"Cryptmaster" Review - Totally My TYPE

Publisher: Akupara Games

Developer: Lee Williams and Paul Hart

Platforms: Microsoft Windows (Reviewed)

At this point in 2024, there have been a lot more indie games released, which has done my heart good considering how sparse the indie market was looking a couple months ago. Regardless, there has still been a lack of true indie gems like a Neon White or an Undertale...that is, until Cryptmaster came along! This being a fairly straightforward game, let's cut the crap and get right into the review!

In Cryptmaster, you play as a party of 4 dead heroes recently brought back to life by a powerful, enigmatic, and above all else, bizarre necromancer. This necromancer tasks your group with fighting and questing your way through the underworld, working your way up to the surface to try and break the eternal seal that prevents the undead from rising to the land of the living. Along the way, you'll meet and interact with suitably cockney rats, regal toad men, sextuple-widowed duchesses, and many other eccentric characters. Your party, for their part, isn't much to write home about. You have a warrior, a thief, a bard, and a sorceress, and while each character has a ton of backstory to be found, none of it is on display in any noticeable way. So while our heroes aren't too interesting, those side characters more than make up for it.

This is largely due to the game's excellent sense of humor. For instance, early on you come into contact with a gate guarded by a giant eye. The eye doesn't want to let you pass into the tombs it guards without a specific objective. So, you seek out the advice of a rat locked up in a nearby cage, who suggests that you tell the eye that you're going to rob the graves to intimidate it into letting you pass. If you follow this advice, "you f***ed up" music starts playing, the eye starts stammering with disbelief and asking "why would you...why would you tell me that?!" all while the rat cackles like an old crone in the background. Confront the rat again and he'll still be beside himself with laughter, unable to believe that you actually fell for his prank. Every section of the game has something charming in its story and writing to look forward to, so even if the gameplay experience were lame, there'd still be some excellent content to tide you over!

But as the end of that segment implies, the gameplay experience is not lame. The best way to describe the gameplay loop is to call it a Worlde Dungeon Crawler. Imagine one of those computer games that taught you how to type when you were a kid, but in an actual game format. In other words, literally everything you do besides moving and playing the world's card game is done by typing something out. If you want to open a chest, you might type out "chest," if you want to talk to an NPC, you might type "talk," etc. Beyond this, each of your four characters has a full menagerie of skills/spells that they unlock as you progress through the game, and when you enter combat, you type out the names of these skills/spells to use them. So that's a super high-level overview of how the game works from a typing-centric dungeon crawling perspective. But what about the Wordle aspect? Well, a given character can only unlock one skill at a time. By their names, each character will have a hangman-style series of spaces that denotes how many letters make up the name of the skill. At first, every space will be blank, but there are some things you can do to fill in letters to make guessing the word easier.

The most commonly-encountered way of doing this is by succeeding in combat. When you defeat an enemy, they drop their "name," at which point you get to select 1-5 letters from that name (depending on your selection in the accessibility settings). If these letters are a part of any of the 4 skills that are currently up for unlocking, the letters will take their spot on their respective hangman spaces. 

Then, there are skulls you can find across the game world. If you go up and talk to these skulls, they'll pose a riddle that you'll have to try and figure out. If you give the correct answer, then the letters that make up the answer will take their places in the hangman spots just like the enemy names.

Finally, there are chests, which are the hardest to crack, but the most fun. When you open a chest, you don't actually get to see what's inside. Rather, it turns away from you and the necromancer gets to see the contents. From there, you have a couple of opportunities to ask questions to try and determine what's in the chest. You can type "look" to have the necromancer describe the contents, "remember," to have him give a vague memory he has of the item from when he was alive, "touch" to have him describe how the item feels, etc. Just about any word you can think of to get an idea of what he's looking at is valid, so you'll want to try whatever you think might help. Like with the previous two scenarios, if you guess the item correctly, the letters that make up the name of the item become hints. However, if you fail to guess correctly, you get nothing. So, it's a risk/reward situation, but it's by far the most fun of the challenges. 

With the discussion of how you go about unlocking abilities out of the way, how exactly does the combat you use these abilities in work? As you approach an enemy, you'll enter a combat state that locks out the rest of the world. The enemy's name is their health bar, with each letter representing a point of damage it can take. So, if an enemy's name is David, it can take 5 points of damage. Certain enemies have extra traits to consider that shake things up a bit, however! Some enemies heal one of their letters when they land an attack, some have a piece of armor in between certain letters that requires a particular kind of skill to remove, some can block any skills containing a certain letter, etc. Like the enemies you face, your party's health is determined by the letters in each character's name. An enemy will target one of your party at random, and when their attack lands, letters will be taken off of that character's name. As for how the flow of combat goes, the enemy runs off of an hourglass. When the hourglass runs out of sand and tips over, the enemy launches an attack, then waits for the hourglass to tip again. While the hourglass does its thing, you can unleash your skills as fast as you can type them, but every character operates on a cooldown once they've used a skill. So you might want to type as fast as you can to whittle down as much health in as little time as possible, or you might be a bit more strategic about it and use skills that strengthen certain attacks or provide healing effects. And if that all sounds a bit too hectic or if you aren't a strong typer, fear not. Everything I've just described is the recommended "realtime" combat setting, but there's also a "turn based" setting. I didn't try that out, but I'd imagine this removes the cooldown and hourglass aspect and just lets you type at your own pace without worrying about timing. So there are options available for those needing some accessibility features. 

Normally this is where I'd go into a discussion of the game's technical state, but there's really only one negative to bring up. There's more than a little inconsistency in the voice volume no matter how you fiddle with the settings. It isn't quite as egregious as the sound design flaws of Dread Delusion, but I did find the voice acting in certain sequences far too loud despite having compensated for previously too-loud segments in the volume options. 

Folks, if you haven't heard of Cryptmaster, you probably aren't alone. It seems to have largely flown under the radar for reasons I can't quite determine. Perhaps the typing-based gameplay turns people off. Perhaps the fact that the dungeons are actually designed and not procedurally generated roguelike putrescence ensures that PC gamers won't give it the time of day. Perhaps the fact that the game has some degree of art direction and isn't just a bleep-bloop pixel game has the exact same effect. Or perhaps it's nothing so cynical and it just hasn't gotten thrusted into the public eye as much as it should. In any case, I hope to rectify that to some degree with this review. Cryptmaster is another big contender for 2024's Indie darling, and I wish more itty bitty teams were making games like this and Animal Well.

Let us review:

Voice acting volume problems - 0.3

The final score for Cryptmaster is...

9.7/10 - Near Masterpiece

Bravo, Williams and Hart, bravo!