I love writing. You can tell by the many reviews I’ve written over the years and how I’ll take any excuse just to type some sentences down. I love expressing my literature skills, ability to analyze a topic, my creativity, and letting my words run wild. Writing is a hobby I’ll forever keep up and helps me escape the stress reality brings everyday. Writing is magical. Now Imagine how excited I was when two years ago a reveal trailer came out for what is probably the most innovative title of 2024. A game I kept close on my radar because the premise of it was so interesting. I mean it is in the title of the review. Cryptmaster, a dungeon crawling indie RPG where every command outside of movement is done through typing. Interacting with the world is done through typing, attacking and spells, talking, and every word you type will give out a different response. It’s as if the developers of this game read through the entire dictionary and accounted for just about every single thing the player could write down. It was a dream come true and I was down for it. Thankfully it finally released. Cryptmaster, the typing RPG.
The game is made by Lee Williams and Paul Hart, and it feels like a love letter to many things. Classic dungeon crawling games like Dungeon Master and Legend of Grimrock which came out back in 2012. The recent Inscryption where a looming figure was always up in your face and not afraid to get into your comfort zone just to make a quick tease. Tales From the Crypt, that one seems a bit obvious and much more. Making a game like Cryptmaster is hard, as again you have so many words to work with. There are thousands of words and combinations a person can use depending on their knowledge and skills in literature. Accounting for anything a player could go type is a massive load to keep track of, but the team pulled it off. Almost any word you typed in could get a knee jerk response. There was a memory system that allowed players to guess words and upon successful guesses they could unlock a variety of skills. Opening different options and rewarding them for their intelligence. Despite being a single player game I expect Cryptmaster to be a really fun experience when played with a group. Trying to guess a word is and plugging in answers until finally something clicks.
Cryptmaster released midway this year and for the most part reception has been splendid. You do have a couple people calling the game alright, but a majority of reviewers loved how unique the whole package was. Cryptmaster is great and I expect to get nominated for several awards at the end of the year, mainly best indie or for most innovative title of 2024. I believe it deserves the love and the developers should give themselves a pat on the back for what they’ve made. That being said, Cryptmaster is an indie I find hard to recommend to people. How could one such as I, a lover of indie games all around, go on to say that about an innovative title? Would I prefer the generic slop that’s been flooding the industry? First off I don’t look down on devs all the time, because that sounds miserable. Secondly, it’s possible to have a game that is innovative but while taking risks accidentally makes a few mistakes. It is possible to make a game that is unique, but discover what problems may arise. Just for the record I do really like Cryptmaster. I’ll just spoil it and say I do recommend it. This is the best spelling game out there, because it’s one of the only few good spelling games out there. However, when you pick the game apart and look at it with a careful glare you realize there’s quite a bit wrong. Still, I like this game and I want to talk about what went really well and what devs can learn including the makers of this game if they were to ever make another game like this. Let’s talk about Cryptmaster and its strangeness...
Story
Many ages ago there was a group of heroes that defeated an evil demon lord who wanted to take over the world. The heroes died during battle, but casted a powerful spell that would seal the evil deep beneath the earth. The heroes were laid to rest within a crypt and with time they were to be forgotten. That all changes when they’re awakened by a dark figure, the titular Cryptmaster. He tells the heroes that he resurrected them to enact his plan on the living. Turns out humanity hates monsters and the undead, so they sentenced them away into a complex crypt so that they may not step foot on the surface world ever again. The Cryptmaster thinks this punishment is cruel and wants to bring justice to the underworld. He hopes the heroes can understand his plea, and if not they have no choice as the Cryptmaster won’t let them rest eternally until the job is done. Our party includes Joro the tribal warrior, Syn the lethal assassin, Maz the traveling musician, and Nix the sea witch. All of whom are weaker than they once were, are struggling to stand, and can’t remember who they once were as they’ve been lying in the depths for centuries. It’s their job to fight their way out of the crypt, encounter the different societies on each floor, help them with their problems, and hopefully reach the surface world to enact sweet revenge.
