Game Theory - DANGER! Don't Play This Game! (Inscryption)

Episode Date: June 11, 2023

Join Game Theory Host MatPat as he breaks down the SECRETS of Inscryption and the related ARG surrounding the game! Credits: Writers: Matthew Patrick, Justin Kuiper and Tom Robinson Editors: Danial "BanditRants" Keristoufi, Pedro Freitas, Tyler Mascola, AbsolutePixel, Marc Schneider, and Shannon (Bomb0i) Assistant Editor: Caitie Turner (Caiterpillart) Sound Editor: Yosi Berman

You're opening a pack of trading cards, inside our coordinates to a secret location out in the woods. It's nearby, so you go. You dig and you find a simple white box buried under layers of soil. Inside it is a disc with mysterious words scrawled across the label, inscription. What follows is a deadly card game with your life and the fate of the world hang in the balance. The only thing missing is a Gen 1 holographic stout. It is, by all estimations, the best indie title of 2021. The only thing is, don't play it.

Seriously, don't do it. Do not play this game. Confused? Well, to understand why, let's go on a journey. Hello internet. Welcome to Game Theory. Today we're talking about the latest game to come out of the insane mind of Daniel Mullins. For those of you who aren't familiar with his work, Daniel was the brilliant game designer

behind 2016's absolutely insane Pony Island. Oh! Look that skill. I did not kill Jesus. And I've been a huge fan of his work ever since. Now, his latest game inscription is all over the internet. Being hailed as one of, if not the best game of 2021. And I've played it.

I've enjoyed it. It is fantastic. But I'm also here to tell you that you should not play it, because doing so might just doom the entire world. Sound like an over-the-top exaggeration? Will allow me to explain. And be warned, there'll be spoilers ahead. As soon as you boot up the game for the first time, the story begins, but not in the way

that you'd expect. We first hear a mysterious voice that says, Okay, time to figure out what's on this thing. Then to make things even weirder, despite having never played it before, the option for new game is grayed out. Our only option is to select continue, so we do that and we meet a mysterious figure that greets us by saying, Perhaps you've forgotten how this game is played. Allow me to remind you.

Immediately this set off theorist alarms in my head. To me, this implies that before we got hold of the game, someone else had already begun the story. What follows is a rogue-like deck-building game where cards require sacrifices to summon, all while this guy takes on the role of dungeon master, donning different masks to simulate the various characters that you encounter on your journey. Gotta say, as a theater kid, I appreciate the commitment to the bit. You play progressively more difficult rounds against each other,

earning teeth via your cards attacks to add to a scale on the side of the table. Tip the scale far enough to one side, and you win. So it's a tabletop game a la hearthstone, right? What's the big deal here? Well, if you play long enough, there is so much more lurking under the surface. First off, the cards start talking to you. Even remembering the times that you sacrifice them in battle, which is certainly off-putting and guilt-inducing, but we also gotta be honest here, if they weren't such useless cards, I wouldn't be sacrificing them as much. Stote!

And you'll be doing a lot of sacrificing because the game eventually gets real hard. In fact, there are times when it seems like the game will do everything in its power to make you fail. When that happens, you get the chance to find a death card in your next playthrough. But while most other cards are based on woodland creatures like rabbits, bats, bats, and a sassy stote, these death cards feature you, or at least a past iteration of you. Lose the game and the dungeon master Leshi uses his camera to immortalize you as a card. If you do manage to win on any given play-through, you might think that it's suddenly time to turn the tables. This time, you're gonna be the one to pick up that camera,

pointed at Leshy, push the button to snap the photo, and... Nothing. Turns out it's not the camera that's magical, but the film that turns people into cards. The solution of this problem lies not in the heart of the cards, but rather in Leshy's cabin. See, the cards are only half the game. The other half involves us exploring the cabin where the game takes place. While you play the card game, you'll discover clues that help you to unlock and obtain special items, including another sentient card the stink bug and a stabby boy. Yep, as it turns out, you can bring a knife to a card fight,

but the target for the knife isn't the dungeon master, but rather yourself. You can use the knife to pluck out one of your eyeballs, which adds a large amount of weight to the scales. Fortunately, our dungeon master is all about the joy of the game, and as losing an eye will diminish this joy, he actually offers you a spare from his eyeball box. Which is a thing that he has just laying around. However, one of these eyes is not like the other. And upon plucking it into your head, you suddenly start to see things that you couldn't before.

Messages and clues written in invisible ink which show us exactly how to open the various locks hidden throughout the cabin. This leads us to a roll of film and a third talking card. The one-eyed, stunted wolf. Wonder what happened to his other... Oh, I get it. What's interesting is that these talking cards aren't exactly friendly to each other, let alone with our dungeon master.

