2022-01-14 PST.
Just to be clear, this has a different story from Inscryption. It is not a smaller version of it. It is a small game made for an indie jam using the same base. It is not a replacement for Inscryption, nor is it a demake of it. Sacrifices Must Be Made just is.
Sacrifices Must Be Made has good atmosphere, and makes you unsure of exactly what’s going on. I don’t know if being able to turn around would have helped - and I’m glad the designer chose not to add such a feature, since it would have been distracting and overwrought.
A similar problem that I had with another card game on itch.io, is that once you have the mechanics down, and know how to read the board state, you realize that you are smashing your face into a brick wall until the random number generator relents. And of course, seeing a path to victory in more difficult circumstances requires being okay to decent at card games. Fortunately for me, as a child, I played Magic: The Gathering, Yu-Gi-Oh!!, and Duel Masters, and read strategy articles and forum posts.
Other players would not be so fortunate, and the game seems to acquiesce to that frustration in order to get the player to finish the story. Waiting for R.N.G. to be good is a weakness of most card games, but that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be mentioned here, and ignores that other card games alleviate it.
The knife isn’t really effective at helping the player unless he can read the board state accurately, which can be difficult to do, it seems, even in the fully-developed Inscryption. This is because although the weight scale gives off a creepy vibe, which is good for a horror game, it is difficult to tell how much progress a player would have based on weight, or how the game calculates progress. How do you know how much is needed to win? The assumption is that you simply need a certain amount ahead in sum. This of course goes back to most people not being good at card games and the need for the game to let them keep going at the story.
I had few issues on my first run, and quite a few issues on my second run, and I think that comes down to which cards I chose. I don’t know what the designer’s intentions were, if there was supposed to be a right and wrong choice, but it was noticeably easier to beat fight the dude across the table with certain card picks. Because of these card picks, the game was harder, and thus easier to get into a bad position, after which the dude across the table offers the player the knife, which is difficult to figure out when the best time to use it will be, because the player can’t figure out the board state, because the scale is obfuscates the progress towards victory, and the computer player can make any card they want, and it is hard to believe you can win, and I think wanting to give up is a powerful feeling that the game COULD have taken advantage of, but chose not to in order to get players across the finish line, which ultimately leads to a feeling of being stuck, which is a feeling itself could have been used to help the game. Even if you were good at card games, it can be a frustrating position to be in. You can see why the developer added the stalemate check to Inscryption.
Of course, Inscryption also suffers less from some of these weaknesses, because Inscryption has a deeper card pool, alleviating the pressure off of the constrained beast supply in being able to handle any threat the opponent sends you.
I’m choosing to view the abruptness of the ending as an artistic and poetic constraint as opposed to a result of a time restriction or a developer’s shrug. I do this because I believe the game is a little stronger by not telling you “either” “ending” is the “good” one or the “bad” one – as if developers of those games will even tell you which is which, and sometimes will only tell you that a set of them are “bad.” Dwelling on the decision would have been a mistake, and I am glad the game relents.
Inscryption seems to have taken in some of these lessons, and provides a deeper game, so I’ll look into purchasing it when I get a stronger computer.