CRYPTMASTER
Spellcasting, literally and literately
Your first task in this lexical dungeon crawler is to acknowledge your resurrection at the hands of its eponymous necromancer. He has reanimated your band of heroes for his own nefarious purposes, and soon has you scouring the dingy caverns of your former resting place for an assortment of fantasy institutions: hidden chests hold valuable loot, anthropomorphic creatures stand ready to poke you with their spears, and sacred altars need toppling. It’s a surprise, then, to learn that all this originated in more swashbuckling surroundings.
“We started to make a game in which you commanded a cartoon pirate ship by shooting things with your pistol,” co-designer and writer Lee Williams tells us. The idea, he says, was to knock words out of other characters’ sentences to change their meanings. “Then we ditched the gun and came up with a system that allowed you to steal and replace words to fit the story. It was getting away from the pirate theme at speed by this time, so we switched to fantasy – a game about mages using words to affect their environment and fight enemies.” The final touch was to make the characters undead and introduce a narrator. “Then,” he says, “we were away.”
That design journey has brought Williams and his co-creator Lee Hart to what is essentially a collection of word puzzles poured into the mould of an otherwise traditional dungeon adventure. Looting items takes the form of a 20-questions-style quiz, through which you must instruct your necromancer guide to describe the hidden object using simple verbs: look, feel, lick. Your reward isn’t the item itself, but the letters in its name, which are slotted into the blank titles of your character’s empty skill deck. Guess the full names of those skills, Wordle style, and you’ll unlock the ability to use them in combat.
It’s not long before we have the basic Hit, Jab and Zap, though deploying them is a puzzle in its own right. Each skill must be typed out, with their accompanying cooldowns requiring us to tactically combine the abilities of our party. Yelling with Maz the bard, for instance, will reset the cooldown of warrior Joro, readying him for another attack. By the end of our demo, we’re granted the ability to deploy a snare outside of combat.
It’s particularly useful for dealing with shielded enemies, whose bucklers block you from typing specific letters – and therefore deploying particular attacks.
Like its pirate predecessor, then, typing is the driving force of Cryptmaster. Whether written during those ‘20 questions’ puzzles or when wandering about the underworld, your inputs are always met with the droll, haughty comments of the necromancer. Is there some
Your inputs are always met with the droll, haughty comments of the necromancer
trick to accounting for the huge range of potential player inputs, we wonder. “The biggest trick is finding someone who has nothing better to do than sit at a microphone for days on end, reading out words from a dictionary and trying to second-guess everything a player might say to them,” Williams replies. But he pins it more concretely on the game’s underlying “coin sorter” system: popular and relevant words will produce a bespoke response, general vocabulary is sorted into broader pools with randomised outputs, while a number of null lines have been recorded for when the player types something totally off-base.
For the most part, it all blends seamlessly. Told to desecrate a shrine, we opt for the most hygienically offensive form of vandalism we can think of. “Yes,” the cryptmaster says, “give it a good soaking.” Discovering these solutions, and their wry narration, feels like the game’s real reward. Though the systems do occasionally slip. When we’re asked to prove our mortality by – what else? – naming the last piece of fruit we ate, we’re surprised to find that ‘tangerine’ isn’t an acceptable answer. Still, if Williams keeps that dictionary close, we imagine similar blunders will be few and far between – and the cryptmaster’s witticisms all the more delightful.