Gold teeth clatter into the weathered-looking scale placed between you and your opponent. Across the table, only your opponent’s glinting eyes are visible in the dark, musty cabin where you sit playing a strange card game. The tumbling teeth weigh down your opponent’s side of the scale as they settle, tallying up the damage dealt by your prized card: a fearsome insect deity. Suddenly a voice belonging neither to you nor your opponent exclaims, "Always pick Mantis God!"

Inscryption defies simple explanation. You have to play it to fully appreciate it. Spooky twists, genre shifts, and excellent deck-building challenges await those who dive into the 2021 hit. And what manages to hold this eclectic game together is a surprising reveal that lands relatively early in the game.

Yes, if you haven't played it yet and want to go in with zero spoilers, here's the moment to stop reading this article. Come back when you're ready to learn more about Luke “The Lucky Carder” Carder, the character that Inscryption's creator Daniel Mullins introduced via in-game found footage to ground the story and pull players deeper into its mysteries.
 

Who is The Lucky Carder?

Players are introduced to Luke Carder fairly early on in Inscryption, though they may not realize it. By the time you're introduced to Carder—and realize you're experiencing Inscryption from his perspective—the game has already pushed you to get one over on Leshy, the creepy figure who has likely delighted in killing the player many times over by that point. Hearing Carder, played by Vancouver-based actor Kevin Saxby, exclaim "I think I just beat him!" serves as the first major turning point in the game's narrative.

(Full disclosure: I attended high school with Saxby. We worked on some silly videos for classes together, but it had been years since we last talked by the time I played Inscryption.)

Almost mirroring most players' experiences playing Inscryption, Saxby didn't know what was in store for him when he auditioned for the role of Carder. "I had never done any video game work before," says Saxby, during a joint interview with Mullins. "Most of my work up until that point was all commercials, then bit parts in TV shows."

Mullins had never directed someone for live-action shoots like Inscryption's either. The game was already well on its way to completion when Saxby came aboard. "As I was making parts two and three, I realized the game needed some overarching thing that tied it all together," says Mullins. "I had been playing with the idea of including video in the game for a while—the idea of the character being a YouTuber opening packs of cards led to the idea of finding the game's coordinates. Then everything started to click together."

Inscryption bounces players between its “in-game” mysteries and Carder's attempts to crack them “outside” of the game itself. Carder’s story is shown through clips filmed with a phone, as many real YouTubers at The Lucky Carder’s level would do.

"I had heard from friends who’d been in video games that usually they do mo-cap or voice overs, stuff like that," says Saxby. "Even as I was reading excerpts from the script, I wasn’t sure exactly what it would be. I’d never really seen games with live-action before, because I myself am not a huge gamer."

Mullins on the other hand was no stranger to full-motion video or FMV. A genre based around live-action performances, FMV had its heyday in the ‘90s with the rise of the CD-ROM as a storage format for games.

"I wasn't a PC gamer then–I was more of a Nintendo boy," Mullins says. "Over the years though, as a developer, I’ve looked back at games like Command & Conquer to get a sense for it."

While many early FMV games leaned hard into cheesiness and low-budget camp (and have aged somewhat poorly), Mullins looked to more recent titles when developing Inscryption. The work of Sam Barlow was a key source of inspiration. Barlow’s breakout game Her Story won the Independent Game Festival's Seumas McNally Grand Prize in 2016, just as Inscryption later would in 2022.

"Barlow's games let you manipulate the footage to a fine degree of detail, and there’s a weird voyeuristic feeling about not just watching it, but also being able to rewind it and look for clues," says Mullins. "That was appealing and put the idea into my mind. Then it almost seemed even more exciting that video wasn’t the main focus of Inscryption, but an eclectic thing in the mix of an already eclectic game with 3D models, pixel art, all these different styles in it."

Unpacking the character of Luke

By the time Saxby landed the role of Luke Carder, there was already a teaser trailer out for Inscryption that demonstrated the game's early tone. Before figuring out how to play a guy getting drawn into the disquieting world of Inscryption, Saxby wanted to nail down the ordinary guy we see in Carder's first videos.

"I watched several videos of pack openings, just trying to understand the external mannerisms and cadence, the performance of somebody who is a YouTuber," Saxby recalls, seamlessly slipping into the enthusiastic, psyched-up attitude of your archetypal content creator: “Welcome back everybody! Today, we're going to be taking a look at blah blah blah.”

"For that voice I definitely needed to do research and base my performance off of that if I wanted it to be taken seriously. But originally that world of Twitch streams and card pack openings was pretty alien to me."

Saxby—who in addition to his professional work regularly films short sketches for platforms like Instagram—thinks of himself more as a comedian than as an actor and is usually a bit reticent to talk about his process. ("I don't consider myself 'a thespian,'" he says.) For Carder, he tried to "keep things simple" and bring as much of himself to the role as he could.

"As long as those parts of myself don't clash with his place in the story, I think you should do that," says Saxby. " I reshaped myself: I was a little more giddy, a little more nerdy. But I just tried to ask myself a lot of questions. That’s how I like to approach every role, where you just figure out exactly what your character thinks about everything that’s going on."

The nature of Inscryption's shoot and the scope of his role also meant Saxby got to collaborate much more closely with Mullins than he could when coming in for parts on shows like The CW's Batwoman or Syfy's Resident Alien.

