Typing dungeon crawler Cryptmaster announces release date during IGF award acceptance speech – Rock Paper Shotgun

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A rare thing: a game with jokes I actually laughed at aloud
In a powerful move, one of the two devs behind Cryptmaster announced the delightful typing-based dungeon crawler’s release date last night during his acceptance speech after it won the Independent Games Festival award for Excellence In Design. Powerful. May 9th is the day, so you have time to practise your touchtyping with Mavis Beacon. I really enjoyed playing Cryptmaster’s Steam Next Fest demo, so I’m excited for the full game.
If I were to attempt to clumsily describe Cryptmaster, I’d say “Legend Of Grimrock meets Typing Of The Dead but with loads of different fun puzzles about typing and oh it’s funny, like actually funny, like I actually laughed aloud at its jokes, how rare is that, too rare considering how many games cram in joke-shaped dialogue, right?” It’s a first-person dungeon crawler starring a party of long-dead heroes resurrected by a necromancer to carry out his definitely-not-evil plan. While you do attack by typing names of abilities and spells, it’s so much more than Typing Of The Dead. Screenshots and videos hint at oodles of different puzzles and combat conditions that require clever and careful typing, and I already enjoyed the few I experienced in the demo.
One fun early puzzle type is unlocking your abilities by guessing their names. Some come from opening chests and trying to identify the item within by typing commands for the Cryptmaster to interact with it in the hope of jogging his memory. I very much enjoyed making him lick what turned out to be a rat. Then the game introduced killing enemies to loot letters to help guess more abilities, and fighting enemies with shields that block attacks containing specific letters, and lying to a giant eyeball, and… I’m excited to see where it goes, especially with marketing mentioning multiple solutions to situations. And I want to see how the Cryptmaster reacts to them.
I adore the Cryptmaster. A bit like in Hand Of Fate or Inscryption, he’s an adversarial presence you develop a relationship with, come to enjoy, come to like, come to want to provoke to see what he’ll do. It’s an excellent performance from Lee Williams, who’s also the game’s writer and co-designer (Paul Hart is the other half of the dynamic development duo). Death has not been kind to his mental faculties but he retains delusions of grandeur, unwittingly silly as he bids you do his evil doing. When I called the Cryptmaster “a bit of a dingus,” I meant it with great affection, though I don’t think his nibs took it way:
For the attention of Alice O’Connor: pic.twitter.com/0LyOl0tr16
Cryptmaster is coming to Steam on the 9th of May. You can still download the demo there to take an early peek.
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Cryptmaster
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Alice O'Connor
Associate Editor
Alice has been playing video games since SkiFree and writing about them since 2009, with nine years at RPS. She enjoys immersive sims, roguelikelikes, chunky revolvers, weird little spooky indies, mods, walking simulators, and finding joy in details. Alice lives, swims, and cycles in Scotland.
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