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.

Played 2 hours and realized I just was not having any fun. I don't particularly like the weapon (his attack animations/feel). I have problems timing the parry and the dodge to the attack animations. I love big shields in Dark Souls, but that feeling is NOT the same as shielding in this game. I dont like that the first area is just a open area with some "ruins".

I got to the second area (a big safe zone city) and all my exploration drive went away. I do not want to hear any more talking, I don't want to explore anymore so I just quit.

Yeah I think the artstyle, setting, and music is a good change of pace for Souls-likes, but it I don;t like the combat so 👎

I think this game is slightly worse than the first one, but still kicks major ass. The exploration is still there, and you even get to keep your shit from the last game, so you just get even more fun shit to your movement kit. The combat is still fun, so fun I wished some bosses had more health cause they are kind of easy. The game is very pretty and I generally felt like I was in Star Wars and that is just something that you can only get with AAA. Just being in this high fidelity alien world is amazing.

The parts I think it lacks in though are just there are less planets than the first game, and only 2 of them are real "explore them" type planets. The other ones are pretty much set piece planets (there are stuff you still need to go back to get later, but generally you explored the planet fully the first time). The first game had like 4/5 basically equivalent planets to explore, but they are smaller and less open than the 2 in this game.

They decided to make the 2 explore able planets more like open world philosophy, with a heavy focus on 1 of them. Koboh is a spoked wheel design where there is a center area to freely explore surrounded by more "linear" locations. This works fine, and there is some visual differences between these areas, but it still all on the same planet. The other planet is all desert and, quite frankly, deserts are boring! There isn't really a lot here so its fine but still thats the only other real place.

Also the story isn't as good, its serviceable here so not bad, but the first one gave me that patented Star Wars Feeling™.

This being modern Star Wars, there is a lot of fan service, and I fucking love that cause it pulls from every era in the universe. You have the original movies with storm troopers and the empire. You have the prequels cause this game has fucking BATTLE DROIDS BABY, THEY ARE HERE AND I LOVE THEM. You have the newer movies with some of the newer droids that added to the empire roster. There is even a bunch of High Republic shit in this game too, its all fucking here. You even got architecture for those 3, you go in a seperatist ship, an empire space station, and a bunch of High Republic ruins. The fucking Crossguard claymore ass light saber is even a stance you can use in this game like YEAHHHHHH. The fan service rules.

Speaking of the stances, you start with the 3 from the last game (single saber, dual bladed saber, and dual wielding), but you also get 2 new ones; The crossguard and fucking blade w/ a blaster. The crossguard honestly felt too slow for this game, but the blaster is so fun. It feels awesome to shoot your blaster while you are doing your saber combo.

I do really wish this game had more platforming challenges because the platforming was fun. There are rifts that lead to like combat challenges, but also Mario Sunshine bonus levels with platforming. Most of them are combat and there are like 4 platforming challenges. I was more! There are things you can dash through that reset your jumps and dashes! Its fun!

Final point is that every game should have a double jump even if you dont need it because double jumping just feels good to do, and with the animations in this game that simple act is just beautiful to me.