"Crypt Custodian" Review

Publisher: Top Hat Studios/H2 Interactive

Developer: Kyle Thompson

Platforms: Playstation 4, Playstation 5 (Reviewed for), Nintendo Switch, Microsoft Windows, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S

The "Metroidvania" is a game genre that I have an inconsistent relationship with. It's a winning formula that activates the good monkey chemicals in my brain, since my first ever favorite game was Metroid Prime, but there has also been a history of flawed execution. Take this year's very own Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown...which, by the way, I accurately foretold would be the end of the studio who made it. Ubisoft can die in a fire. But as I was saying, take that particular Metroidvania: it had so much going for it, but it suffered from some staggering difficulty spikes and technical issues. I find these to be the main problems with Metroidvanias when I find them. Despite this fact, and despite that aformentioned inconsistency, I keep finding myself coming back to the genre when I hear positive buzz. Such is the case with the subject of today's review, Crypt Custodian. So...how does it fare?

Well, in Crypt Custodian, you play as Pluto: a recently-deceased cat who ends up in the afterlife awaiting judgment on whether he'll go to the palace (where all the good animals go) or be condemned to wander the lands outside the palace for eternity...so, right off the bat, don't worry: this isn't a "cat goes to hell" kind of scenario. Pluto awakens a fair distance from the office of Kendra, the afterlife overseer who makes these decisions, so after picking up a nearby broom to clear some obstacles, he finally appears for his judgment. Kendra looks over the book of his life and finds that he was a very, very good kitty, and so she resolves to let him into the palace...that is, until she turns a hitherto unnoticed page and finds out how he arrived in her presence in the first place. Remember how I mentioned Pluto had to clear some obstacles? Well, these obstacles turned out to be a bunch of Kendra's beloved vases...so in spite of the life he lead, Pluto and his broom are sentenced to be janitors for the afterlife on the outskirts of the palace for all eternity. However, outside of the palace walls, Pluto becomes instrumental in a brewing plot to bust into the palace and reach the crystal mirror: a magic item that will let these restless spirits visit the land of the living one last time to say the goodbyes they never got to. I don't think it's a spoiler to say that you accomplish your goals here...and I also don't think it's a spoiler to say that the end credits are going to require tissues if you have a beloved pet you wish could visit you one last time more than anything. Story is rarely the point of Metroidvanias, so that's where I'll leave that discussion.

I will say this, however: in spite of what I said about the end credits, this isn't a game that wants you to be sad. It also isn't a wannabe marvel movie with quipping characters. It's just a mostly good-spirited romp with a good sense of humor. Because the story is about the afterlife, there's naturally going to be a little darkness to be found (the runt coyote waiting for the rest of his pack to find him is...ooofff), but it's important to remember that this is a story about deceased animals trying to return to our world to say goodbye before ultimately accepting their new lives. So, a kind of positive, wide-eyed, macabre hope, if nothing else.

If you aren't aware of Metroidvanias as a genre, here's a brief rundown: you get plopped in the middle of a huge map with very few paths currently open to you. Each blocked path can be opened with specific tools or abilities that unlock as you make your way through the plot, and this results in a kind of domino effect. You might unlock a kind of gun that opens locked yellow doors, for instance. You'll have passed several yellow doors on the way there, so all of those paths become open to you. Beyond these doors, you might find the next place you need to go for the story, or you might find a collectible, or you might find a purple locked door further down that unlocks to the same possibilities once you find the purple door unlocking gun. Throughout the map, you also typically find upgrades to make combat easier (in the case of the Metroid games, these are increases to your maximum health and increased missile capacity). So, that's the general format. Each game iterates on it a little differently, but they all typically follow that outline. In the case of Crypt Custodian, the progression pieces you unlock are all about traversal. Early on you acquire a mid-air dash to make jumps to farther-away platforms than you could before, for example. Another example is a "broomerang" attack wherein you throw your broom in a given direction. This is used to hit far away switches to raise bridges and the like. So in this case, it's not so much guns that unlock doors as it is new abilities that let you do things you previously couldn't. 

