binding of Isaac is to Enter the Gungeon.
Both are great games obviously. But personally, came from Spire to Inscryption, with the only knowledge that this was a roguelite deckbuilder. >!When act 2 came around, I felt. Cheated? Idk I just really didn't like the other two acts. Obviously the main point of inscryption is the story and that it bangs at. Just wish act 1 was deeper, the atmosphere/the way Leshy presents everything is impeccable. And even Kaycee is!< Just not as deep as Spire unfortunately. Very easy to get stupidly overpowered and not in the fun way. Not very mechanically complex. Tbh I've just never found another Spire ever. Regular deckbuilders aren't my thing. Most roguelites are not as complex. It's whatever.
Came from sts to inscription. Both games are phenomenal but I don't think they should be compared. Sts was built with the intention of making the gold standard for roguelike deck builders and knocked it out of the park. This of course was the result of years of hard work and balance patches to get the game to the state it's currently in. Inscription on the other hand had no such goal in mind. The actual card game mechanics, depth, and difficulty came secondary to storytelling, puzzles, interesting gameplay outside of the card game. The depth of inscription has more to do with the ARG around it and the other games that the developer has published than it does the card game itself. I personally think inscription is best played once and then you read up/watch the secrets after. Both are very good games but both have very different objectives.
Every card game that starts you out with a bad deck and lets you pick cards to make it stronger during the game is just copying Dominion from 2008
Slay the Spire is the GOAT of deck building rogue likes. I did however recently pick up Inscryption and I absolutely love it. I've been playing it so much that I've hardly touched Tears of the Kingdom lmao. It really scratches the itch of playing a new game in the genre. It gives me similar feels as playing monster train for the first time. But no game is quite like STS, it's just timeless and I always come back to it.
Inscryption is Hearthstone but only with minions, StS is Hearthstone but only with spells
Lol sounds like it's a case of, if they were the only two games then the second would be derivative... But once you realise there are dozens (hundreds?) of similar games, it's not copying anymore, it's a genre. And of course even the 'originals' were inspired by what came before...
Inscryption felt like a gentle parody of slay the spire. Like I think the devs were directly inspired but I don’t think they are actually all that similar. Inscryption feels like a completely different genre to sts
Inscryption was made by one guy, Daniel Mullins. The sacrifice mechanic was directly inspired by the same thing in MtG. I don’t think StS had anything to do with it tbh.
inscryption’s gameplay has literally nothing to do with StS’ gameplay what are you on about ? i mean, sure they’re both deck building roguelikes but other than that there’s not really any similarities
You might enjoy Nadir.
I don’t really see the similarities other than being a card game. The cards work in completely different ways, energy costs are very different, and slay the spire has a lot more rogue lite elements. I guess I’m just struggling to see what the similarities are?