No video game blends the game world and the real world quite as well as Daniel Mullins’ Inscryption, a deck-building RPG that has a lot hiding beneath the surface. Players begin in the cabin of someone by the name of Leshy, playing for their lives in a card game built around sacrificing creatures to play stronger creatures. The card game version of Inscryption has more than enough content by itself to be a full-fledged game, but those who’ve played know that’s not quite all there is to see.
The ARG, or Alternate Reality Game, that followed the ending of Inscryption was a wild experience. It has since concluded, giving players a completely new ending for the game that has some pretty dire consequences. While the entire story of Inscryption is best experienced rather than explained, the secondary story of Luke Carder discovering a floppy disc of the game Inscryption is incredibly important to the experience.
Everything kicks off when Luke Carder tries to look into Inscryption‘s origins. Contacting the game’s fictional developers, Gamefuno, led to them demanding that Luke send them the floppy disc without admitting that it was an official Gamefuno product. The exact reason why Gamefuno wanted the floppy disc back isn’t quite known, but it likely has something to do with something called OLD_DATA.
OLD_DATA is mentioned multiple times throughout Inscryption‘s story. What exactly it is still remains a mystery, but there are a few things players were able to piece together based on hidden lore and in-game secrets. OLD_DATA is likely what gave the characters of Inscryption sentience, as the game itself was developed by a Gamefuno employee named Kaycee in order to hide OLD_DATA. Whatever it is, it’s so important that it instigated the four main characters of Inscryption, the Scribes, to fight over it.
Leshy, from the game’s first act, starts out in control of the OLD_DATA. This doesn’t last long, as when the player beats Act 1, everything resets back to a neutral state. In the game’s second act, all four scribes imminently begin trying to dig up OLD_DATA from within the game itself. Leshy has someone literally fish for it in a river, but the Scribe of Technology, named P03, manages to get to it first. It takes control as Inscryption enters its third act.
Another Scribe, named Grimora, realizes the true nature of OLD_DATA and comes to the conclusion that the only way to protect the world from the file is to delete everything on the Inscryption floppy drive. She manages to do just that in the game’s ending, right after Leshy assumedly kills P03 before it can upload Inscryption and OLD_DATA to the internet. As the game is deleted, Luke Carder manages to catch a glimpse of OLD_DATA, which causes him to destroy the floppy to hide what he saw.
The real game of Inscryption ends when Luke tries to go to a journalist to share the story but is killed before he can do so by a Gamefuno employee. This is where the fans playing through the ARG began developing the plot out further, including discovering a bit more info on what OLD_DATA is. According to lore uncovered by the ARG, OLD_DATA may have been created by the Nazis in WWII by using something called the Karnoffel Code.
It’s a pretty wild twist, but it’s nothing compared to the secret ending to Inscryption‘s main story that players found waiting for them at the end of the ARG. An unlisted YouTube video showed Luke Carder’s computer with P03’s face displayed on it, heavily implying that PO3 succeeded with its plan to upload Inscryption. This might mean that the OLD_DATA actually did get out into the world, or that the version players picked up on Steam is meant to represent what PO3 uploaded, blending together the game’s story and the real world.
The story of what OLD_DATA is can be learned without diving into the game’s ARG. Likewise, the ARG doesn’t really answer any of the mysteries that make Inscyrption‘s story worth experiencing. Instead, the ARG builds on the world presented by the game and gives just a bit more context to some of those mysteries. The ARG doesn’t provide any clear answers on what OLD_DATA is or what it’s capable of, but it does outline that people have been fighting to keep it a secret for a long, long time.
The entire Inscryption ARG is worth going through for fans of the game. For those who want to try and solve the mystery themselves, community created guides exist that help with solutions to the ARG’s more complicated puzzles. Given that the ARG also tied Inscryption‘s story to some of other Mullins’ games, there may still be more coming for the story of OLD_DATA.
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