Gameplay
In this game you explore labyrinth-like dungeons trying to get to where you need to be. Fighting all the enemies that get in your way, obtaining new skills and memories, and not dying. Again, what makes Cryptmaster different from all the other RPGs I’ve played is how every single action outside of movement is done through typing. You write out the word and the character does just that. Each character has their own list of abilities, and when a specific character’s action is typed down you have to wait for a short period until the character is available to act again. For example Syn’s basic attack is JAB, and once she JABS the enemy you have to wait till she’s ready. Every time you defeat an enemy you get to choose one of the many letters that were in their name. You get to choose more overtime, but choosing the letter you want fills out some bar beneath each of the characters’ names. These are skills and memories you have to guess, and once guessed right you get to use that skill or progress further down their skill chart. So there’s an incentive to grind out combat so you can new skills.
Certain skills like healing skills and spells take souls, which is another thing obtained from winning fights. Souls can also be spent to purchase items from merchants, so basically the Souls from Dark Souls. This is an RPG and of course there are failure states to account for bad player performance. When an enemy attacks one of your selected characters a letter from their name disappears, and once all the letters are gone they’re dead. Only way to resurrect them is to reach an altar or use a specific spell, but if everyone is dead it’s game over. Combat is not the only way you obtain news letters to guess more skills. Occasionally you’ll run into a treasure chest or skull in the wild. Here you’ll play whole new guessing games where you have to figure out what’s in the chest, or solve the riddle of a lost soul. Chests are much easier IMO.
You can have the Cryptmaster who guides you the whole time to interact with the object. Everytime you interact with the object differently like through touching, lifting, looking, and tasting a letter of the object is filled out. You only get to interact with the object so many times, and once you run out of interacting cards you get one final guess. If you guess correctly you get all the letters of the object you got. Lost souls are different in that the letters fill in overtime. You can reattempt lost souls as much as you want compared to chests, but they won’t give you hints. You can have the Cryptmaster answer the riddle automatically, but this will nab you half the souls you would have gotten by doing it yourself. Think hard with these ones because they’re quite clever. Other than that there’s nothing else for me to say. How is the overall package? Does it stack up well and what problems does Cryptmaster run into? Well it’s complicated…
Thoughts
Cryptmaster is a game I really like but find difficult to recommend to people. I said near the start of this review this is the most innovative and unique game of the year. However, in taking huge risks and messing around with ideas that haven’t been touched in a long time it encounters a few problems it and only it can have. I’m not trying to talk down the devs or anything as I critique their game. What they’ve made here is outstanding and if given more time they could possibly make a sequel or another game like it that improves on all the flaws Cryptmaster has. Innovation is hard and nothing is perfect the first time around. Cryptmaster is genius, but when you fully pick this beast apart you go “that didn’t go the way they thought it would.” I want to talk about the spelling portion of Cryptmaster first as it’s what I and several other people bought this game for. It’s great. It’s satisfying when you guess a new word and the clues you’re given still make it possible to guess instead of sitting there and struggling for hours. There’s an incentive to grind out combat to get letters to words you’re trying to guess. Getting bigger letter deposits from the riddles and chests is fun in itself because you’re still guessing what word it could be. The system of gaining clues and having an easier time guessing is splendidly designed, but my problem with it comes with the fact of how much there is to guess for every character.
All four party members have 50+ different skills and memories you can unlock throughout the whole game. That may sound awesome on paper, but it brings a lot of problems especially during the endgame. There are five total chapters in Cryptmaster. The first being a tutorial and the fifth being a couple hallways before the final boss. I have ⅕ of skills and memories for each character by the end and I feel like I was suppose to have half of them. I’m fine with a game being short. I’ve argued several times in the past that unique ideas should be executed quickly rather than go prolong their stay. However, if you’re gonna do a complex RPG with multiple options you might want to make sure players have a good portion of them by the end otherwise it’ll either feel like they haven’t gotten much or limit what they can do. 50+ words for every character is too much, and the memories specifically feel like unnecessary space. Being there so you don’t do anything but unlock skills, and so you can learn more about the characters’ lore. I love world building in games because it adds much needed depth, but there’s a better way to do this. If you wanted a player to learn lore through skill memory then why not tie it to the skills. Have brief descriptions of what the skills do, and another in the menu they can pop up saying something the character used to do involving the skill. “Maz used to SING when invited to royal events.” That feels like a better use than guessing memories that give you absolutely nothing in return.