As for the improvements you unlock for combat, Crypt Custodian is truly unique in that you exclusively unlock varied, specific upgrades. One might give you a 5th hit point on top of the baseline 4 you spend the entire game with. Another might make a beeping noise when you're near an undiscovered collectible. Another might increase your attack power by 30%. So it's a smorgasbord of things like that. However, each upgrade takes up a certain amount of upgrade slots. The more useful the upgrade, the more slots it takes up, typically. But thankfully, you also find additional upgrade slots in the world, so you have this ever-expanding capacity that allows you to consistently mix and match your upgrades to get the optimal build for what you have. Some of these upgrade slots can just be found lying there somewhere, some are unlocked by completing a time trial, some require you to solve puzzles, some require completing combat trials in which you take no damage, and finally, some are gained by overcoming curses. These curses are additional combat trials where healing at checkpoints becomes impossible until you defeat a certain amount of enemies in the world with some kind of negative effect applied to either you or your foes. For instance, one curse might have a trail of spikes follow you around, necessitating constant movement. Another might cause enemies to explode in a massive wave of projectiles upon death, adding further hazards as you try to lift the curse. So, there are plenty of interesting avenues through which to gain upgrade points, and I can say that as far as I'm concerned, none of them were so challenging as to be frustrating.

Now let's talk about the combat you unlock these upgrades for. Ultimately the combat style is more of a bullet hell than anything, with each enemy type unleashing countless projectiles that must be avoided. A single hit from a projectile will result in a single one of the 4 baseline hit points you have getting taken off, and once you lose all 4 hit points, you have to restart from your last checkpoint. To fight enemies, you have only 3 options: your standard broom attack, your "broomerang," and one of several special attacks (which one you go with is up to you). As you deal damage to enemies or bosses, you build up your special attack gauge, so you can likely imagine how the flow of combat tends to go. Altogether it's pretty satisfying, but it's not without its flaws. By far the most affecting one is the occasional committing of the cardinal sin. For those who are unaware, the cardinal sin is contact damage for no reason. If an enemy or boss is covered in spikes or fire, contact damage is fine, but taking contact damage just from touching a regular dude or monster is never ok. But the odd thing is that as I implied, Crypt Custodian only sometimes commits this sin. There doesn't appear to be any rhyme or reason to it, it's just that certain enemies do contact damage...some of the time. Other than that, the only other flaw is that there are times where the visual chaos on screen is overwhelming, and hand-in-hand with those situations are times where the in-game depth perception seems to be a little off, leading to the occasional unexplained hit from a projectile. My own depth perception isn't what it used to be, so I don't know if that's a me problem or not...but I thought I'd mention it anyway.

One other complaint I have isn't really a combat thing, but a design thing: there's no way of healing between checkpoints. A common staple of the medtroidvania is that there are little bits of healing that are consistently doled out. Things are still difficult, but typically you can stay alive by, for example, killing enemies in a difficult combat situation to gain little bits of health back. In Crypt Custodian, there's no such system. So you're going to find yourself pretty frequently in situations where you're at only one hit point left and you're desperately dashing through enemies trying to find a new checkpoint, only to be hit by a stray projectile and have to start over from the last checkpoint you were at. This isn't a soulslike, so its not like you lose your currency or valuable resources, but you do lose time. You'll likely get through a mandatory combat segment with one hit point left and just kind of resign yourself to the fact that, as far as you've come, you're going to have to do it all over again. This is a game that could've really benefitted from something. Perhaps a special attack that just heals you one hit point? Or maybe half a hit point? Something?

Now that we're done with overall complaints, it's time to discuss bosses. In metroidvanias, bosses are almost always the trial you have to overcome to unlock your next progression ability, and Crypt Custodian is no exception. With that in mind, these bosses are where a lot of the planning and design typically goes, and again, this is no exception. The bosses in Crypt Custodian are some of (if not the most) creative bosses I've seen this year. Period. For instance, there's one double boss where one is phased out of reality and one is phased in, and when you dash, it switches the bosses roles. Both are attacking and moving as if they're fighting you, so you need to be careful with your dashes, otherwise you might phase the other boss' projectiles into existence right as it hits you. By that same token, if you realize that a phased-in projectile is milliseconds away from hitting you, you can quickly dash to phase it out. That's the kind of creativity on display, and much like the puzzles and trials you have to complete for upgrade points, these are challenging...but not frustrating. I'd say that the final boss pushes this a bit given that it racked up a fairly high score on my "goddamnit" count, but in general every boss feel surmountable and memorable. And if you haven't yet played, allow me to give you a word of advice: if a boss is giving you a really hard time with a particular type of projectile that you just can't seem to avoid...try jumping over it. That has been the solution when I've had that problem every time, because sadly, the game doesn't do a great job of showing you what kinds of projectiles can be leapt over.