Not only that, but they change a little. appearances throughout the game. The stout starts to look less like a woodland Weasel and more like a creature with a mechanical head and the card that begins as a stink bug starts to take on the appearance of an old woman. It's certainly strange, but we don't have a lot of time to think about it because with our film in hand, it's time to Dida Dada Dita D duel! We sit down at Leshey's table one final time Proceed to the end of his board and beat him, but as we deliver the final blow we hear a familiar voice Oh my did I just I think I just beat him! It's the same voice from the beginning of the game Suddenly we're ripped out of the gameplay

Revealing that what we've been seeing all along was actually just a video recording. We aren't actually playing the game, but rather we're playing as someone playing the game. This mystery voice. Man, you gotta love that about indie games. If it isn't three layers of meta within the first couple hours of your gameplay, are you truly playing an indie game? That voice belongs to a guy named Luke Carter, a humble card game aficionado and aspiring YouTuber. Because of course, he wants to be a YouTuber. Hey there, Card gamers! I'm the Lucky Carter, and this is a vintage

pack opening video. I've got four packs of inscription. Next thing you know, he's gonna try to start a podcast and box against Floyd Mayweather. But what our little Logan Paul wannabe has in his hands is no ordinary pack of cards. Inside one of them is something unusual, a set of coordinates. 49 degrees north, 123 degrees less. And like a true theorist, Luke goes and visits the coordinates on the map where he finds an old floppy disk with a simple handwritten label, Bend Round. Sorry, sorry, sorry, uh, wrong creepy pasta. It's actually labeled Inscription. That's the name of the movie. Game, actually, but you're close. Anyway, in the words of another game franchise, Some things are best left forgotten for now.

Luke probably should have left that disc buried though, because by digging it up, he starts to attract the unwanted attention of Game Funna, the game's creators. In fact, representatives start visiting his house. Coffee disc for a game called Inscription. I was told he came by a coffee of it somehow. Listen, uh, how did you know where I live exactly? And how did you get past the side gate? It's locked.

Like any good YouTube or Luke films at all. Except the video and audio periodically glitch, leaving the subtitles alone to reveal the truth. I'm just... That's binary for Amanda, in case you were wondering. And what's Amanda looking for? Well, that's hidden in another glitch. Did anyone ever play an inscription and video game? See that? More binary. Translating it gets me the Carnoffel code, which, after a quick Google search, is just some old German card game.

Now, it would be an odd Easter egg on its own, but the game actually tells us more. Or I suppose I should say the game within the game. See if you jump back into inscription after defeating the dungeon master, you grab the camera and use the magical film that you found earlier to turn him into a card. This suddenly unlocks the new game button that was missing from the opening menu. Now we can finally start this thing from the beginning, the real beginning. And you see, this is where things start to get real trippy because this new game is literally exactly that. A new game in a completely different graphical style. Immediately we're told about four characters known as the Scribes who have different ways of creating cards. There's the old woman Grimora who uses her quilt to inscribe the epitaphs of the dead, P03, a robot who uses a particle scanner to create cards, as well as Magnificus, who used his brush to paint his wizard pupils. And if all three of these look familiar, well, that's because they were our three talking cards. The stink bug, the stote, and the stunted wolf from earlier on in the play-through. How did this happen? Well, it's all thanks to the fourth scribe Leshi,

who uses his camera to capture the others, just like he would use it on us at the end of each game that we lose. And just like Game Funa out in the real world, the characters in the game are also looking for something. Leshi has the angler plumbing the depths for some long-forgotten relic. P-03 has the dredger digging through the archives, trying to find something equally ancient, something named the old data. We learned from this guy late in the game about this mysterious data and how it carries with it the Carnoffel code. There's that phrase again, which is apparently something like a virus, one that was responsible for given these four scribes their sentience. That's right, the characters in the game are alive, or at least they want to be. When Leshey is finally defeated by the player, P03 remarks that, quote, we would have been even sooner if the disc wasn't lost.

So not only is P03 aware that he's a character in a game, but he's aware that the disc that they were on was lost out in the woods. Quote again, dearest Grimora. I believe P.03's plot may go far past the extent of a common power grab. Indeed, this great transcendence will have catastrophic and unpredictable results. Great transcendence, you say there, Magnet. A video game character trying to break out into real life? What? You don't say?