Having 50+ words and skills also brings up problems during combat. Why try to remember all that you have learned and scroll through gigantic lists when I can just use the most basic options I have and still succeed? Which segways us onto talking about combat. It’s okay. It’s well made and there's some clever tricks to get you swapping between options, but it doesn’t feel all that great compared to a lot of other turn based games out there. Enemies sometimes have shields that block skills having certain letters, or you have to use a skill that breaks their armor because you can’t deal damage to them further unless you do. Yet, all it comes down to is how fast you type your actions and the combos you use to kill them within ten seconds. I found a combo later on where I have the thief charge her heaviest skill, the witch zap, the musician quickly recharge the cooldown time, make them both attack, and finish the enemy off with the warrior. It was fun to work towards that strategy, but is it good when I can do it more than half the time? Good turn based combat is when you get the player to think and adapt to the scenario at hand. Not just go spam their most powerful abilities. I know people are going to argue skills take souls, but trust me you’ll have a lot of souls by the end and there’s not much to really spend them on.
Exploration is fun and there’s nice rewards if you poke around in the right places. My only gripe is that the map is not the most intuitive. It’s a small hud above the screen, and I wish it gave you a better idea what area connects to where. Especially when some paths loop back to places that you have been before. Maybe have a menu you can open up to show you, but apparently that’s too much. I’ve been rambling on about the design of this game, so why do I still like it besides the core ideas being innovative but not perfect? Well the game is more than the sum of its parts and one thing Cryptmaster has is personality. It has this grimdark artsyle where everything looks black and white, and every surface is made of pencil strokes. Still making it easy to tell what is what and outline certain things without any of it mushing together. I like how when you speak to a character it zooms close to their face. Reminding of old school RPGs like Fallout where they’d occasionally give you a grotesque close up of a stranger you want to get away from sooner than later. The characters are pretty funny. Despite the game looking like a horror title on the surface I’d classify Cryptmaster as a comedy game. A really good one in fact as every joke managed to make me chuckle. You encounter a piper who is trying to make a diss track and you get to help him make a diss track. A rat child who is really annoying and doesn’t go home until you unearth a fart bomb. A fat frog man who marries all four of you, a woman who keeps getting upset when you smash holy altars, a god who tells you to wait in line respectfully, and much more.
The real star of the show though are the not the side characters or the four fools you lead along. No, it’s actually in the title of the game. The Cryptmaster is the real treat of this game as he is always finding ways to insult you or make fun of the circumstances you're in. Responding to the things you do and giving knee jerk reactions when you type certain words. I learned that he was afraid of chickens, and when I type CHICKEN he freaks out. One of the memories I unlocked for Nix described a bedchamber filled with handsome folks, and he made a quip about how Nix likes to do dirty things. If you keep wandering into dead ends and corners in the world he’ll tell you to stop lurking until he just sees it as a regular thing. He’s a great character and by the end you kind of feel bad for him. You spend the whole game with him looming on your shoulders and you wonder how much suffering has he gone through to be reduced to this state of misery. There is a nice plot twist at the end of the game that connects everything together and it’s one of the best twists of the year for me. Also the guy who voices the Cryptmaster deserves a raise. He has delivered a top notch performance and I can’t imagine how long he was in the recording room to react to every word in the dictionary. These are factors that justify my recommendation despite all I said previously. Cryptmaster is charming in all the right ways and even if you don’t vibe with the gameplay you’ll still have a great time. In the end I give Cryptmaster an 8.5/10 for pretty good.
Commenti