Indie Game of the Week 445: Crypt Custodian

We're a few weeks out from Halloween but that's no reason not to contemplate the afterlife and all the suffering and regret that irrevocably led us there from birth. Heck, it's my go-to thought whenever I'm at a stop light or a YouTube video is buffering for too long. It was only a few months back that I played a game that had its own distinctive concept of what awaits past the great beyond, the Korean-made 8Doors: Arum's Afterlife Adventure, and this week's game finds us in thematically and structurally similar territory: Kyle Thompson's Crypt Custodian. The story of this game has you follow the recently deceased cat Pluto as he immediately runs afoul of the local judge of the damned, Kendra, and is unfortunately sentenced to an afterlifetime (i.e. eternity) of custodian work cleaning up an incredibly grubby version of the underworld. A scheme develops to get into the blissful Elysian Fields equivalent under Kendra's nose, but it means first befriending a bunch of fellow accursed spirits with their own backstories and obsessions. A rare case where the friends you made along the way are actually pivotal.

Though typically categorized as an exploraction game most places Crypt Custodian's top-down perspective and occasional use of environmental puzzles to solve actually makes it closer to a Zeldersatz or, more specifically given the protagonist's species, a Zelderkatz. Now, while I'll admit to being pretty new to Zelderkatzen I can say it's fundamentally similar to games like Hyper Light Drifter or Unsighted or Death's Door in using the broad strokes of the traditional Zelda format and complementing it with plenty of tough combat encounters as well as twisty open-world navigation with its many collectibles to find off the beaten path. It does have plenty of areas that you can't traverse until later, either with the right ability or the right key item, but assuages much of this roadblock hassle with some always-welcome map marker features and a zippy fast-travel system while dispensing with the usual big arrows pointing to the next story objective for a more exploration-focused freeform approach... though with the option to buy one of those big arrows if you decide you really need some direction.

The combat's tough due to a restrictive limit of four hits and no opportunities to heal, though you can acquire a few upgrades that keep you in the fight longer if you opt for defensive over offensive options with the limited number of passives you can equip at once. Concordantly with this spike, it won't punish you much at all for any untimely demises (not that you can really die in the afterlife anyway) beyond the time needed to return to where you perished or however much damage you may have inflicted in the boss fight you just lost. A selection of those passives and special attacks to use (the latter run on cooldowns) means you can always retool for different strategies to befit whichever foe is causing you trouble, though with the nature of the game there's also often the option to just go explore some other direction for a while and maybe grab a few extra boons along the way to help out with your rematch. Either way, the game offers a mix of dodge rolling (later air dashes) and jumps to elude most enemy attacks once you have their patterns down and at least there's nothing by the way of a parry system—probably for the best, I'm kind of tapped out on perfectly timed defensive maneuvers after Clair Obscur and Lies of P (not to mention Nine Sols from last year; another feline feature). As with Kyle Thompson's previous games it has a pretty chill demeanor to its presentation (due in large part to another of Eric Thompson's typically soothing ambient soundtracks) and a genteel sense of humor with its cast of cute animals coping with untimely death and an unjust post-life arbitration system.

Crypt Custodian is the sort of unhurried exploration-heavy game that this developer has become fairly adept at crafting, albeit framed in a new paradigm here rather than his previous 2D platformers like Islets or Sheepo, and so most of the gameplay loop will be spent wandering around enjoying the low-key atmosphere and occasionally being led into a challenging sequence or battle arena. Beyond the standard fights, you'll also run across a few risk vs. reward scenarios like a deadly curse that you can wilfully subject yourself to or a no-damage gauntlet against multiple waves of foes to earn a treasure. With the curses, you're expected to defeat a certain number of enemies without healing and with some deleterious side-effects active—the last one I had caused a row of spikes to constantly generate behind me wherever I went, threatening grievous harm to my kitty keister if I ever stopped for more than a few moments—which made for some tense gameplay where I had to be more cautious than usual. This is the kind of game where enemy attacks are telegraphed both regularly and overtly and so the greater danger comes from having to tackle several of them simultaneously, keeping an eye out for the telltale red alerts that an attack is forthcoming from any angle: a single enemy is unlikely to trip you up unless you're being especially careless, but the melees against several different types are where your brain has to kick into gear as you prioritize taking out the biggest and most aggressive threats first before circling around to the more passive nuisances. In this respect, it's able to maintain a respectable difficulty curve despite the influx of new power-ups, either by finding them out in the world or retreating to a local cafe to buy them with the currency you've found. At first blush Crypt Custodian strikes as a pretty simple game where it almost struggles to throw enough new things at you to justify its substantial runtime, but it's in that manner of being deceptively basic that it often finds ways to pull the rug out from under you.

While this is hardly the game's fault and is a probably familiar enough refrain to anyone who subscribes to PC Game Pass, I have to say that Crypt Custodian has a really half-assed implementation on there. The download is missing its favicon, it asks you to sign in every time you boot it up, and I receive about two achievement alerts in five whenever I earn one. Xbox is a branch of a huge corporation that relies significantly on Game Pass as a business strategy, certainly more so than their current strategy of throwing all their money into a big dumpster with "AI" written on it that they then toss a match into, but in my many months of... well, not buying it, since I'm cashing in the Bing points I've earned from using their terrible search engine all year, but in my many months with those circumstances I've noticed the Xbox app has always really been shaky with smaller profile Indie games like this. It's a shame too because bashing your way through a half-dozen innovative Indies in one month is a much better value proposition than spending that entire subscription length pottering away in the newest COD; if the industry wasn't as screwed up with its priorities as it is right now, GP could exist as this amazing (for the players more than the developers, perhaps) Indie discovery portal. Given the type of treatment that output is proffered here, though, Steam and Switch feel like far superior alternatives if you're into the smaller, cooler games out there. Either way, what issues Crypt Custodian have that it's actually responsible for are relatively minor hitbox irritation stuff and/or difficulty-based (which you can change with the game's settings or by exploring elsewhere for a while, admittedly) and it's largely about giving you a big world to explore at an unhurried pace, with as little or as much direction as you might want and no real punishments for failure. After all, you're already dead, so it's not like you don't have plenty of time on your hands.

Rating: 4 out of 5.