Inscryption

The game is presented as found footage recorded by Luke Carder, an internet content creator who specializes in collectible card games under the pseudonym "The Lucky Carder". 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. There, he finds, buried under the dirt in a forest, a box containing a floppy disk titled Inscryption. The disk turns out to be an Inscryption video game, although Carder cannot find any trace of its existence on the internet. He turns on the game, but finds he cannot start a new game, and is instead forced to select the "Continue Game" option.
In-game, Carder's unnamed player character interacts with a shadowy dealer named Leshy within a cabin, where they must play a card-centric tabletop game with Leshy as gamemaster. Every time Carder loses, Leshy uses a magic camera to capture the character's soul into a "death card", and Carder restarts as another character. 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 sapient 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. Upon acquiring it and selecting this new option, Carder is able to play the Inscryption disk game in its original form.
In its original form, the disk game is radically different from when Carder first started playing, although it revolves around a card system similar to the tabletop game's. It is set in a world ruled by the four "Scrybes": Leshy, the Scrybe of Beasts who had taken over the game in the save Carder originally used, P03, the Scrybe of Technology, Grimora, the Scrybe of the Dead, and Magnificus, the Scrybe of Magicks. 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. Carder's player character arrives in this world seeking to challenge the Scrybes; after defeating all four, they pick one Scrybe to challenge again in the hopes of taking their place, but P03 appears and fights the player regardless, using a glitch to defeat them and take over the game as Leshy did. 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 by a fire related accident while working on the game, and notices that his camera is experiencing an increasingly large number of uncanny malfunctions.
Carder continues to play the disk game following P03's takeover, finding that the game has once again been radically altered: Carder's player character is now trapped in a factory, with P03 acting as gamemaster in a tabletop game of its own design, which emulates the game's original form, and in which the goal is to defeat four "Uberbots" to achieve "The Great Transcendence". Over time, P03 accesses elements from Carder's computer to use them in its tabletop game, such as using his Internet connection and accessing his files; after the last Uberbot is defeated, P03, directly addressing Carder by name, reveals that its version of the game was all a ploy to gain access to Carder's computer and that The Great Transcendence is an upload of said version to a digital game storefront to spread it worldwide. Before the process completes, the other Scrybes appear and kill P03, aborting his plan. 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. As the game is progressively wiped, each of the three Scrybes has a final card battle with Carder. First is Grimora, who justifies her actions for deleting the game and all its content. Carder then has one final game with Leshy back at the setting of the first act, where Leshy thanks him for a good game. Magnificus battles Carder while the game collapses and continues on until he is deleted. Despite having been warned by the disk game's characters not to, Carder opens an in-game ZIP file titled "OLD_DATA"; upon witnessing its contents, he panics and smashes the disk with a hammer. He contacts a journalist, trying to explain his story and claiming OLD_DATA would expose severe wrongdoing on the part of GameFuna, but is interrupted mid-call by the GameFuna representative who shoots him dead and enters his house to retrieve what remains of the Inscryption disk.



Alternate reality game

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. The ARG notably reveals that Kaycee had acquired the "Karnoffel Code", a computer algorithm reportedly created by the Soviet Union during the Cold War after gaining possession of Adolf Hitler's corpse and discovering a connection between him, the game of Karnoffel, and the occult. A spy named Barry Wilkinson had gotten a copy of the Karnoffel Code from the Soviets and hid it on a floppy disc among other empty floppies, which eventually fell into the possession of Kaycee, leading to the video game that would later be found by Carder. Parts of the ARG point to narrative connections between Inscryption and Mullins' previous game, The Hex, with characters from The Hex helping P03 or GameFuna.
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.