Anyway, by the end of the game, P03's Great Transcendence is thwarted, and the game inscription gets deleted off the disc. Eventually, all that remains is you and the old data, with an NPC casually dropping the recommendation that you do not access it. So, you know, of course I'm gonna access it. Old data begins unzipping, flooding the screen with redacted images. Whatever it is, it's enough to terrify Luke into ripping the disc from his drop. and smashing it with a hammer.

Speaking of Luke, he calls a journalist hoping to expose the truth about Game Funa and the terrible secrets that he just uncovered, but he's interrupted by the arrival of Amanda, who ensures that Luke is taken out before telling the rest of his story. So that's the base story, but there's still a lot of missing pieces here. What is the old data and how did it get onto this disc? But what exactly the old data is is still a bit unclear, but it was clearly powerful stuff, powerful enough to grant sentience to game entities and bring oblivion to the rest of the world. We know, based on the game's ending, that it can't be deleted. We also know it's something incriminating enough that Game Funa were willing to kill in order to get it back.

And all of it is tied to a girl named Casey. You see, in Act 3 of the game, we meet a figure that offers us a rare card. One, named Casey, who, we're told, is the creator of inscription. According to the end-game dialogue, she also learned a lot about the old data. This moment alone was enough to get my theorist's senses a tingling, but we actually hear mention of her two other times in the game, as a death card in part one, as well as a person who got hit by ice in part two's bone game. Luke also stumbles across her name during his investigation of the disc.

Listen, I was at your garage sale the other day, and they were your daughters? Would it be possible for me to speak with her? Oh, no, I'm so sorry. Her name was Casey? That's a lovely name. Sorry, what? She worked for inscription? And just like that, the puzzle pieces start to come together.

This character, Casey is the one who buried the game out in the woods, but something seems to have happened to her. She died for a crime developer Casey Hawes died from fire related complications. She died in a fire, which, in a dark twist, ties directly to something that we see in the game. In part three, a bot named Casey offers to clear up some ice that blocks a road using fire. P-03 thinks that this is funny, proven just how dark and twisted this sadistic stout robot actually is. So, based on everything that we learn about Casey, it seems like all of her actions were meant to keep the old data locked away and hidden. Because remember, it can't be deleted.

Not even when you have full file control. First, she buried the old data under the game inscription in order to hide it away, with the game acting as a sort of seal. Then she buried the physical disc out in the woods. But not only that, she found a way to soft lock inscription so that the scribes wouldn't be able to break the seal on the old data. We know that the scribes are engaged in a perpetual turf war, constantly vying against each other for power.

So, when you think about it, putting Leshy in charge was actually the smartest thing that Casey could have done. We know firsthand that just leaving the data disc in a new game state would be unstable. One of the scribes would be able to make a grab for power eventually. If Grimora got control, she might use it to free herself from the pain of existence by erasing inscription, just like we see her due during the game's ending. So she can't be trusted. P-03 actually presents the opposite problem.

He wants to share inscription with the world, which is not the kind of entity you want in charge when your goal is to bury a secret in the woods and hide it. But Leshi? Leshi just wants to play card games. As we saw at the start of the game, he's more than happy to exist in a perpetual loop, forever a sitting in his log cabin playing tabletop cards with anyone who will drop by. In short, Leshi is the perfect soft lock, which leads us to another disturbing conclusion here. Inscription is a game where the only winning move is not playing it. By playing the game, by beating Leshi and starting a new game, Luke, and by proxy us as the

player, have allowed the old data to escape. We broke the soft lock. We shattered Casey's carefully crafted seal. During the game's ending, when inscription gets deleted, the old data is able to be And that is our doing. Like I said at the beginning, by playing the game, we lose. We were always meant to lose. But what if I told you that wasn't the end of the game,

that in this three-act game, there's actually an act four. What if I told you that his next game was right in front of us all along? That's right. The entire game of inscription is itself a cover for a much bigger game that Daniel Mullins has crafted for us. One that leads, no joke, to a real disc hidden out in the woods for us gamers to dig up. So grab your shovels, friends, it's time to dig, both literally and figuratively, into the real game that's hidden inside of inscription. The first major act of inscription ends with you finding a new game icon, which allows you to, go figure, begin a new game. Only this time it's in a completely different art style from everything up to that point.

When you start this new game, though, the keen-eyed among you may have noticed that what we get looks like an old Windows command line. And this prompt can actually become responsive if you hit Control C while it's on screen. By using some basic coding language, which you can figure out by using the help tool, or you just know because you're a pre-internet boomer, you can navigate into a new file directory. Specifically the one at the heart of the mystery, old data. There, we find a log.t. Text file. But when attempting to decode it, the command line prompts us for a cipher. After throwing Valoran characters, that guy from the Matrix and famous Twitch streamers at it got nowhere,

so it's back to the game for some clues. Specifically back to the guy who's been doing a lot of the legwork for us, Luke Carter. Last time when we talked about Luke's story, we were mainly focused on the on the videos that move the plot forward. But there are a few others that have been broken or corrupted. These error videos are a bit of a mess, but you know that they have to be here for some reason, right? And indeed they are.

