Episode 178 - A Bunch of Band-Aids - Cryptmaster

What did you say? Podcast? We’re not going to drop everything and do that. Welcome back to the podcast. We’re still playing a bit of catchup this month, and to continue with our Halloween picks, we’re talking about Cryptmaster! This is a dungeon crawler in the typing game subgenre, where you solve puzzles and fight enemies using abilities you type out. To gain the abilities, you need to find letters, which you can come across in a variety of ways, which fill out a series of blanks for each of your four characters, and then guess what the full word is, similar to a Wordle or a crossword puzzle style. This, objectively, is a weird and really cool system. And it feeds into the other elements of the game, encouraging you to engage in combat and explore the world, complete sidequests and play the in-universe card game. On the other hand, many of the things you have to do can become a bit tedious, especially relating to the soul resource you have to manage in order to engage in combat effectively, not to mention the huge number of riddles you have to solve with no artifice really over top of them. That being said, the end product is still extremely cool, builds an effective tone which walks the line between being funny and building the feeling of an underworld in a serious way, and is probably worth looking past the irritants if you’re looking for something novel and interesting. We’re going to be talking about how we responded to the challenge the combat posed, the different mechanical choices that did and did not work for us, and how mastering the combat requires the memorization of an educational curriculum in vocabulary. Thank you for joining us this week! Cryptmaster generated some light buzz when it came out earlier this year, and it was clear it was a game that fit into our preferred level of weirdness. The overall idea here is so cool and I think it’s still great even with some of its contents working against your ability to have fun with it. Did this game overcome its flaws for you as well, or are you just a huge fan of riddles? Let us know in the comments or over on our Discord! Next time we’re finally finishing up our October games and preparing to move on to greener, less horror-themed pastures, but we’re closing out the theme with Amnesia: The Bunker, so we hope you’ll join us for that!