Summary

  • Cryptmaster is a unique dungeon crawler with innovative gameplay using keyboard commands for actions and skills.
  • Exploration and combat require strategic thinking, with clues and riddles to solve for rewards.
  • The internal card game, Whatever, adds an engaging and exciting layer to the overall gaming experience.

Since playing Cryptmaster’s demo a few days ago, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it. It’s a real testament to the power of a good demo that I bought it just a day later – it was already discounted, I wanted to play more, and even if I never finished it, I could rest easy knowing my money was going into the pocket of an independent developer.

Thankfully, I don’t have to worry about yet another game languishing forever in the depths of my Steam backlog, because I’ve been completely hooked since I dove in properly. God, Cryptmaster is good.

I’m not a fan of dungeon crawlers, but this one is entirely unique. The four characters you control are awoken by a creepy necromancer, who tasks you with taking a soulstone and venturing out of your crypt into the outside world. You’ll be moving around the world with the arrow keys, because you need your WASD (and all the other letters) to input commands. Here, your words are everything, and do everything.

Its gameplay alone is astonishingly fun. While there are hub cities you can explore, the majority of explorable areas are constrained, small levels and full of things to discover. When you encounter an enemy, their names act as health bars, and hitting them knocks letters off. When you start, each member of your party only has one skill, and typing that skill out on your keyboard will activate it.

Enemies might have items that block certain letters, meaning skills with those letters won’t work on them.

For each enemy you kill, you can choose letters from their name to steal, and those letters will go into boxes next to your party members’ names, giving you clues as to what their next unlockable word will be. Typing that word correctly unlocks a skill or memory for that character, either giving you new tools in and out of combat, or more background into their story.

You can pull up all the skills you’ve unlocked at any time, and the interplay between characters is great – one character might be able to boost another’s attack, for example, or direct attacks towards other party members to keep themselves alive. There are even skills that deal damage based on how many of a specific letter is in your enemy’s name, adding layers of complexity. In this sense, combat is incredibly thoughtful and strategic, especially as you get deeper into the game.

Exploration is wildly satisfying as well, requiring a lot of brainpower – I can’t remember the last time I’ve pushed my chair away from my desk to lean back, stare at my monitor, and think in silence for five straight minutes. You can discover chests with items inside them, but you only get rewarded if you can identify what’s inside. You have to type prompts to the Cryptmaster, like ‘look’, ‘feel’, ‘smell’, ‘hear’, and ‘remember’ to get clues as to what the item is, and you’ll also know how many letters the answer has. After a few questions, you have to guess. You’ll also come across skulls that the Cryptmaster will wake, and they’ll give you riddles.

Correct answers net you souls that go into your soulstone. You have to spend souls to use skills and buy items from merchants, so you’ll want to get these right if you can. You can also supplement your souls by catching bugs and fish, each with their own compelling mechanics, and you can use those critters to make potions.

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But I said its internal card game is the highlight for me, and that’s high praise, considering how much I love the game as a whole. We love card games within games here at TheGamer, as you can see from Meg Pelliccio’s and Andrew King’s enthusiasm for Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth’s Queen’s Blood, and my raving about Saltsea Chronicle’s Spoils. In Cryptmaster, you can learn a card game called Whatever, and NPCs who you can challenge to Whatever will have cards floating over their heads. Every time I see that floating card, I get ridiculously excited.

Whatever is a pretty simple game. You build your deck with cards you receive from beating other players. Each card has a name. You also have a number of letter tiles at the bottom of your screen which you select in pairs. Let’s say you have the cards Boh, Gab, Flap, and Nip drawn. If you managed to get A and P next to each other, you could select that pair and deal damage for every time that letter appears in your cards – so you’d deal two damage for A, and two for P. If you manage to highlight all of the letters in a card in the course of playing, you activate that card and its corresponding skill. Your opponent then does the same, and the game goes on till one of you loses all your health.

There’s also a mechanic in Whatever called ‘wild letters’, where black tiles will change their letter every turn.

Your activated cards might add new tiles to your hand, deal additional damage to your opponent, heal you, convert tiles into wild letters, and more. It’s simple, but it’s so fun. I can’t wait to dive back into Cryptmaster, explore its beautiful black and white world, and most importantly, beat some people in Whatever. Once again, a game within a game has captured my heart, and I only wish I could play it in real life with my friends. Maybe I could repurpose a Scrabble board…?

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Cryptmaster

Dungeon Crawler Horror Systems OpenCritic Reviews Top Critic Avg: 76/100 Critics Rec: 83% Released May 9, 2024 ESRB m Publisher(s) Akupara Games Engine Unity
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Cryptmaster is a dungeon crawling adventure game in which you use words to advance, either through text or speech. You take control of four adventurers, seeking to recover their memories.

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