If I were to give a rating based on uniqueness, it would easily be a 5/5 game. But because of that, it's not exactly made for everyone. It's a dungeon crawler infused with word games and riddles directed by typing. The art direction is great, and the voiceover work is unbelievably extant; there's dialogue for a lot of different things. Also, it has fishing and card games! A necessity for every well-to-do RPG.

I had this feeling when starting this game, but even after finishing it, I think this is one of the most unique games I've ever played. Props to the devs!

This is a hard one for me to rank because while there are a lot of things about it that are extremely my shit, there are also a few aspects that just aren't, and left me not entirely loving my time with it. But despite the somewhat "average" score that I'm giving it based on my personal enjoyment, I want to emphasize that this is very much NOT an average game. It's one of the most unique, clever, weird, and daring games I've played in a long time, and I will always deeply admire it for that.

Genre-wise, this game is almost uncategorizable. It looks like, and to some degree is, a first-person party-based dungeon-crawler, but having literally just played Legend of Grimrock (one of the most “one of those” kinds of games ever made) a couple weeks ago, there’s not much that these two have in common outside of some surface-level similarities in movement and exploration. This is a game all about typing, and it borrows from “Typing of the Dead” style typing combat, text-parser adventure games, and word games in a wholly unique blend of keyboard-based gameplay. Combat is in real time by default, and requires you to type in commands based on your party’s set of abilities, and the result is frantic typing while attempting to strategize synergies. You uncover new abilities by guessing the new words that pop up next to your character’s portraits that slowly fill in Hangman-style as you defeat enemies, solve riddles, and…fish! You interact with NPCs, and really everything else, by typing as well, and it can be fun testing out what words have specifically programmed responses.

It’s a brilliant concept, and is mostly pretty fun in execution. Interestingly enough, I think I was having the most fun with this game when it felt more like a typical RPG rather than a word/riddle game. Grinding through dungeons, eating all the bugs I could find to add to my stock of souls, “leveling up” by uncovering new abilities and adding letters to my character’s names, spending enough time with the combat to actual figure out some reliable tactics rather than freezing up and forgetting any commands my party responds to (thankfully, you can pause the combat at any time to check your character’s list of abilities).

I think where I struggled the most with this game is in just not feeling like I’m on the same wavelength as it with the riddles/word puzzles. A pretty regular aspect of the gameplay is opening up chests, where the Cryptmaster gives you a number of chances to ask questions and receive vague answers in order to guess the object inside, and talking to skulls, who ask you to solve classic head-scratcher riddles. In both cases, I so often found myself struggling to come to the right answer and just feeling kinda dumb as a result. To be clear, the game offers very thoughtful and generous accessibility options for these parts of the game, which I absolutely took advantage of, and feel very grateful for. They’re the reason that I merely have some ambivalence about the game, rather than set it down entirely out of frustration. But it still left me with the feeling that this game was just not entirely “for me.”

This feeling also came up with what I sensed to be the relative slowness that I discovered new abilities. By the end of the game, I still had less than half of all of my characters’ abilities/lore filled out. Thankfully, it was still pretty doable to face even the late-game enemies with what I did have, but it once again reinforced the feeling that there were aspects of the game that just weren’t quite clicking with me. I want to emphasize that I fully recognize this is a “me” problem. The game really does go out of its way to accommodate various player proficiencies. I’m not saying any of this out of actual criticism for the game; rather, I’m just attempting to explain why I personally didn’t have an overwhelmingly positive experience with it.

What pulled me through the game, besides the many aspects of the gameplay that I actually did click with, was the consistently entertaining writing. This game is FUNNY. Like, anywhere from “ha, clever bit” funny to laugh-out-loud jokes. I guess there were a couple that didn’t land, but it’s still pretty impressive to get me looking forward to each new NPC interaction to see what new silly or witty or weird places the story would go. I found myself getting pretty invested in where it would all land, and I appreciated that the final decision it leaves you with feels legitimately like a tough one to make, but it also doesn’t feel like the choices are equally good or bad, despite the fact that there is ambiguity to the results of each one. I tried both because it’s so easy to go back and do it again after the game ends, and it reinforced for me that I think I made the right decision the first time.

I think writing all of this out and reflecting on my experience with this game made me appreciate it even more than I did while I was playing it, honestly. Just an incredibly idiosyncratic and cool thing, even if not every aspect of it entirely worked for me.

As soon as I first laid my eyes on this game, seeing what it was aiming for, what inspirations it wore on its sleeve, I knew that I’d love it.

One of my favourite TV shows as a child that I still adore today was “Knightmare”, for those not in the know it was High Fantasy style competition with child participants, a dungeon master like host and what I guess would be best described as crude “virtual reality”.