If you freeze frame that, zoom in and enhance, it looks like Luke was onto something by covering everything with Post-it notes. Kind of reminds me of my office every time a new FNAF game comes out. But here we see a close-up of one of the Post-it notes, which says, My Collegist 12, perhaps, blood letter box. Could this possibly be the cipher that we need? Going back to the command prompt, we try it, and, And a...

That is a big old nope. However, it is a clue that will help us find the ciphers that we need. So we start with the first section, Mycologist 12. The Mycologist is actually one of the bosses from the main game. During that fight, we encounter a card that has this really odd name, just a random assortment of numbers. But loyal theorists will know that nothing in an ARG is ever truly random. These numbers are the first part of our cipher, but how many of them do we use?

Well, it's right there in the clue. 12. The second clue, perhaps, is a lot trickier to find. In fact, it's such a generic word that you could probably link it to anything within the game itself, but that's where it gets ya. Because it's not actually in this game. It's really a reference to Pony Island, a previous Daniel Mullins game. In it, there was a mysterious soundbite that, when reversed, sounded like the words, a beeper perhaps.

Let me be the word really be the thing that's connecting these two games? Yep, it is. If you watch the credits of inscription closely, already a monumental task, the game credits someone for the design of Beeper. Now, to be fair, I don't know much about game development, but, uh, I don't think beeper is a real job there. That someone is named Louis Nathis, which is weirdly similar to the name of a character from another Daniel Mullen's title, Hex, Loonatus. A man who, if you play that game, is revealed to be the CEO of Game Funa, the same company that killed off Luke in inscription.

Yep, it appears that we are fully immersed in the Daniel Mullen's connected universe. If we look at the credit for Louis Nathis, we see what appears to be an asset link. But that URL doesn't lead to any. It does, however, provide us with the next part of our cipher. After the word beeper, where perhaps would be in the phrase, we find 8339-344, question mark, question mark. That's solution number two. Now for the third and final clue, Blood Letterbox.

And here, things hit a bit of a roadblock. You see, in the weeks after the game's release, the Daniel Mullins' Games Discord was leading the charge and ripping through all these secrets, with JEC 0-0-7272, consolidating it all down into a single running document. But at this point, even dedicated members of the the community weren't really able to follow the clue. Instead, they had to brute force their way to find a solution.

The best train of thought that I could muster up for this one is that in Act 1 there's the Bone Lord pedestal and it requires a blood sacrifice. So we then have to interact with the Bone Lord in Act 2 and Act 3 as well. Anyway, during that Act 3 encounter, a hint becomes visible if and only if you set your screen to a letterbox format. Bone Lord 666, or at least I think that's what it's supposed to say in Leetspeak. I'm not the most proficient hacksore. Anyway, that provides us our third and final code for the cipher. So going back to the command prompt, we tried to decode old data. We're asked for a cipher, we put in our three pieces of code and... Nothing. Well, almost, nothing.

We get part of a chat log from a person, C, who appears to be talking about a smuggled disc, but that's about it. Clearly there are parts of this conversation missing, and, as we can plainly see, there are parts of the chat that are glitched or encoded in some way. So it looks like we're back to the solving board, friends. The first, SE-167 BP True requires us to know some basic game design principles, so a huge shout out to the Daniel Mullen subreddit for this one. Basically, SE in gaming code typically stands for story events.

It's how the game keeps track of progress within the save file. And, fun fact, save files can be manipulated without playing. So by opening that file up in a text editor like Notepad, we can add 167 to our story events chain. The BP is definitely the more obscure one here. This one is shorthand for another variable within the the save file, Bone Lord Puzzle active. Basically a variable that keeps track of whether this skull's eyes in the cabin are glowing or not. Our hint ends with BP True, so let's set Bone Lord Puzzle active to True.

