Indie Game of the Week 431: Cryptmaster

One of my more expensive recent game purchases was a Steam bundle of acclaimed Indies from 2024 and despite the usual buyer's remorse that comes from spending more than you intended to on a game (or several, in this case) I can't help but feel it was money well spent in retrospect. That bundle included previous IGotW entries Minishoot' Adventures (#412), Dread Delusion (#418), 1000xResist (#421), and Mouthwashing (#427). Cryptmaster, from Paul Hart and Lee Williams, was one inclusion in that bundle I was a bit more skeptical about since (unlike the others) I'd never heard of it before but it's been every bit as entertaining for completely unexpected reasons. Cryptmaster begins with the titular ghoulish necromancer figure raising your party of ancient heroes from the dead and setting you shuffling off towards the surface to see what mayhem his machinations can cause. It feels like it's riffing on Wizardry IV a little: that's the one where you have the series antagonist, Werdna, waking up at the bottom of the dungeon and making his way to the top one violent encounter with heroic adventurers at a time in a reversal of the standard format.

The big difference between Cryptmaster and something like a Wizardry or Legend of Grimrock is that almost everything is done through a text parser. Rather than the usual keywords and verbs of a traditional interactive fiction adventure game though, it's structured a bit more like The Typing of the Dead: each member of your party has a list of commands (that constantly grows as they "remember" more of their past through keywords, which you can try to guess at any time) that they use in battle, doing damage or drawing aggro or buffing and healing the team, with various conditions imposed on you by the enemy you're fighting like being banned from using a specific letter if the opponent has a shield with that letter emblazoned on it. You also type words frequently when exploring, guessing at the contents of chests—only the Cryptmaster can see what's in there, and you have to ask him questions about the object to figure out what it is—or answering some familiar riddles posed by skeletal totems. Rather than gold or items, your reward is almost always either letters or souls; the former filling in those character-based keywords I mentioned to make them easier to guess while souls work as both your currency and the means of using more complicated commands.

It's an unusual system for a first-person dungeon-crawler but works surprisingly well, and the parser is pretty robust as the Cryptmaster will regularly repeat and question any non-sequitur words you might type in. Swears are eventually penalized if you use them too often, commands can be used outside of battle (useful for healing), and the Cryptmaster will have unique dialogue for a great many words you can conceive. He's also just a fun character in general, playing up a Greek chorus Cryptkeeper (of "Tales from the" fame) role as this wisecracking undead cynic with plenty of derision for the NPCs you meet (they can't seem to hear him; he only exists as a voice in your heads, for now at least) and a strange aversion to chickens. Humor plays a major role in the game throughout, especially as your chief means of creating save points is by desecrating shrines protected by an increasingly exasperated avatar of the Goddess of Life whom sounds more desperate and annoyed each time she spots you coming. The presentation is rendered entirely in monochrome but has a very sharp polygonal look to it; I wish I could recall what it reminds me of—maybe a little bit like Darkest Dungeon with the thematic similarity, or perhaps a Loop Hero at least in terms of the grainy look to its characters—but it's enough to give Cryptmaster a distinctive aesthetic and an attitude germane to its premise since "colorful" isn't really in the vocabulary of most necromancers.

The combat is starting to get a bit cumbersome where I'm at with the number of commands I've been given as it's getting much harder to remember what everyone can do while fighting with the game's recommended real-time setting—there's a turn-based option too—and this indecision becomes all the more prevalent when you meet enemies with shields or armor that limits what words you can use, including perhaps a small set of repeated commands you've been leaning on a little too much. Each command besides the basic attack requires souls to cast so you really don't want to waste them on abilities that aren't pulling their weight: as I continue to increase these move lists it feels like I'm taking on more commands I'll never see a need to use. Others might involve doing damage for every instance of a specific letter in an enemy's name—like with most cases, you get to take several of these name letters as post-battle spoils—which is an incredibly conditional thing that's easy to forget about. You can summon every hero's word list whenever you want, though obviously in a middle of a real-time fight you can't spend too long perusing what you have while they're throwing attacks at you. Everyone's name also represents their health: they start with three characters each (four for the main fighter Joro) and can gain more as the game progresses, but that's still a very small HP pool that means you can't afford to screw around. That said, it's the type of increasing challenge you'd expect from any dungeon-crawler (or just any reflexes-based game in general) so I have to give the developers props in figuring out how to make that escalation work even if doesn't always feel satisfying to be stunlocked more and more frequently by choice paralysis.

On the whole though, Cryptmaster is a delightful game for any fan of dungeon-crawlers or word puzzles alike and has a similar sense of sarcastic (and frequently meta) humor as The Stanley Parable and its ilk, if you don't mind your games taking a moment to call out how stupid you are on occasion. The riddles and treasure chest guessing games make a nice break from fighting and exploring and it feels like there's a tangible reward every time you solve one of these hangman conundrums beyond the gratification such puzzles usually offer. There's also an optional card game you can play against various NPCs and earn additional cards for your deck, where you input pairs of letters from a set of (usually useless) possibilities in order to spell out the names on your cards to activate them, and even that's proven to be as compelling as anything else in the game. Like a sardonic Dungeon Master for Wordle fanatics, it's wormed its way into my affections like so many graveyard carrion feeders and I'm looking forward to seeing more of what it has to offer. Just as long as it doesn't screw me over again by doing something like not accepting "boot" as an alternative answer for "shoe" we'll be all good (seriously, what was that?).

Rating: 5 out of 5.