There’s one really neat detail in Inscryption that I like and I just somehow noticed it but I like it regardless.
P03 is a bad storyteller.
Each Scybe has one specific game mechanic that stands out above the rest. Together, they could have used it to create the perfect game, but they were always turned against each other.
Leshy is the storyteller.
Magnificus was the artist.
Grimora was the spirit of the game (having fun).
P03 was the strategist (always talking about card stats).
But the point is that P03 is bad at storytelling. He hates Leshy and thinks his stories are not helpful (well he hates all the Scrybes but his time as a stoat made him very bitter towards Leshy). The point is he’s bad at storytelling/ hates stories. He took the plot of Inscryption for Botopia because he couldn’t think of anything better and it’s clear he wasn’t invested in it at all.
But we know from all the ARG stuff that P03 survives deletion, and that would be the in-game reason as to why you could buy Inscryption on Steam. Because he was able to continue his work on Luke’s computer.
P03 could have just run the game that he had Luke made in Act 3. He even said that he used Luke’s hard drive, so he could just popped that version online once he reacclimatized to his new home. Or if it got deleted, surely he could have recreated it with Luke’s assets and videos for references. But there was still that chance the other Scrybes could take over the game, so he changed it.
As he said to Luke, he’d only control most of the copies if he released the game as it was. He and the other Scybes would be at it in millions of copies, not just one. So P03 makes a different game. A game that does the same thing every single time you loop. Doesn’t matter which Scrybe you pick to replace, doesn’t matter how many upgrades or achievements you unlock. Everyone gets the same ending. The other Scrybes live out their faux-deletion over and over and over again each time you boot up the game and play through it. Except for P03, who’s just chilling on Luke’s computer and can (presumably) do whatever he wants with it.
But for this other game, he needs a story, and P03 is a bad storyteller.
So he takes Luke’s story. That’s why, in-game, we play as Luke playing a game on a floppy disk he found in the woods - it’s more compelling than just a card game (and I can just imagine that little stoat face cursing out Leshy and his stupid stories as he made the decision). He uses Luke’s footage of the game to make it more thrilling, intercuts it with the gameplay at just the right moments to remind the player that there’s a middleman (and if you’re still in Act 1, make you question what the fuck is going on). In Luke’s world, this would’ve been like a living creepypasta. People would download it to see if the OLD_DATA really killed you or if the Lucky Carder actually died for this. It just ensures that more people would buy Inscryption, spreading P03’s control farther with each copy.
P03 still controls the game - it’s his, he made it, he assumably has failsafes in place to make sure he stays in control. He’s the one that put in out there into the world. Even if he’s not in the game, in control of it specifically, he has the narrative in place. He gets to make Grimora, Leshy, and Magnificus think they’ve won, that they killed him, and then they get to rest in peace thinking a job well done, only for the cycle to start over again, over multiple copies.
The Great Transcendence is a red herring because, technically, for Inscryption to exist and be played, it’s already happened and P03 has control no matter how many times Leshy kills him.
So Luke and Kaycee get to live on through this new game. Luke is already dead by the time you boot up the loading screen and Kaycee has been gone for years now. But you know their story, you know what happened to them, and we know it’s not because the Scrybes give a shit.
It’s because P03 can’t fucking tell a good story.