Now we load the game and immediately get a glitchy screen where the Bone Lord skull pops up, and for a brief second we see the on-screen text, I am learned too much before the game crashes. 23 K2 Floor is simultaneously really easy and also really complicated. Instead of having to alter game files, this one actually just has us going back to Luke's video. In the video labeled October 16th, we see that Luke has four post-it notes under his monitor. Pig, 3K, pig, which kind of matches that 2-3K2 hints. And looking at what's actually being displayed on Luke's monitor during this moment,

we see that he's on the real-life Wikipedia page for the card game Carnoffel, a German game. So how do these things connect? Well, you know how people sometimes refer to the number two as a deuce in the context of like a dice or card game? Well, that's actually a German thing, where the two card is often depicted as having a hog, or sow on it. That's why Luke's post-its replaced the twos with pig faces. And wouldn't you know it, but Deuce, or Daos in German,

is also the name of a rare creature card in inscription, a pig with a bell. Hmm. So if the pig is a card reference, could the other ones be as well? What about the three in the K? Well, three would probably be Mantis God. It's the only card that we find in Act 1 with that triple strike

ability. And K, well, this is a card game, so could it be possibly referring to a king? Say the rat King, maybe. By creating a deck with these cards and playing them all in this order during a card game against Leshi, suddenly the card names change, each to a different letter, S-T-O-P. Stop. Ha-ha, Leshi, we've come this far. You know that telling a theorist to stop is like telling a train to stop. You can try, but it's just gonna mow you down on its way to the answers. But that's just the two 3K-2 stuff. Still leaves us with the second half the code, Floor.

Since the first part of it was found in the game, it would make sense that it's referring to something else in the game. various floor textures that are found throughout. So we just need to head on over to Leshe's cabin, look down, and uh, yeah, yeah, you can't do that. In the game, there is no looking up or down. Fortunately, YouTuber Fleminade figured this out and did an entire video where he opened up the game's asset files to find hidden numbers in various floor assets. By assembling all of them together, we get 273 for 1, which is now added to our new cipher. Now on to the third and final clue, which is the second time that I've said that in this video.

Maybe this time it'll be true. Anyway, archive new game. We know that there's a boss character in the game called the Archivist, so maybe he's the one who's going to help us solve it. As soon as our encounter with him begins, we hear a bunch of beeps and boops. Yep, that is definitely one that we're more than familiar with doing on our own. That's Morse code. Transcribing it all and translating it gives us big ear. That's not the only Morse code that we can find in the game either.

The next part, new game, is referring specifically to the new game card. In Act 3, it's actually sealed inside of a case, but we can still see that it's glowing, pulsating, flickering, in a pattern that resembles Morse code. Transcribing those flashes actually gives us the word no chance. So once again, armed with three parts of the cipher key that we got from these new clues, we go back to the command line and try to use these keys to decode log.com. And boom, we've got ourselves text in Polish. Luckily, my family does speak a little bit of Polish,

and it is useless in this context. Yeah, my, my mom taught me the phrase for, if the old lady isn't peeing, she's pooping when I was a kid. Yep, that is the extent of my family's. knowledge of Polish, so... time to hit the forums, friends. Thanks to bilingual Daniel Mullins community members, we have an English translation, giving us another part of our chat log, Character B, which reveals a conversation between two co-workers at Gamefuna. Character B, or Mr. Kaminsky, is not particularly happy about working on this particular

assignment, you know, if the amount of F-bombs that he drops were in a dead giveaway. Mr. Kaminsky makes this whole old data stuff feel way bigger than just a company's secret, referring to things like the fate of the world and kissing the boots of the Russians, which sounds like some sort of Cold War era propaganda. On top of that, we also have character C mentioning the name Barry Wilkinson, which, if you'll recall, is the name on the ID card that flashes up briefly when you open up the redacted files within old data at the end of the game. But who he is and what he has to do with the old data, it's still not clear. He went to prison and got back to the US eventually, but still feels like we're missing something. In fact, we're missing a third person from the chat, Person A. I mean, after all, it would be kind of strange to start a conversation with person B. But of course, when I was scratching my head trying to figure this one out, I noticed another set of clues within the text.

Setting us up for yet another three-part search, which hopefully will give us the context that we are so desperately lacking. The first clue we have is back to beginning, so let's do just that. I went back to the start of the game and couldn't find anything. All right, well, maybe it's referring to the real start of the game once he beat Leshy and Unlock New Game. Nope, nothing there either. There was nothing I could find in the game that this made sense with, and that's when it dawned on me. Daniel Mullins has already hidden references to his old games as a part of this ARG, so why not take a look at his catalog? At first, I thought it might have meant his first ever game, but again, nothing there.

However, when I checked out his Itchio page, something stood out. Those cards, that squirrel, looks familiar, doesn't it? It's from a game called Sacrifices Must Be Made, which, it turns out, is an early prototype for inscription. Back to beginning, meaning like literally back to when the game's creation first started. Beating sacrifices must be made causes the game to search for a file called cipher. Which doesn't actually exist, so, you know, let's create one. By making a file using our previous cipher code, naming it cipher. Cipher.

