9 Most Inventive Video Game Levels You Need To Play

Depending on what you love most about them, there’s so many wonderful things to appreciate in video games. Incredible narratives and unusual mechanics are among them but levels so creative we have to play them to envision them are something everybody loves.

While there are inarguably excellent levels you might have caught on some of our WhatCulture lists before, and you might spot one or two familiar ones on here, we’re focussing more on particularly inventive levels.

These are the levels that had us baulking at the creativity of the developers, connecting deeper with the story and/or mechanics of the game we’re playing, and chatting with our friends about how freaking cool what we just experienced was.

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9. The Archivist - Inscryption

Act III of roguelike deck-builder Inscription is a wildly innovative segment of an entire game that is probably unlike anything else you’ve ever played. It’s a genre-blending, brain-breaking and meta experience that refuses to let you get too comfortable and your battle with The Archivist is a great microcosm of it all.

The archivist is encountered and fought with the same basic elements of Inscryption’s deck-building and card battling mechanics that you’ve been using up to this point.

What it does differently, however, is that the baddie insists they need access to your hard drive to continue. After granting it access you’re asked to choose a large file and shown an Explorer menu of your system. Another encounter takes into account how precious your file is, meaning its age. This is a particular treat for those playing Inscryption on a beloved PC with an ancient hard drive they never clean up.

The full battle is as cool to experience as it was dangerous for streamers who accidentally doxxed themselves.