"If you’re a day player on a TV show—and I say this with fairly limited experience—but there’s definitely no room to talk to the director in those scenarios. They’re exhausted, they’re busy working with the stars," says Saxby. "In that sense [Inscryption] was fun, because I could play with my performance more. There was also more room in the day to do it too, because there aren’t 15 people who need to sign off on things."

Mullins also found it fun to hit the ground running with Saxby, even as he also had to finish up development of the game and hone the rest of its story with Carder added to the big picture.

"The scripts were not all written when we started shooting, and we spaced the shoots out by weeks or sometimes even a month," says Mullins. "It was super helpful to have footage as we went along, and by the end it was easier finishing the scripts knowing that Kevin was going to be the one playing it."
 

Going from playful to paranoid

Without delving too deep into the particulars of the plot, the journey that Saxby and Mullins took Luke Carder on visits darker places than the life of a happy-go-lucky gamer—and even extended into the alternate reality game or ARG that Mullins wove around Inscryption's core.

The bits of FMV that were inspired more by the found-footage horror genre than the performative positivity of YouTubers required both men to step a bit outside of their comfort zones.

"Different things come naturally to different actors, and it is a lot easier for me to do more lighthearted comedy stuff and play myself," says Saxby. "That's why I always have such a respect for scream queens and other actors who have nervous breakdowns in horror movies, and they do it so believably and so well, like Toni Collette in Hereditary. I mean, getting to that place—I don’t know if fun is the right word, but it’s exciting.”

"It’s a challenge to get to a place where you really think you’re going to die," Saxby continues. "If I want to be honest with the role, I have to at least believe that somewhat. I can’t just think myself into having these emotions and living as Luke did through this unraveling nightmare. I had to get my heart racing, I had to stretch my imagination."

"I do remember Kevin psyching himself up for a few of the scenes, repeating things like 'I’m gonna die, I’m gonna die,'" Mullins recalls, chuckling. "I had very little experience being a director or working with actors, so I thought 'I guess this is what he’s gotta do?'"

When it came to crafting Inscryption's companion ARG, Mullins took advantage of working with Saxby to place clues in the video segment and even to respond to the community's efforts to solve the puzzles he laid out. For the people who had played his earlier games like The Hex and unraveled its ARG, Mullins wanted to take the challenge to another level.

"Not a lot of people experienced the ARG I made for The Hex—not even close to the amount of people who participated in Inscryption’s," says Mullins. "For me the question was how to make it different from that, how to bring in new twists and shocking moments.

"I also think about what happens when the ARG is all said and done, when everyone’s found everything there is—how will it get presented as a narrative after that? People will make videos that summarize what happened, and I think that’s part of the experience too."

Mailing out clues to ARG players was a first for Mullins, and when a pair of fans decided to go livestream themselves looking for the coordinates where Luke Carder finds his build of Inscryption on a floppy disk in-game, he and Saxby leapt into action. "The encounter with the two people in the woods with Kevin, that was totally unplanned," says Mullins. (The live reaction the stream's viewers had to the discovery of the "real" Inscryption floppy disk—and what came next—is absolutely worth a minute of your time.)
 

Luke's legacy

Inscryption's great word-of-mouth buzz in the months following its October 2021 release led to several Game of the Year awards. But two years out, the part that Saxby looks back on most fondly is the way Inscryption's most adoring fans embraced not just the game, but himself. Over the course of several months, Saxby streamed himself playing through Inscryption, overcoming its challenges, and delighting in fan art of Luke Carder and other characters like Leshy along the way.

"The whole Inscryption community was so loving, warm, and welcoming," says Saxby. "Based on how popular the game is, it was probably a small percentage of the community that showed up for my streams, but they were wonderful and it was fun having them see me as both Luke Carder and as Kevin. Playing through the game, as myself basically, was a blast."

"Actually, I think about it almost every day,” he continues. “Every time I post a video I’ll get a comment on Instagram or something like 'Hey, this guy looks like Luke from Inscryption!' It’s such a privilege."

Mullins—prepped and ready to try out a new board game with Saxby after our interview wraps—was also quite happy with how their collaboration panned out. "I liked the whole process," says Mullins. "I built some confidence up by doing it."

"I still have impostor syndrome, a bit, from working on this project," Saxby tells Mullins. "People will ask me about when it'll be available on this platform, or about a board game coming out, and I tell them they've got to ask the king, the mastermind."

"Well, to be fair about the impostor syndrome, I think you were a much more professional actor than I was a director. I was amazed," Mullins responds.

"There was one really funny moment," he continues, "when we were in the woods, and we filmed a whole scene. We'd take the camera off and look to play it back and the video's just gone—like 'What the hell happened? I pressed record!'"

Mullins and Saxby both begin cracking up. "It was strapped to my head, right?" Saxby asks. "There was some clamp we used that kept pressing a button to stop the recording."

"Actually," Mullins adds, "I'm doubling down on this. The whole implication—Luke's holding a lamp and a shovel in the scene, so he must have purchased a head clamp to go filming. That's so ridiculous."

Ridiculous? Sure—but it's also the sort of detail that makes Luke Carder feel like a real person swept up in Inscryption's story, a sign that he's the kind of guy who’s too curious for his own good. Certainly too curious to leave a floppy disk alone after finding it buried in the woods.

If you haven’t played it yet, you can pick up Inscryption in the Epic Games Store now.