And then beating the game, we get ourselves this. A brief reveal of the phrase, what lies ahead. So with that, step number one is done. Our second clue is manatee. Yeah, that one was nearly impossible to solve, so we're just going to come back to that. Sometimes you just have to walk away and move on to a different part of the assignment. The third clue was actually a bit easier. Birchkin 5657N.

The name Birchkin sounded familiar to me, but where was it from again? Birchkin. Birchkin. I rewatched portions of the game, and lo and behold... Today, I am opening Catch Monsters packs, and our first rare is a Birchkin. Luke Carter's videos from the main game. Yep, it turns out that Catch Monsters isn't just a trademark neutral substitute for Pokemon.

I mean, it is, but it was also the name of a Daniel Mullins game that actually failed. to get funded on Kickstarter back in 2014. It's designed for people like me who grew up playing Pokemon and still do, but are now adults and seek a richer gaming experience. Sadly, because of this, it never made it past the prototype phase. But wait a minute, did you see that? It's a wild Birchkin. What does it mean?

Downloading and playing the existing prototype, we learned that in Catch Monsters, Birchkin is associated with one very specific word, its ability, pacifism. So that's the first half of our first clue solved. But then, what about the second? second half of it. 56 to 57M. Like meters? Like, is that an estimate of distance? Well, since the last two clue solves required us to go back to Daniel Mullins' previous games, maybe this one requires us to do

it too? It does. Kind of. A bunch of Daniel Mullins' fans noticed that measuring distance was a feature in a 2018 game called Beneath the Surface, a game that Mullins had used in the past to create the secret ending of his other game, The Hecks. But that's honestly a theory for another day. This game was developed by Carla 51, which in itself seems to be a reference to a character from the hex. The actual gameplay bears a striking resemblance to another Daniel Mullins game, beneath the ice, a game that he created a game jam back in 2014, where the theme was, get this, beneath the surface. Both are simple games that involve ice fishing for items hidden at various depths,

earning money from your finds, and discovering weird secrets the deeper you go. All of this, a couple of the fact that beneath the surface is Carla 51's only game, Yeah, it leads me to speculate that Carla 51 may actually be an alias for Daniel Mullins himself in order to keep his ARG clues a bit more obscure. But anyway, like I said, all of this is just me speculating and I'm getting way off track, so back to the 56 to 57 meters thing. We cast our line down in beneath the surface to that depth and what we find is an old disc. Starting to notice a pattern here.

But the code that we get with it is way too big to be our cipher key. So what did we do wrong? Well, nothing. We just have to realize that beneath the ice came from the same game jam as sacrifices must be made. To solve the clue, we need to use the cipher. cipher file from sacrifices. So let's use the one that worked with the back to the beginning's clue. Nope, didn't work. Um, how about this other code from the ARG? Not that one either. Uh, okay, this one from a previous cipher? Yeah! All right, now we're back in business. I was

worried there for a second. Doing this unlocks the phrase, who knows what secrets are inscribed upon it. It's easy enough to read, but we only need six characters to solve for this part of the cipher, and wouldn't you know it, there are six characters in the phrase that aren't letters. 044, exclamation.3. So that is chunk number three solved, which brings us back to the Seacows, the manatee clue. This, to me, was the ARAG's hardest challenge. And shout out to the Daniel Mullins' games discord for help me out with this one. I spent hours racking my brain, trying to remember if there was like a manatee card that I'd missed within the game that could help me answer the clue, but alas, there was not. I went back to all his previous games on

his itchio, since that seemed to be the running theme through this chunk. of clues, and again, nothing. I thought I'd checked everywhere, but the Daniel Mullins game's Discord knew that there was still one place left that no one had checked yet. The real world. That's right. One of Luke Carter's videos shows him revealing a strange set of coordinates when he opens a pack of cards. There's a set of coordinates on this card. 49 degrees north, 123 degrees west.

Turns out if you follow the coordinates that Luke found in this pack of inscription cards, it leads you to a forest in Vancouver. Discord users Nuts for Nuts and Memes Prey Sneck actually went out to explore the area, and wouldn't you know, there was, in fact, a mysterious box buried at those coordinates, complete with a floppy disk inside. Man, it kind of makes me want to wander alone deep through the Canadian woods more often. Much like Luke Carter, they too had to go online to order an external floppy disk drive, which, you know, is just a pretty great moment of life-imitating art. Anyway, that floppy disk contained a file named file,

which just contained the words, this guy moaned. I am not sure that I like where this one's heading. Fortunately, this was actually a name of a now deleted Reddit account that back in 2017 made a post on the smash-up card game subreddit. Yep, 2017. Daniel Mullins was playing the long game with this one. This Reddit post contained the idea for a custom faction, the Aqua Romans. In their words, imagine if the Roman Empire was underwater.

