This week in Fully Ramblomatic, Yahtzee reviews Cryptmaster.
Transcript
I worry that after last week, when I set out to widdle all over Summer Game Fest and everybody's hopes and dreams for the future, that I let a little too much negativity slosh around in the widdle. I'm not a bitter, antisocial person by nature, you know; I even left the house last year. And I think we'd all feel a little better if we took a moment to appreciate some of the positive things in life: it's a nice, sunny day, I am in good health, many of the people currently in control of the world have a decent chance of dying of old age in the near future, I have a lovely smile and a vaguely symmetrical face, which is not presently being stamped again and again into a concrete pavement.
And you know why it isn't? 'Cos I'm not playing Shadow of the Fucking Erdtree and don't plan to; I still haven't gotten around to finishing base Elden Ring 'cos of my ongoing Souls-like fatigue problem. But you know what? I'm sick of framing that like it's a failing on my part. Maybe I'm sick of proving myself to you over and over again, FromSoftware; maybe if you're still judging me for not dodging away in a direction between 30 and 45 degrees between the seventh and eighth hits of Lord Flaily-Arms of the Spazz-Out Brigade's main combo, then you're the one who's the asshole. "Positivity, Yahtz; don't forget." Oh yeah. *ahem* I admire the way you've turned your six botched penis extension surgeries to your advantage, Lord Flaily-Arms.
And for this week, I'm going to review a recent indie game I actually really liked; Cryptmaster is its name, a first-person dungeon crawler of the classic retro kind typified by games like Dungeon Master on the Amiga or the Might and Magic games, where you glide from grid square to grid square, rotating exactly 90 degrees to turn, and play as four heroes who've been sort of horrifyingly squashed together into a big blob of Play-Doh that moves as one. More specifically, we play as four dead legendary heroes, who get resurrected in the depths of their subterranean resting place to act on behalf of the titular Cryptmaster, who wants to guide them upwards through several layers of dungeon to take revenge on the surface community that wants to keep them and every other mindless undead horror trapped in the underworld 'cos of their knee-jerk opposition to upward mobility in modern society, I guess.
The first and most obvious selling point for Cryptmaster, that's on full, upfront display like an extremely interesting opening paragraph tattooed across a delightful pair of jubblies, is the Cryptmaster himself; yeah, he couldn't more obviously be a bad guy even without the skull face or the whole "revenge on the living" ambition, but he's such a joy to listen to, I was pretty much on his side by the end. Yeah, why are the living hogging all the nice surface beach resorts? It's just another form of racism, isn't it? I'm not a bad person just 'cos I smell like a dying fart bubbling through the mushroom soup at Panera Bread.
He's got a voice that's at the midpoint between Vincent Price, Peter Lorre, and the G-Man from Half-Life that makes all his dry, sarcastic quips weirdly hypnotic. You remember that fad in the 90s for board games that came with a VHS tape? That's what this reminds me of, moving your counter along a grid while an out-of-work actor with a weird face looks down on you the whole time, taking the piss. Although, it was annoying how he kept complaining about me walking into corners. "Are you skulking again?" No, it's called "being thorough", asshole! You know, like what your plastic surgeon wasn't.
But what really sold me was that, in contrast to the old RPGs it's referencing, where the core gameplay was mainly clicking on things and not clicking on other things, Cryptmaster's core gameplay mechanic is, in a word, Hangman. Your four dudes all have a word hanging over them with the letters blanked out; you acquire letters from solving puzzles and defeating enemies, and when you guess what their word is, it unlocks a new memory or combat skill, and then a new game of Hangman begins. And this is where my recommendation of Cryptmaster has to have a great big qualification nail to it; that is, I like it because I'm the kind of tiresome "A-star in GCSE English" smartarsed git who unironically enjoys playing Bananagrams, and gets perverse glee out of the discombobulated look on his four-year-old's face when he uses words like "discombobulated". If you're not into word puzzles, then this game is going to leave you behind and disappear over the horizon like a deadbeat vampire in the face of a garlic-scented bill for child support, because we have a core progression system based around guessing the right word, constant optional puzzles about guessing the right word, a conversation system based around guessing the right word, several critical path boss fights based around guessing the right word, and a core combat system based around... erm... typing things very fast?
Yeah, this is where my second qualification flies across the room and beans Cryptmaster in the skull: I don't like the combat much. It's based around typing the commands you learned in the skill-unlocking system to knock off enemy health points, stun them, buff yourselves, etc., but when literally every other game mechanic is word puzzles, this feels like a vicious, poorly-trained dog adopted by a nice, gentle family made of bacon. It's less about vocabulary skills and more typing speed, and desperately trying to remember which of the nineteen different damage-dealing commands you've unlocked is both appropriate for the situation and doesn't contain the letter "A", 'cos you're fighting a dude with one of those motherfucking shields. Surely, combat should've been about guessing the name of your opponent, filling in letters one-by-one; that's on theme, isn't it? Names are power? So mid-fight, you could go, "Wait, your real name is Tarquin Boobookiss?" and watch them die of shame.
A shame it certainly is, especially since, in contrast to the optional Final Fantasy-style collectible card game that, like all diagetic card games in RPGs, I immediately shunned like a leper clutching a Cards Against Humanity box, you can't avoid the combat. So there's that, and we're playing host to a few other members of the "Gosh, Wouldn't It Be Nice?" Club. "Gosh, wouldn't it be nice if you could have a map of the entire floor you're on and not just the current room? Gosh, wouldn't it be nice if the music didn't occasionally feel a little tortured and out-of-place, like a King Charles Spaniel in a tumble dryer?"
But for all that, there's enough to make me like Cryptmaster, hence my earlier usage of the words "Cryptmaster is a game that I like", because most importantly, it's funny and clever and well-written. Your interface for the game world is typing individual words; that's funny in context, 'cos it's presented as as much of a sentence your rotten undead brains can collectively string together. It's also explored from every possible angle as a gameplay mechanic, and it evokes lovely nostalgic memories of playing slightly dodgy text adventures and typing word after word to figure out what esoteric fucking rewording of "PRESS BUTTON" the parser was looking for now. Well, not quite like that; it's downright impressive how many possible inputs Cryptmaster has accounted for. The voice actor must've burned through lozenges like an industrial furnace, the number of words he recorded on the off-chance I'd type them. "Why did you say 'bumbiscuits'?" You know why; now say it again, and tell me I'm pretty.
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Addenda
- Actually only has an A in GCSE English: Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw
- My list of things never to bring to parties: guitars, Cards Against Humanity, gonorrhea, wasp nests