One child would adorn a helmet that meant they could only see the floor in front of them, a bag to hold items and shield bearing an eye which would be the (in universe) way that this adventurers three friends, “far away” could give out advice and command the dungeoneer on his journey.
The adventurer in real life was on a TV set, using green screen (probably blue actually) technology the child would venture through dungeons, avoiding traps, speaking to monsters and actors being NPCs.
The three back at base would not just be guiding the dungeoneer simply where to move but would huddle in and discuss what answers to give when something such as, a spooky golem, would ask them a riddle.
It was brilliant, at the time it felt like magic but also clearly felt like, because it was, a game.
Treguard, the gentleman who acted as the guide, was a real life equivalent to tooltips, one that, if memory serves me correctly, was a bit more obvious as the show moved on and the children continued to fail to see the finish.

Cryptmaster pulls a lot of its flavour from this show but specifically its main gimmick.
In Knightmare they would acquire magical spells to help solve puzzles and with the command “Spell casting” they would need to spell out the word letter by letter.
In Cryptmaster you can say anything and spelling out the correct things are not only your answers to puzzles but the way to fight combat, learn about the characters and even more.

From the start you learn the party’s names by typing them out, you soon come across a chest but your undead brain does not have all its memories intact and the same goes for our leader, guide and companion the titular Cryptmaster.
Rather than just pop open this chest and get an item, each thing you find is a guessing game.
Your only information is how many letters are in the name of the item and asking old Crypty to tell you what it is based on commands much like a retro text adventure “LOOK”, “SMELL”, “TASTE”, all these and more are commands you give and our undead guide gives us his opinion.
Some of these you will get straight away and some you’ll be drawing either literally or in your mind to figure out what he could mean. Afterwards you aren’t awarded with the item, most of them you would have no use for, but you are rewarded letters that fill in blank spaces near each of your party.
This ongoing game of “hangman” is where Cryptmaster’s version of levelling comes in.
Fill all the spaces or type out the word once you can see it and that will either teach you a new ability for a character or give you a little piece of their background.
You can’t skip ahead so simply just typing over and over is only going to give you confused and sometimes sarcastic replies from your guide.

Now you’ve started learning these abilities and attacks you are able to take on the many enemies that roam the dungeon. The game gives you a choice of real-time (sort of active time battle) or turn-based. Each word has a timer and costs souls (a currency I’ll get to later) and your and the enemies’ health bars are based on the amount of letters in their name.
As the game progresses some enemies hit harder, some have shields that block words containing the letters adorned and some may only be damaged by certain effects.
The combat due to its real-time nature feels like a more visceral version of the dice rolling mechanics many CYOA books had. It’s simple enough but there are tactics, and, in some parts, you may feel like avoiding combat is your best choice.

Unfortunately I can see the combat being something that may feel too simplistic for some. I believe there are so many distractions that it never needed to be too in-depth but did feel a little disappointed towards the end where it didn’t feel like there was enough variety and that things could have at least scaled faster.
A problem I had by the end as I went back in to find more secrets and collect some Steam Trophies (because I still wanted more) was discovering quite how many words each of the four main characters could unlock.
To put it simply, I finished the game on row two or three for each and it turned out there were seven rows of words I could have collected.
It was nice to know I didn’t have to grind out these actions to see the credits but it also made it feel to me that the amount there was, was not really necessary.
I also found that the few times I did feel the difficulty had spiked, that having to learn the lore based words before eventually seeing one that could affect combat did feel like a chore.
Discovering the memories of your party is definitely a cool and interesting way to serve the player lore but I felt throughout that maybe these should have been separated which would have made the combat scale faster and potentially be more engaging.

Before even seeing Cryptmaster being played, I was intrigued by its art direction.
To me, and then confirmed through tweets, AMA’s and the like, the art reflects older fantasy books and specifically another text-based non-video game format, that being choose your own adventure books and another British classic in Fighting Fantasy.
The environments may be 3D but they look as if they are drawn with ink, gloomy, scratchy and full detail.
If there were one small criticism to make about the game’s looks it’s that although there are multiple locations the black and white dungeons still look a little too similar, but it’s a direction with a purpose and one I feel that if they did push for more variety would maybe have lost the game’s specific feel and fashion.

The characters all look fantastic, rats, knights, blobs and more, all as you’d expect and all feeling like they were pulled straight from the page of an old Warhammer book.
The only thing that sometimes doesn’t look right is when bumping into an enemy at an odd angle. It was never game-breaking but did sometimes look awkward when they’d shuffle into the camera and have to turn around - the sort of “glitch” that I wouldn’t actually want removed but a very minor argument for a teeny bit more polish.
One of the top points in why this game is worth anyone’s time is that the voice acting is top tier and is genuinely funny throughout and as an extra bonus, Treguard from Knightmare, the same actor is in it as a narrator.
There are many games that attempt comedy and for me, the majority fail, but between the silliness of the riddles, finding items and the great characters I was doing small chuckles from beginning right up to the end.