So of course, one of the custom cards in this four-year-old Reddit post is called Manatee Antony. So we go from Manatee to Antony or Manatee hashtag hashtag to Antony, hashtag hashtag hashtag, Fun fact, Octothorpe is the official name for a hashtag. Anyway, the extra Octathorps are there because, you know, it's still got to fit into the cipher. Like I said, this one, nearly impossible. And worse, would have required me to fly up to Frid Vancouver in the winter. So glad to hand that off to someone else. And with that, we have our third and hopefully final cipher.

After all these years, finally we have them all. So we go back to the command line, plug this baby, and are rewarded with yet another part of our chat log. I started to piece it all together to make a full conversation, and there are still pieces missing. Are you kidding me? Haven't you ever heard of the rule of threes? One more overexcited exclamation to complete this joke?

See, the chat log actually tells you what parts of the conversation go where. At the start of each section, we see a number and a letter within square brackets. These markers also appear in the middle of paragraphs within the chat log, telling us the location of the corresponding message within the conversation. But I now have responses from certain characters that don't belong anywhere. There's gotta be more. Something that allows me to fit all these pieces together. And there is, but it's physically impossible for me to solve because I was late to the party.

You see, I tried looking for codes within the chat log like we'd done before, but there wasn't a single thing to be found. There was, however, a corrupt data message smack dab in middle of the whole thing that didn't really seem to belong. Data Corrupted. For any quality concerns, please contact Kaminsky Data Storage, MFG. finishing with the web address for us to follow, KaminskyMFG.com. If you go to the website now, there's nothing there. It just tells you packages around the way.

However, thanks to the power of the internet, we can see that if we had tried it during the initial parts of the ARG, we would have found a site that looked like this, with a field to enter your address. Luckily, TwitchStreamer Uwawa, Discord user Trollinator, and Discord user Princess Fizzy S Fire Esquire the Third did put their addresses in in time,

and they received individual floppy disks. Plus, they didn't get murdered by a rogue game, game creator, so bonus. Each of the three users was sent an incomplete file with characters missing. But combining all three of those files gave the following output text. Some random code, and then thank you for playing, inscription friend, the end. I mean, it's a nice little message for dedicated fans of the game, but no, it's another clue. I mean, look at it. My eyes had been trained to see these things at this point. I'm not crazy. At least this time, I'm not crazy. That layout of the second line is no coincidence. It's identical to all our other cipher's, so.

far. And if we type that into the log.ttext file from the very beginning of this whole thing, we get even more Polish text, which, again, using my mother's limited grasp of the Polish language, coupled with the help of the Daniel Mullins community, gives us the Finnish transcript. Finally! It reads like a Reddit thread, with people commenting and replying to a document at different times. It doesn't make for the easiest to script reads, but we'll do our best. And I, head editor Dan, will apologize now for the terrible Russian accent. April 30th, 1945, top secret information. Me and my comrade Maxim took photographs of the corpse and buried it at the drop-off spot, Ed.

This is it. This transcribed journal page reveals the very location of Hare Hitler's rotting corpse, and, more importantly, the precisely ordered deck of cards in his jacket pocket. It's a carnaffle code. I cracked the encryption last night. My situation here in the USSR is delicate, but I believe this intelligence warrants an action that may below my cover. Yeah, it did. Poor old Barry Wilkinson was imprisoned literally hours after these words were written to the disc.

He did eventually get back to the States, but I've not had any luck contacting him. There are actually a ton of Barry Wilkinsons, and it might not even be his real name. I'm now prepared to smuggle the disc out of Moscow to West Berlin, then on Boston. The disc is carefully concealed among many blank ones. Eureka! That explains so much, actually. I could not figure out why this disc would be tossed into a crate with a bunch of blank ones. Barry's plan to smuggle it out this way seems contrived at best, but I can't imagine the pressure he was under over there.

Idiot! Vade of the world, if you take into consideration for other effects, and toss them into a chest with a ton of identical discs. Now we have to kiss the boots of the f***ing Russians, or risk the worst of the outcome. I surely have better things to do than reading and reading again this top secret disc. But no! Idiots from Gamefuna have to finish their game.

