Review: Cryptmaster

What do you get when you cross a dungeon crawler with a typing game? It’s Cryptmaster! The premise is simple, you play as a party of four heroes that get resurrected by a powerful necromancer, the Cryptmaster. Your party is down in the depths of the earth and aims to reach the top.

The visuals of this game are truly stunning. I love the sketchy black-and-white art style. Every character (even the humans) make you feel slightly awkward, slightly unnerving. It really elevates the narrative and the tone of the story. Honestly it’s one of the key selling points for this game for me personally.

The core game mechanic is typing words. The only thing that deviates from this path is navigation. And because you need all lettered keys to type words, navigation is done with the arrow keys instead of the classic WASD. To be fair, it would be a pain of navigation was done through written word as well. Movement is your classic 1 block movement you see in plenty of dungeon crawlers. You do have the option of a free cam to look around. But when you leave freecam your view gets snapped back to one of the cardinal directions.

You start the game with just a single keyword per character to use in combat. Joro can HIT, Syn can JAB, etc… In order to unlock new actions, you have to guess the word that is obfuscated below that character. Once you’ve guessed it, that character now obtains that skill and gives you more possibilities during combat. Letters from those words will reveal themselves be interacting with the world. And this is really where the game design aspect shines, because the whole world is built on the foundation of words and given you rewards for typing. Every enemy has a name, and once you kill them you will get rewarded with a pick of 2-3 letters from their name. If any of those letters match any of the words hidden beneath Joro, Syn, Maz or Nix then they will get revealed. Not only that, but the healthbar of an enemy IS their name. Every hit chips away letter from their name, and once you have erased their name, they die. This also applies to your own party. Once Maz takes three hits, down he goes and you’ll have to find an altar to rez him.

Once you have guessed a fair amount of words for a character, they get to level up, and you can add a letter to their name! Which is such a cool mechanic. Honestly, I’m so impressed with the systemic game design of Cryptmaster. A lot of thought and effort was put to make the typing aspect of the game feel as natural within its world as they possibly could. Apart from stealing letters from defeated foes, you can also gain letters by solving riddles, opening chests or catching fish. Unlocking some words give you new abilities, others give you some backstory of the characters.

I only got through halfway all unlockable words for each character in a single playthrough. You’ll have to do a lot of grinding in order to unlock everything. Which isn’t for me, the story length was fine, and I even skipped some enemies in the last level in order to finish the game. That doesn’t mean I didn’t enjoy the game, but it does get stale a little too fast? Combat is dynamic in that every other enemy blocks a certain letter, or gets buffed when a certain letter is typed. Which forces you to use other skills, than the standard set you’re used to using. Instead of a challenge, this felt to me like a bother. There’s no way I can remember the 10+ skills of every character I had unlocked near the end, and instead of using my favourite set of abilities and rotate between them, I had to spend my time looking through every character’s abilities in order to find a new ability that wouldn’t screw anything up. This takes you out of the action of combat and slows things down. Really what it does is throwing the tension of combat out of the window, while you’re flicking through a dictionary of words in order to find the one that is valid to use.

I’m somewhat torn about commenting on the writing, because I really liked it. But some points of the story structure I didn’t really like. Every spoken line is great, I love how the Cryptmaster disses your party. When I tried to improvise and do an action without the game prompting me to take that action, then the Cryptmaster would make a comment about it like: “Speak? You won’t speak, unless I allow you to.” He’s a witty character who really likes to make sarcastic observations about what you are doing as a player. And these comments really hit. But, then there’s the story, the Cryptmaster wants to reach the surface, and because you have been reanimated by the Cryptmaster, you’re forced to go along with it. At some point in Act 3, you’re talking to a countess and you’re sent on a fetch quest before you are granted passage. This bit of the story really made me feel like it didn’t quite hit home. Maybe a different structure could have been set up, because it fell kind of flat here.

What is an RPG without a great card game? Cryptmaster has it, and I really liked it! You can invite people to play cards with it, by saying its name WHATEVER in conversation. Which prompts a lot of funny responses. The game itself is very straightforward. You draw four cards and pick a set of two connected letters in the bar below it. If any of these letters appear on any of your cards, their attack is triggered. When you complete a card, its ability is triggered and the card will be replaced with a new one. The black letters in the bar are wild and will change every turn. The premise is so very simple, and the game is that hard to win, but I have spent more time than I should have playing this game-in-a-game.

If you’re interested this game is available on Steam, GOG and itch.io (as well as Xbox and Playstation, but a physical keyboard is somewhat of a must). Go check it out!