Finally I want to just speak on the “souls” currency I mentioned earlier.
As I said each word you say in combat costs souls, one per letter, and these are acquired not just from winning fights but from collecting bugs (typing their names when you see them on walls), fishing and the in universe card game WHATEVER.
WHATEVER isn’t particularly my favourite in universe card-game but much like Triple Triad, Gwent and the like it is an enjoyable distraction that runs parallel to the main quest without hindering your progress.
I wanted to give some focus to the souls because I found it a clever combination of currency and MP, action points or whatever you prefer. Too many games want you to juggle and remember so many different types and Cryptmaster keeps it all about letters.
Grab letters, use letters, spend them as money. It’s a small innovation that doesn’t change the world but one I’ve not seen enough people speak about.

In the end, Cryptmaster was love at first sight and a game that I felt like only I’d want, something that combines Knightmare, Atmosfear (coincidentally also known as Nightmare) and Fighting Fantasy, not only exists but completely delivers.
It looks good, sounds good, is funny and plays well. Sure there are a couple of minor balance things I would like to be different but nothing that ever had me close down steam.
It never outstayed its welcome, so much so I went straight back in to delve deeper into some of the games more cryptic puzzles, and by the end it had cemented itself not only as a confirmed good time but one I would happily recommend even to those who aren’t quite a nerdy child of the 80’s like me - although if you are, Hoo boy, get this!

I played the demo for this game and was blown away. It seemed like a fun take on a typing game, but when I got the full game the ideas presented to me in the demo just got vary arduous soon after the demo ended.

Cryptmaster is a dungeon crawler mixed with text adventure, with a typing game also. There are many puzzles and dialogue things where you can just type whatever you want, so things are very "open ended"(?) kind of? This could be cool, the allure of text adventure games is the freedom you could have from being able to "do anything", but that is the same allure that falls short in this game.

There are a lot of mechanics that feed into each other so I kind of just have to start explaining them all. Let's start with the memories of your 4 person party. At all times your party will have a blank word that will gradually fill up as you gain letters. Letters are gained from fighting enemies, doing riddles, or opening chests. The more letters you have, the easier you can guess the word, but you can type in the word anything once its the one on screen. These memories can either be lore, or moves to use in combat. There appears to be like 40-ish for each person, mostly consisting of lore from what I could tell. I beat the game and ended up with like less than 20 on each character.

Chests are puzzles in which you ask the Cryptmaster to describe a mystery item (look, touch, remember what it did, taste, etc.). Limited number of guesses, and when you solve it all the letters get put into your memory words. There are skulls that give you riddles to figure out, and similarly if you solve them, the letters get added. The problem with these is purely a chance thing where maybe none of the letters actually help you, or you already had those letters, just fucking annoying i think.

Fighting enemies gives you 1 letter of your choosing from their name, but I find the combat fucking annoying. The combat is recommenced to be in real time (more in line with most typing games), or you can do a version of turn based combat. In real time, you must type your moves fast while a timer counts when the enemy will attack. However, you have a cooldown after each move (per character), and this feels so ridiculously long compared to enemy attack speed. Also the fact you have to remember every move for 4 characters in a high speed fight, that was just not feasible for me, so I went to turn based. Turn based isn't traditional turnbased, it just makes every letter typed advance time. Enemy attack timer goes down per letter, and when a party member is on cooldown, each letter takes away a segment of cooldown. This slows it down so you can think and you can actually look at your list of attacks, providing more "strategy". Turn based was a band-aid to finish the game because I don't think the combat is good overall. I will say its mainly because the moves all kind of suck too. idk none of them felt really good to use, but maybe there are cooler moves i didnt unlock even though i beat the game! Maybe if I could get memory words faster, combat would be better, but even then combat just woudlnt be fun until "late game" so it seems not very good.

Then the other part of this game besides combat is the mystery object and riddles and boy FUCK do I hate word puzzles. I didn't think this game would be so full of them, so fuck me i guess. Im just not good at them. I can't solve riddles, and I cant remember words when I need to. Then it just pisses me off like really bad man. If you like word puzzles you might be happier than I!

Also, there is a card game in this, and I also think it sucks. Maybe thats just me not understanding how I should play it, or not understanding how to build a deck, but you dont get a lot of cards to even build one. Most cards you get from beating opponents, but you have to beat them with your crap cards.

The card game has you draw 4 cards, and a whole row of random letters (maybe like 20ish?). You pick 2 letters at a time, and if any of the letters are in the name of the cards in your hand, you deal damage. If you get all the letters in a card's name, its effect will happen. You can also skip your turn to mulligan your letters. This is heavily reliant on you actually getting letters you can fucking use in your hand, which I barely ever had. From what I could piece is that deckbuilding would revolve around either picking cards with a variety of letters so you can have more letters that are useful, or cards with a small variety so letters do more damage per pick. Again, you don't really get a lot of cards to do either of these I feel. Maybe I just fundamentally did not understand this card game, but I dont think its very fun at all.

Mainly just every mechanic frustrated me and it just did not gel with me, im sad it didnt, but oh well.