It's a cover, guys! You too, Mr. Kaminsky. They never told us that. No one's going to play it. Just give me a clone of Super Weaselkit so I can go print it so an eight-foot-tall Russian doesn't come knocking on my door at 11 o'clock in the evening. Yes, he's equally angry in person. I believe this plan will work, and if it does not, better to lose this old data than allow the Soviets an opportunity to use it. We are currently awaiting further instructions at the local tavern,

playing a lot of Daraq accompanied with a few shots of vodka. How fitting. Indeed, Barry. Indeed. We are full and satisfied, but about our accomplished, we won't say a word to our work. It seems to us that we have already come to the end of such a long journey. I have failed to change that encryption. I shouldn't even be trying. What can I do to kill the fucking time?

So there you have it. Finally the real ending to this whole game. The old data is a collection of top secret documents and files, with the Carnoffel code at the core of it all. A code created from the Order of the Carnoffel cards hidden on Hitler's corpse the day that he died during World War II. It sounds like the Soviets, in finding Hitler's body, managed to create a malicious piece of computer code, a combination of Cold War era computing and Nazi occultism. Barry Wilkinson managed to infiltrate the Soviet Union and stole the disc containing the data,

then hid that disc in a box of blanks that ended up in the hands of Game Funna. They created inscription to cover up the presence of the Carnoffel Code located in the old data. Game Funa were just doing their patriotic duty by hiding the code deep within the game, and then they killed off Casey to tie up any loose ends once the job was done. It's still not clear how the Carnafel Code works, how some order of cards, in a dictator's pocket would bring sentient to a group of computer programs, but then again, it doesn't seem like the game devs knew either. It feels like Cold War propaganda.

The Soviets have it, so it must be important, so we're gonna stop them from having it, because they're the bad guys. Nevertheless, we did it. After three videos, we solved every mystery inside of inscription. So then, why do I feel so empty? Like something is still unfinished? Well, we have this whole chat log around this important document. We know that person A is Barry, and person B is Mr. Kaminsky,

But who then is person C? With them being the latest commenter, it means that nobody actually refers to them by name. So then why are they important to the story? Well, for our final, final, final answer, we have to explore yet another Daniel Mullins creation, the official expansion to inscription Casey's Mod. And yes, even though it's called a mod,

it is created by Dan Mullins, so it is the real deal. What this mod does is turn the game into a challenge mode of Act 1, but with a twist. If you complete enough challenges in a single run, you unlock what appears to be a devil, from none other than Casey Hobbs, the woman that worked at Gamefuna, the one who buried the original inscription disc out in the woods, the one who was burned to death in a fire. In our original theory, we believe that she was the one that put Leshi in charge to purposefully soft lock the game,

thereby stopping old data from being discovered. However, these devlogs unlocked through Casey's mod actually revealed a slightly different story. The first two entries show us the story of how the angler found the old data, like he was doing during Act 2, and so began walking to take it to But Casey states that the character doesn't have a walking animation anywhere in the files. She even tries other discs, and she can't replicate it. Everything is normal on all those other copies. But when she goes back to the original copy, she discovers the 3D game that we're all familiar with, with Leshi in charge.

So she wasn't actually the creator of it, the old data just kind of allowed all that to happen. In entries 3 and 4, she writes that she's probing other devs for information, and she finds a log from Mr. Kaminsky explaining the game to be a cover. This proves then that Casey is undoubtedly, person see from the chat thread that we deciphered. She even talks about meeting him in person and him seeming off, which is also referenced in the Dakota document. It was pretty clear when I met him that the guy had issues. Yes, he is equally angry in person. Now we know that Casey was a developer at Game Funa, but she, much like Luke, was just discovering the game in its secrets for the first time. Like I said, the mod is still in beta, so there's a high chance that we'll get more devlog entries and figure out how she started working on the project and what she did to end up in a fire that led to her death. If Luke is anything to go by, I'm pretty sure Game Funa may have had something to do with it. However, despite Game Funa taken such measures to try and conceal the game from the public, they failed.

We're all playing it after all, so how'd that happen? Well, we find out using the finalist of final, final, final, final clues that was hidden back in the thank you message from the end of the ARG. Remember that random series of letters and numbers that the people who got sent the disc were able to put together? Well, that's not any normal code. That's actually a YouTube URL. In this YouTube video, we see the old data files. great transcendence halted from upload thanks to our actions in the game. But then all of a sudden it starts uploading again, leaving nothing on screen

except a familiar face, the stout looking back at us and with a wink the video ends. P03 did what he set out to do. He made the game and in turn old data and the carnaffle code available for the whole world to see. And that my friends is the true true final ending of inscription. Stote gets the last laugh and game Funa has a lot of houses visit. Don't open your door to strangers, friends. But hey, it's all just a theory. A game theory. Thanks for watching.