Cryptmaster

There's definitely something to it, it's not really a bad game. It's funny, it's interesting. Ultimately though I just didn't want to play more of it once I took a break. It didn't pull me back in.

Cryptmaster is a fantastic adventure game with options where you can choose to play a turn based adventure or a real time do everything you can to survive mode. I chose the real time cause i like the adreanaline it gives when i have to do something fast and efficiently. The concept of 4 dead adventures who comes back as undead because of the person who callles himself the Cryptmaster and begins the quest of getting into the human world was cool to me. The silly and sometimes questionable past of the 4 undead was amusing to read. I absolutely loved the background scores. The spooky CRYPTMASTER THEME, the beautiful ADGA THE CHASTE SONG and the kinda goofy RATS SONG. Every song was perfect. All the characters in this game was well written . Their discint personality and past stories really made it easier for me to love this game. I especially LIKE VITUS THE PIPER. His rap song was a banger. The voice actors did their jobs really well. LIKE TOOOO WELL. The VA for the Goddess of flirtation ISS is the best example. Good job VA's. There was nothing for me to criticise in the gameplay of the game. The riddles were funny ,witty and fights were really properly entertaining. Although the black and white way of the game was kinda irritating for me at first. Thats my problem for not properly looking into the options available in the settings. Overall this game is fun, entertaining and brain teasing. I could definitely see the work the devs put into this game. A 10/10 game that i ABSOLUTELY recommend anyone to play atleast once.

This game is good. Like, unfairly good. The mechanics, worldbuilding, and puzzles all tie together beautifully and seamlessly. The writing is excellent. It's like if you crossed Planescape: Torment with Blue Prince. The aesthetics are flawless. The only weak point is that there's no area map and the minimap rotates with you, so it can be hard to keep track of where you haven't been yet, which is a shame because you don't want to miss anything. Your entire adventuring party can marry a giant Frog King. It might be the best game ever, actually.

A deeply weird, challenging, but overall satisfying game! The art style is very unique and somewhere between fascinating and off-putting. However, the entire presentation is very consistent and fits well into the world. The game itself is several levels of difficult. The battle mechanics are surprisingly deep and even on the simplest settings, the final section can be quite challenging. Balancing the fact that the same currency counts for both shopping and battles is already tricky, but adding on top that really strong skills are also shockingly expensive gives a whole different dimension to the concept. The puzzles cover a lot of ground, from simple wordplay to complex allusions to concepts. The solutions to everything is typically a single word, but the words get progressively more obscure and rare. I imagine that this can be particularly hard without a guide if one's English is not at least "work proficient", because words like "pulchritude" are not exactly encountered every day. Overall, the entire experience left a pleasant and satisfying feeling. The game is pricey, but there is a lot of details to enjoy. There is some room for replays if one enjoys card games in particular (there is a card minigame). Even if played once, it is still a refreshingly new experience.

This is a good game edging towards a great game, let down by a few small problems and one large one. It's a dungeon crawler that feels like you are playing Wordle - and that's the part that's great. It's full of riddles and other word problems, and they are often good, but the difficulty and level of forgiveness in them varries wildly. The riddles you get as many attempts as you like, and it will give you the answer if you fail. The guess the object from weird clues puzzles you get one try at, and if you fail, you have no idea what the right answer was. But the flaw at the centre of it all is the combat. You have a few basic skills, and then, as you level up through clever word guessing mechanics, you unlock new skills. The problem is that while the new skills are often really clever, from a pure min-max perspective, your starting skills are better 90% of the time - making combat usually borring when it could have been interesting. And given that it's a dungeon crawler, combat is the activity you will do the most of. But the writing is good and the world building is fun, so all told it's still a good experience.

Lack of manual saves is a deal breaker for me. Repeating a full section, either due to poor play or real life hustles is just not fun.

90% of the game is the same thing you did in the tutorial: remember words for attacks, and use those that the opponent is not immune to. There is nothing more to it. I've been running around for almost two hours, and it has just been killing low level mobs by typing the same stuff, and trying to figure out new words. Not to mention, when the game has an "open-ended" question, it only lets you use a few preset words, and using ANY synonyms is not recognized which is really stupid. 2/10

"An exemplary display of the power of language": Tabletop D&D, dark fantasy, punnery, riddles, spelling and satire combine to make a near-perfect creation of old-school dungeon crawling made from ingenious programming that emulates an AI with whom you can interact with any word in the dictionary, great writing carried by mustache-twirling voice actors at their hammy best, and dry British wit that make every moment spent with this tour de force time well spent.

Soo. My thumbs down is actually not fully negative. I honestly like this game a lot. But there's several parts that are weighing it down...rather heavily. Firstly, the "wordle" system. I absolutely love this mechanic and how it's also tied to level ups of the characters is really novel idea! The game has heart. The voice acting is mostly entertanining, though I wished the cryptmaster was bit more...charismatic? But honestly that's just a nitpick. Overall writing is funny and the world is quirky. Now, for the bad. The combat system is dull after the first couple encounters and I'm actively just avoiding getting into combat. The novel levelup system becomes a hinderance here as to remember any attacks you need to know its word. Towards the end you're going to have dozens of them. In live action combat I just find myself repeating the simple ones rather than spend time looking up a more verbose attack. I could make it turn based, but that probably would make this unbearably slow. So avoiding combat it is! -> not great if player actively avoid an integral part of the game. Level design is tedious and the save system makes this worse. I might have to spend several minutes crawling trough rooms to simply die in unfortunate combat -> start from wherever was the nearest altar that often means traversing through the same rooms again. Hoping not to die this time. Game doens't hold your hand. This is good and bad. For agest I didn't understand why my group kept dying. Until I realised that some attacks use souls. But if you have zero, you take damage. Some of the puzzles are absolutely diabolical. Requiring you to shuffle around taking notes and retraversing to attempt to solve them. I personally don't mind puzzles, but I for one am not one who wants to take notes outside the game. I'm finding myself googling answers more and more as I realize this game is asking for level of patience I simply don't have. This is probably more about a game not meant for me, rather than bad puzzles per se. I really really want to like this game. There's so many things here in its favour. I love the look of it, the quirkiness of the world and the basics of the worlde system. But it's hampered down by teeeeedious level design. Annoying save system. Combat system that I actively avoid because it's just not fun after a while and some really diabolical puzzles. Still. I'd say. Get this game on a sale. or heck full priced if you're rolling in extra cash. I'm all for supporting games like this. Just wish it was slightly more...polished?