izigame.me

Cryptmaster is a really unique game, and one of my favorite 2024 releases thus far. It plays like an old school dungeon crawler mixed with a 2000s JRPG and Wordle. You control a party of four, each member of the party has a word for you to solve. You fight enemies in real time, or turn-based combat (the choice is yours), and type out your character's abilities to make them act. Upon defeating enemies you can choose a letter from their name to take. Your chosen letter is then revealed for all of your living party members. If you think you know one of the words you can type it out at any time- aside from combat- and unlock new skills for your party if you guess successfully.
Generally, Cryptmaster does a great job of making use of its word based mechanics in different ways. For example, you're also able to reveal letters from catching fish, and some skills are case dependent such as "do 2 damage for each 'N' in the enemy's name". Certain enemies will also forbid the use of certain letters, or go stronger when particular words are typed. These distinctions create a purpose for variety within combat scenarios, and encourage you to make full use of your abilities. While the premise is great, it's backed up by an interesting world filled with wacky characters. There are hilarious NPC interactions, and quite a few funny moments throughout the game, many of which showcase the developers understanding of gaming tropes, and sometimes poke fun at them in a Deadpool-lite manner.
While hard to describe perfectly, Cryptmaster is easy to understand once you're playing. It's honestly a great entry point for newer gamers; I completed the game playing with a non-gamer friend who's super into word games, and they loved it. I would like to throw out a few criticisms though, the first being the strict specifications on the utility of each character. It feels like nearly all of the heal/revive skills are on one character, so if that character dies while your others are alive, you might as well backtrack to a checkpoint. Especially because once characters die new letters you claim won't be revealed in their words, so in a sense you're losing potential progress by not healing, and it doesn't feel great knowing that happened because the RNG decided to randomly repeatedly target your healer in that encounter. My only other complaint involved the souls; killing enemies, and catching fish and bugs rewards souls. Using any of your characters skills, outside of the four they start the game with, costs souls. At times my friend was struggling with the combat, ran out of souls, and ended up killing our party trying to use abilities that they don't have enough souls to use (even if they were only trying to heal out of combat). In general, I find this system is more likely to punish people who are having a harder time with the game, while being completely trivial for those who aren't, so what's the point? Plus it can encourage grinding, which isn't great.
That being said, I absolutely love when smaller developers get creative, and Cryptmaster is easily one of the most inventive games I've played in recent years. I absolutely loved it and highly recommend it. For less experienced gamers, switching to turn-based mode if you're struggling will create a much more approachable experience. Cryptmaster is one of a kind, and of superb quality.
Highly Recommended
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