Cryptmaster: I beat this one, but only after running out of steam yet stubbornly persevering. It's a bummer, too, because I think Cryptmaster has a really strong opening -- but within 20 minutes you've seen just about everything you'll see across the next dozen hours.

I liked the premise of both its puzzles and progression. In order to learn more moves in combat, you needed to find “letters” that would fill in blanks on the bottom of your screen. Guess the word as early as you can and you either learn a new move or some backstory, which is essentially experience that once enough is garnered the character gains another hitpoint. Advanced combat moves require souls, and the fun way of getting those is by solving riddles you'll encounter on the journey.
This was all good, but you'll get this before you even finish the tutorial area. It's literally all in the demo of the game. New levels and areas hardly even look very different thanks to the game's achromatic visual style which definitely becomes grating (you can add some color in the options but it's clearly “wrong”, if that makes sense). Everyone you meet is kind of annoying and you want to spend as little time with them as possible. Sure: when asked to defile a statue and you type in “masturbate” and it works, you'll probably laugh a bit. “Shit” even makes a fart sound and you can do it any time. That's neat, but is it really going to keep you around? It probably shouldn't.

I guess my first suggestion for improvement would be to drastically shorten the game as I don't think there's enough going on here to justify its length. I wish the “letters” system worked a bit faster as by the time I beat the game, I don't think I even had half of any characters' total vocab unlocked – and this was with me solving almost every single riddle tossed my way (for more letters, combat only gives you a measly one as loot). I also wish the attack cooldown was shorter on my characters as a lot of the combat was just me sitting there waiting out a clock.
Lots and lots of work went into this game and it shows: the number of words you can type and have the Cryptmaster respond to is shocking, but was it needed? I don't think so. Sometimes it was nice, like when one time I said “rivers” but the intended answer was “water”, the game gave it to me. Cryptmaster is actually quite forgiving in its combat, too, as enemies won't respawn in challenging locations and you can go back to an altar (which revives/heals) at any time with a teleport. The Cryptmaster will also offer to solve riddles for you if you're obviously stuck.

I liked it until I didn't yet played on anyways and I regret that choice. I wish I just played the demo and forgot about trying this.
I do not recommend Cryptmaster. It's a cool concept but it definitely drags on too long and it's an adventure more likely to reward you with a headache than anything else.

A funny dungeon crawler featuring four dead heroes arisen from the graves by THE CRYPTMASTER, who requests their help to reach the surface.

The game takes the typing of the dead style gameplay and gives it a wheel of fortune spin (pun intended) by asking players to figure out your character's moves and history as the game continues.

My one complaint that would have made me give this an extra half star is that when picking out letters to fill out a word, it doesn't tell you if you've already guessed that letter with the current lineup of blank tiles. Obviously with four different characters that's a hard thing to manage I'm sure, but it would have made things much less stressful for me.

this had a really strong demo! i was intrigued by the unique way of interfacing with the space via word input and loved the dungeon crawler promise it held beyond it. the reality unfortunately is that it's incredibly superficial. there's too much combat with all the respawning enemies, which is in itself tedious and mired in bad gamefeel due to waiting for the cooldown. the combat also doesn't feel like the point, but there as part of flavor, but the puzzling/exploration isn't good either. puzzles often are just simple riddles that you either get or you don't, or a description of an item you have to guess. the humor of the game definitely carries it, and i really come away from this game not wanting to dislike it, but there's just nothing to keep me going.

In the realm of the Cryptmaster, you OPEN chests, TALK to characters, FIGHT, and FISH using only words typed on your keyboard. This feature is what makes the experience original and plays into its humor.
It's riddled with riddles, cheeky responses, and clever wordplay, but also problematic design flaws, the worst being its skill-unlocking progression. After completing most of what the game had to offer, I still lacked a lot of abilities, which especially showed its ugly face in the last area, with fights literally impossible to win.
Combat, while definitely unique, ultimately funneled all fights into mindlessly executing one or two trusty word combos, if you know how to win, there's no stopping you (unless you can't!) and the game does too little to diversify the encounters.
All of this has a silver lining since its core idea is phenomenal, and I would love to play something similar, maybe more mechanically sound, in the future.

Absolutely adored this game, one of the most unique experiences I've had in a while. I love the different systems in this game and how they all feed into each other. It would be so easy to just stop at "type a word to do an attack!", but the added layers of riddles, treasure chest guessing games, and fishing for letters just fed into the core idea so well for me. There's definitely moments of tedium (typing "leave" every time you want to exit a convo, typing funny bug names hundreds of times, SOOTHE SOOTHE SOOTHE) but I think optimizing these things out would go against the spirit of the game.

I love the Cryptmaster and so many of the weird lil guy's I met along the way. I also really enjoyed the in-universe card game "Whatever." if that was it's own game on steam for like $3 I would've been happy with just that.

I haven't messed around with the voice-to-text or controller options, but it really stinks that most people won't play it because it's on PC and you need to be at your desk with a keyboard. I personally only played this game on the weekends, because I can't be at my desk after an 8 hour work day of being at my desk, but I looked forward to my long weekend sessions all week long. Everyone loves a pick up & play game, but I really enjoyed having the complete opposite. Each session felt like an excursion where I could only hop out when I felt like I had made a good amount of progress and found a good stopping point.

GOTY candidate for sure

You MUST enjoy little riddles, word puzzles, and "Typing of the Dead" style gameplay to truly get this game, but if thats your jam, this game delivers tenfold. I loooove puzzles, and had a blast of a time going through this really refreshing game. The Cryptmaster's voice acting is extremely impressive for being recorded all by one of the devs just for the sheer amount of words, let alone the charming delivery. I did experience some audio bugs with the sound volume being a lil wacky, but nothing horrible.

If you have any interest in this game and love word puzzles, this is a must play. What a genuinely refreshing and fun game!