Cryptmaster

I put off playing Cryptmaster for months because the pitch sounded gimmicky: type words, crawl dungeon, repeat. What I did not expect was a game so thoroughly committed to its one strange idea that it won the IGF's Excellence in Design award and somehow earned a 94% positive rating across over 1,600 Steam reviews. That is not a coincidence. Paul Hart and Lee Williams built something genuinely singular here, and the indie scene is better for it. The setup is macabre and funny in equal measure. Four long-dead heroes, Joro the fighter, Syn the rogue, Maz the bard, and Nix the wizard, are yanked out of their graves by the titular Cryptmaster, a capricious necromancer voiced by co-writer Lee Williams himself. Because they have been rotting for centuries, they have forgotten everything: their names, their abilities, their memories. Your job is to give those things back to them, letter by letter, through a Hangman-style system where defeating enemies and solving riddles drops letters that fill in the blanks hovering beside each character portrait. Guess the full word and you unlock either a combat ability or a fragment of that character's backstory. Health is represented by the number of letters in each hero's name, which is an elegant, tactile way to handle something normally buried in stat menus. The whole structure feels like a paper-RPG manual sketched in monochrome ink, which is exactly the aesthetic Paul Hart was going for, drawing on 1980s Fighting Fantasy and Knightmare illustration as reference. The real joy is in the freeform interaction. The game runs on an extensive voice-recorded dictionary, so when an NPC asks you to defile an altar, you can type SMASH, DESECRATE, or, yes, URINATE, and the Cryptmaster will have a personalised, voiced reaction to each. Steam players have documented entire dialogues of typing COOKIE at an orange until the Cryptmaster loses patience. That generosity of response is rare and it gives the game a warm, handmade quality that no amount of procedural content can replicate. Beyond the core loop, the game constantly reshuffles its mechanics across five chapters that take roughly ten to fifteen hours to clear: there is a card game called Whatever that requires spelling enemy names from a random letter pool, a fishing minigame for gathering letters, riddle-skull encounters, lock-cracking puzzles, and a rap battle section in the first chapter that you can play back to the recipient hours later. The dungeon biomes, the gloomy Bonehouses, the Sunken Sea, and the freakish Downwood, each carry their own visual register within the monochrome palette, and the animations do real work keeping the black-and-white world from going flat. The criticisms are real and worth naming. Combat grows repetitive across the back half of the game because the ability economy, fuelled by souls used as magic points, tends to reward spamming a small pool of cheaper words rather than experimenting with longer, more expensive ones. Some riddles recycle puzzle-book standards that veteran solvers will crack in seconds. A single save file means there is no clean way to revisit earlier chapters and unlock the third of the lexicon you likely missed. And while controller support is listed, the near-constant typing makes a keyboard the only sensible choice. These are genuine rough edges on an otherwise lovingly crafted piece of work. The voice acting alone, quirky, irreverent, and centrally anchored by Williams' dry, witty Cryptmaster, carries the quieter stretches. The sound design does the rest: listening for bug sounds to locate hidden items is the kind of deliberate, attentive mechanic that only a small team obsessing over every layer of the experience would think to include. Cryptmaster is the kind of game that makes sense the moment you accept it on its own terms. It is not a deep combat system. It is not a branching narrative with meaningful choices. It is a love letter to words, to the texture of language, to the specific pleasure of solving a riddle with an absurd answer and hearing someone cackle back at you. If vocabulary games like Wordle and Wheel of Fortune give you a certain satisfaction, this is where that itch goes to become a full evening. Highly recommended for the word-obsessed, the dungeon-curious, and anyone who has ever wondered what a necromancer would say if you typed POTATO at him.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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