Hey there, card gamers. You've solved the puzzles of the cabin, went on a retro-inspired journey, and now you're facing down the boss challenges of Robotopia in the horror card game, Inscryption. On the surface, these boss fights can be quite intimidating, but if you know a few things going into them, they are complete pushovers. Here is our Inscryption Robotopia boss guide.
First thing's first, despite the sci-fi reflavoring and the soulslike structure to this part of Inscryption, the location of these boss fights are completely identical to the four Scrybes from the RPG section of the game. To that end, this guide will tackle the four Uberbot bosses in roughly the same order as before.
Furthermore, despite the fact that your deck is now strictly limited to robots again, this guide won't necessarily focus on deck-building strategies. This is because the game itself forces you to play a specific way despite giving you multiple choices for cards, a cash shop, and places to empower your cards. You've gotten this far in the game and have internalized the fundamentals; now there's just a basic expectation of performance. It is quite meta given that the master of ceremonies, P03 is all about optimal play.
Inscryption Robotopia Boss Guide - The Photographer
The first boss we'll be covering on the guide is The Photographer, the boss found in Leshy's cabin in the woods. There's no real puzzles to put up with, just go into the cabin and fight him. There's even a checkpoint nearby if you lose.
The central gimmick behind The Photographer is right in the name. At the end of each of your turns, The Photographer will ask you if you wish to take a photograph of the board. If you do this, after a few turns, he can then select that photo and revert the board to that state.
But here's the trick, you can do the same thing. Overall, the Photographer's deck is identical to Leshy's woodland animal gimmick with high damage monsters and trees to block you. But there is a great one-two punch you can implement if you want to end this fight quickly. Once you've held off his attackers long enough, bring out your big hitters and position them in a way you know will finish The Photographer off. Then make sure a photo is taken when you end your turn.
When the Photographer switches to phase two, he will completely reset the board with more challenging enemies. When that happens, just end your turn, click on the photo you took, the board will reset to your victory swing, and you'll completely bypass the second phase.
Obviously this is easier said than done. A lot of the harder hitting cards you'd have at this point like Ouroboros (check out our Robotopia Puzzle Guide) and the Double Gunner need a lot of energy to summon. But if you play your consumables right you should be able to manage your energy for a quick and decisive win.
Inscryption Robotopia Boss Guide - The Archivist
The Archivist is found in Grimora's graveyard in the lower right section of the map. Getting to her will take a while since you need to get a feathered quill from the well and agree to two creepy statues that you'll give them all access to something.
This is important for The Archivist's central gimmick. At the start of the fight, The Archivist will play a bunch of robot priest cards with a curious symbol on them. They're played in a way that you have to defend and get through them if you want to actually hit The Archivist. But once you kill one of these cards, the ability goes off.
How the ability works goes something like this. The Archivist will pull up a menu of files on your hard drive, like your actual hard drive, and tell you to select something with a large file size. Whatever file you pick will then be turned into a data cube and placed on The Archivist's scale, substituting in for damage. The thing is a lot of the files you can pick are small, things like shortcuts or executable files that only rack up to a couple of KB or MB at most. But if you scroll all the way down to the bottom of the list you can see a bunch of files you don't recognize in dark grey text. These amount to a few GB.
Select these dark grey files every time you down a robopriest. Eventually, the shear size will instantly put The Archivist into her second phase. No need to swing at her directly here. However, do not select any of these files whose date goes back a long time like 2006. This will be important for The Archivist's second phase. When this second phase activates, The Archivist will ask you to pick another file from your hard drive, the older the better. Pick one of the greyed files with the time stamp of 2006. When you do this, the file will be transformed into a creature card and put into your hand. On average this creature will be a 4|4 with no energy cost. But the Archivist warns you that if it dies, it will be deleted from your hard drive forever.
But since The Archivist didn't heavily change the board for this second phase. You can just play this uber creature in an open slot and just tap her with at least one of your other creatures for an easy victory.
Inscryption Robotopia Boss Guide - Golly
Next up on our list is the really chipper Uberbot, Golly. Golly is found in P03's robot factory in the upper left part of the map. This boss room does take a bit of effort to get to. You need to climb four different ladders and reactivate four satelite dishes. Once that is done, head to the center of the floor where you'll get beamed up Star Trek-style into the boss room. Once you're here, you need to head to the right side and turn the power back on. Head back to the main room and click Golly's handle to start the fight.
Arguably Golly is the most fourth-wall breaking and annoying boss fight in Inscryption. The idea is that she is hooked up to the internet now and will pull out some gimmicks on you across her two phases. The first is that she'll summon creature cards based on what she finds online. If you're playing Inscryption on Steam, this will include people from your friends list.
Because of how random this process is and how their attack and defense values are calculated, this can escalate quickly. I was facing off against a 4|12 Flyer at one point during my match, for example. My best advice is to use the Bomb Remote followed by the Nano Armor upgrade to protect your creatures from the explosions. You can get the Nano Armor consumable back in the shop at the center of the map for about 25 robobucks. Once the way is clear, hit Golly fast and hard with all you got.
The second phase is a bit stranger. If you recall the “create a card” event from the Robotopia Puzzle Guide, Golly will ask you to do the same in the middle of the fight. She'll then send the card out to someone else playing the game, then comment on whether or not it gets used and/or gets destroyed. If you last in the first phase long enough, you may even receive one of these cards yourself. Once that is done, the board will with even more devastating Steam friend creatures.
The easiest, and by far the least helpful, strategy for Golly is to have no friends on Steam. However, if you are sociable enough, this will be rough. The trick is not to focus on destroying them but finding an opening and working around their abilities. Instakill poison, having a latcher card inflict them with the fragile status, or strategically bombing them with exploding drones are all viable strategies.
Inscryption Robotopia Boss Guide - Create A Boss
Finally, there is no boss in Magnficus' old haunt in the lower left part of the map. But don't take this as a freebie. Once you get there, P03 will comment that the boss battle in this section of the game is unfinished...and get you to make one.
This can be one of the worst fights in the entire game. This is because once you've made a face, you are forced to choose the boss' own unique ability that comes up in the two phases of the fight. There's even a third gimmick added if the second phase goes for too long. All of these effects stack on top of one another.
Furthermore, the effects themselves are nasty. They can range from having a random card taking 5 damage whenever a creature dies or the boss getting a free card whenever something takes damage.
But there is a way to potentially break this boss if you're clever about it. Avoid effects that causes damage all the time. You can accidentally wipe out the entire board this way, and the effects only happen during your turn. The custom boss can then just wait until you take yourself out. But if you pile on enough effects that go into a perpetual loop, for example “every time a creature dies, boss plays a card” and “every time a card is played, a random card takes 5 damage” P03 will interrupt it.
Much like the cave dweller sections in Leshy's cabin, the key to this boss is know your deck strategy. If you have Ouroboros, having random death is actually a feature since it'll just boost him up. If you've been playing more defensively, an effect that adds more random nonsense to the board can give you some breathing room, etc..
Just pay attention to what rules you're adding and you should be able to make it out of this fight alive.
And that is our guide to finishing off the last string of boss fights in Inscryption. There is one final stretch of the game from this point, but that would be telling. Enjoy.