It provides no context nor backstory at its start; its cryptic, metafictional narrative must be put together from subsequent story elements and various optional clues.

After publishing the prototype to itch.io in December 2018, the positive response led Mullins to significantly expand on the original game, resulting in the making of Inscryption.

A free expansion titled Kaycee's Mod, allowing players to focus on the tabletop game without Inscryption's various other elements, was released in March 2022.

Between encounters, the player can also get up from the table and look around the cabin, solving puzzles similar to an escape room, discovering clues to locate the card forms of P03, Grimora, and Magnificus.

P03 and its underlings have access to several of the death cards that the player may have created during prior runs of the first act, making battles in this phase more challenging.

While losing a card match in this act does not restart the game, it does reset the player to their last collected checkpoint, which are represented as antenna towers within the map.

Before the beginning of the game, Carder, while opening a pack of old, little-known out-of-print cards known as Inscryption, finds inside a set of handwritten coordinates indicating a location near his own.

Between rounds, Carder's character can move about the cabin and solve puzzles to obtain various advantages in the tabletop game; they also find three sentient cards, the Stoat, the Stinkbug, and the Stunted Wolf, who work together with Carder's character to find a roll of film and beat Leshy's tabletop game.

Upon their win, Carder's character steals the camera, uses the film roll to capture Leshy inside a card, and finds the previously missing "New Game" button.

P03, Grimora, and Magnificus were previously encountered as the Stoat, the Stinkbug, and the Stunted Wolf respectively, having been trapped into the Leshy-led version of the disk game and turned into cards.

Between play sessions, Carder, growing increasingly obsessed with the disk game, continues his investigation of its origins and contacts the publisher of the Inscryption cards, GameFuna; GameFuna denies the game's existence while also forcefully demanding its return, repeatedly sending a representative to reinforce the demand, whom Carder sends away.

He also learns that a GameFuna developer, Kaycee Hobbes, mysteriously died while working on the game, and notices that his camera is experiencing an increasingly large number of uncanny malfunctions.

Grimora uses the opportunity to start a full wipe of the Inscryption disk, believing that the deletion of all of its contents, including the Scrybes themselves, is for the greater good.

[6] The alternate reality game (ARG) expands further on narrative elements hinted at in the main game via many cryptic easter eggs that must be decrypted, and led fans to receive floppy disks in real-life by mail after ordering an unknown item on a website that could be found by decrypting the ARG easter eggs.

[7] The clues from the ARG lead to a short live action video acting as an epilogue to the main game, which starts with the sound of Carder hitting the Inscryption floppy disk with a hammer at the end of the original game, before showing Carder's computer turning back on by itself and completing P03's upload of Inscryption.

The video ends with a winking ASCII image of P03, revealing that it survived the wipe of the floppy disk by uploading itself onto Carder's computer and succeeded in achieving The Great Transcendence; this seemingly indicates that the real life Inscryption game made available worldwide online (and played by the real life player) was P03's cursed version all along.

Mullins had considered that the dealer was a type of "forest demon" and while searching online, came across the mythos of Leshy, which he believed fit well with the horror theme of the game.

From there, the other three Scrybes fell out as he had compared them to Pokémon gym leaders, each with a different theme; since Leshy was associated with beasts, the other three were associated with robots (P03), wizards (Magnificus), and the undead (Grimora).

In this mode, the roguelike deck-building game from Act I can be played endlessly, with the player able to unlock new cards and starting abilities to take on more difficult challenges.

[12][13] Rock Paper Shotgun praised the scale mechanic, writing that, "You lose and gain momentum, deliver killer blows, claw back from a near-loss by being aggressive...