Cryptmaster PS5 Review

Cryptmaster is a curious dungeon crawler about the power of words.

It’s an intriguing and unique adventure that answers the immortal question of whether a decent adventure could be constructed around mechanics that govern your average crossword or wordle.

The answer, by the way, is an emphatic yes.

It may be because I’m a professional writer, or that I adore a good brain teaser and games that don’t take themselves too seriously doubly so. but my time lurking in the corners of the undercity trying to piece together what the bloody hell my party of four long-dead heroes were even doing awake in the first place while being guided by a mysterious necromancer to the world above has been an incredibly entertaining one.

That being said, it certainly isn’t a game for everyone. If you’re not the kind of person who doesn’t like word puzzles and riddles, you will probably hate Cryptmaster and that’s perfectly fine. But if you do. Oh boy, are you in for a treat!

Players take on the role of four long-dead heroes. Roused from their graves by a sarcastic necromancer, the titular Cryptmaster, who wants your help to get revenge on the world of the living, and needs their help to get there.

One problem, you all have amnesia and can’t even remember the names of your attacks and spells. Let alone how to perform them. Thus it’s up to the player to explore this beautifully rendered pen and ink world filled with weird and wonderful characters who will help you build your vocabulary and return to the world above.

To do this you’ll need to solve a slew of riddles, word puzzles, and find a way to effectively communicate with the myriad of weird and wonderful NPCs that you’ll need to befriend and befuddle as you make your way through the barmy grid-based dungeon diver.

When you’re not trying to make a love potion to keep the King of The Frog’s skin nice and moist or saving your game by urinating over another altar dedicated to the goddess of the world above, you’ll be unlocking new skills or revealing the backstory for your party by playing the world’s longest game of hangman.

Next to each character is a word you need to figure out to either reveal more about their backstory or unlock a new attack or skill they can use in combat.

Solving puzzles, riddles, and banishing baddies reveals letters next to each of your characters to help you suss out what each word is like the words most violent crossword puzzle.

It’s a compelling system to level up your characters, making every side quest and action in Cryptmaster worthwhile.

The battles themselves can either be turn-based (which even the game recommends) or have a countdown timer (no, not like that) in the time allotted you need to use the words you’ve collected to knock the letters out of them.

These go from straightforward things when you HIT an enemy to buffing other characters by SINGing or knocking an enemy down by JOSTLING. However, whenever one of your guys makes an attack they need to cool down. This isn’t a straight timer, but a segmented clock reduced by every letter from another part member’s ability or attack. This forces you to mix up your words and tactics and encourages you to use the more synergistic actions in your growing dictionary of destruction.

This is complicated as the game progresses and enemies appear with shields that block attacks if you use certain letters, flying enemies that can’t be knocked down, and gelatinous cubes that become a lot more deadly if you type in the wrong character.

Sometimes this can be surprisingly tricky and dying sends you straight back to the last save point you peed on.

You’ll also collect souls by defeating enemies and eating bugs to buy useful items like potion recipes, or using your abilities in battles. It is a bit of a juggling act and while the game does throw a ton of them at you early doors as Cryptmaster progresses and the amount of mechanics dependant on souls opens out, grinding for more becomes necessary and slows the pace to a grinding halt at times.

There are some fun ways to harvest souls and letters though, which include solving riddles posed by random skeletons sitting on rockpiles, deciphering what is in chests with a quick game of 20 questions (well five), or having a game of Cryptmaster’s surprisingly addictive deck-building card game, Whatever.

Players take turns spelling out the names of monster cards from a pool of random letters at the bottom of the screen which are used to whittle down your opponent’s health points until they reach zero. Each monster has a different skill that’s activated once you have successfully spelled out their full name, that does things like do a certain amount of damage, improve your chances of getting certain letters, or heal you.

Although sometimes success feels like the result of luck more than judgment, the deck-building elements help smooth that out a little, and there’s a surprising amount of depth here and plenty of opportunities to create powerful combos and some great synergies with a few clever choices.

You’d think this being a console port of a game that relies heavily on typing the controls would suffer, and you would be right-ish. While using a pad will admittedly never suit the game as well as a keyboard, the devs have still done a fine job of creating a responsive virtual keyboard with a predictive text bar that turns your various attacks into a single button press. This is incredibly useful when the timer is ticking down and you’re unsure what to use next.

All of this is wrapped up in a beautiful pen-and-ink art style that makes the whole game feel like a grungy, homemade RPG constructed in the back of a teenager’s notebook as they were bored in Maths class, and probably should have been paying attention to how quadratics work or something, I forget. Maths bores me.

The characters are charming, The script is hilarious and you can fart so hard the walls shake. Likewise, the voice acting is superb, the necromancer is a constant source of wit and sarcasm, and the increasingly exasperated god that can’t do anything while you continue to desecrate all her altars steals the show. A feat considering Cryptmaster is packed with irreverent and quirky characters and the cast brings them all to like with aplomb.

Final Thoughts

Cryptmaster is a unique and engaging dungeon crawler with a quirky sense of humour and some very clever ideas. Though it may be a bit too ponderous for some, and action junkies should probably stay away, those with a passion for linguistics who love a good brain teaser or a good belly laugh should certainly check it out.