The magic is that you have two major components. Wands and spells. After every level, you get an opportunity to tinker with the wands you've found by replacing spells you have on them with other wands to make something better.
It's a roguelike, and has no real tutorial, but it's definitely one of those niche games I've put serious time into.
Oh I get it. Standalone, it's great. It's just not what I thought it was. I bought it for one reason, was surprised that it wasn't what I thought I'd be receiving as a consumer, reflecting, I'd definitely say it's a good game.
Battle passes/ dailies / loot boxes aren't really my thing either. I do love roguelikes and the idea of "runs" and it being a sandbox to play in to experiment with builds.
Noita, for example, is probably one of my favorite games of all time. (Also a game I recommend everyone to play and give a good college try.)
Hot take for me: I thought going into Inscryption was going to be a pure deck builder game with a goal of beating the first guy. Then I really enjoyed the deck building in the 2d zone, and wanted so much more of that, but after beating the game, it has next to no replay ability. It turns very ARG centric and to get the whole story required going outside of the game into the "real world" (internet) to learn the rest of the story. It never stuck with me, or striked me right. It felt like I was being led on and thrown into something I didn't really care about.
I know that they added an infinite mode, but I think that's just in the first zone, not all of them. .
In any case, the game was just ok, since it's not the Slay the Spire esque card builder I thought it'd be.