Speaking of memorable, the soundtrack isn't what I'd call "great," but I can remember more tracks from it than from most other games that came out this year. That's odd, don't you think? I haven't touched Crypt Custodian is maybe a week, but I can still replay several of the tracks in my head. Normally I start this segment off with a throwaway transition line about how now it's time to talk about the technical fidelity, but the organic segue potential was there and I took it. The important things like framerate, textures, lack of crashes, etc., are all solid as they should be. However, there are a couple of issues not necessarily of the technical variety, but of the design variety in ways that don't apply to combat necessarily. For instance, certain bosses have unskippable cutscenes on repeat attempts, which I'll never be in favor of. And on the subject of repeat attempts, when you die, you have to hold down the triangle/y button in order to skip the oddly long "dying" cutscene that plays...why is that a thing? I can't recall any other game that does this. The Batman Arkham series has little taunting cutscenes before you get to reload, but they don't have a prolonged sequence of Batman clutching his heart, falling to the ground, and asking the player to tell his wife he loves her or anything like that. In Crypt Custodian, however, there's a couple seconds-long stationary screen where Pluto slowly explodes (non-graphically) into a beam of light before you respawn...again, this is truly perplexing, as the cutscene adds literally nothing. You also have a fast travel system when you aren't at checkpoints, which would be an excellent quality-of-life feature if you could do so easily. See, there are two maps: one that's zoomed out and shows the general layout of the map, and one that's zoomed in and shows all the specific topographical details of every area you've uncovered. When you aren't at a checkpoint, the only way you can fast travel is through that zoomed in map. What's more, the colors on the zoomed in map don't always match the colors on the zoomed out one, so as you're slowly scrolling through the map trying to find where you want to travel to, you'll sometimes not be able to find it until you zoom out, get another somewhat decent idea where the relevant checkpoint is, then slowly move in the necessary direction until you hopefully find what you're looking for. It's especially odd considering that the exact opposite is true when fast traveling from checkpoints. Also, at checkpoints there's no way to switch between maps, so if you happened to close your map on the zoomed in version before activating the checkpoint, you'll have no choice but to leave the checkpoint, zoom out, then go back to the checkpoint to try again. This, like the death cutscene, is puzzling. Yet another puzzling design choice is the fact that there's no easy way to exit out of menus. What would be your first guess as to what you need to do to close, say, an equipment menu? Did you answer "the face button all the way to the right"? I would think so, too! But instead, you have to manually scroll all the way down to the "back" button every time. Adding onto this is the fact that if you open the map while on one of these menus, it won't close the menu window like it would in many other games. This is hardly a huge thing, but it, like so many other odd decisions here, is a convenience issue. I'll also concede that it's possible that by switching the controls around to a control scheme that makes sense, I somehow broke a thing that would otherwise allow me to quick exit...so I won't consider this issue when I'm taking points off. But, like, come on. Other than that, my only other note is that the art style is...uninspiring. It's a bunch of muted, frankly ugly color choices with many of the environments being borderline unpleasant to look at. However, Dragon Age: Origins is my favorite game of all time, so I don't ever get to take points off for not liking graphics. Ever.

Folks, all of my reviews come out fairly long after the games come out. So, the vast majority of the time, anyone who is on the fence will largely have fallen on one side or the other already. But in the case of Crypt Custodian, I think it's just indie enough to have flown under people's radars, with few of the big names in criticism having touched it. So, it's entirely possible that, like me, you didn't even hear about it until well after its release. As for whether or not I'd recommend it, there are a couple of easy yes and no's I can give. If you really like metroidvanias, then you'll absolutely enjoy this one. If you can't stand metroidvanias, Crypt Custodian does nothing that will win you over. It's a game with some satisfying combat and all the dopamine that comes with watching a list of collectibles gradually fill up, but inconvenience is almost always the death of fun...and there's an awful lot of inconvenience here. I don't regret my time with Crypt Custodian, far from it: I actually was enjoying myself in the moment almost the entire time. I think it's fair to say that it's great in spite of its many odd choices. So if you're still on the fence, maybe give it a shot? If nothing else, your money will be going to a smaller developer, which becomes more and more important in my book with each year that passes.

Let us review:

Sometimes commits cardinal sin - 0.5

Other combat woes - 0.5

Myriad inconveniences - 1.0

The final score for Crypt Custodian is...

8.0/10 - Great

Great work, Kyle Thompson, great work!