Episode 178 - A Bunch of Band-Aids - Cryptmaster

What did you say? Podcast? We’re not going to drop everything and
do that. Welcome back to the podcast. We’re still playing a bit of
catchup this month, and to continue with our Halloween picks, we’re
talking about Cryptmaster! This is a dungeon crawler in the typing
game subgenre, where you solve puzzles and fight enemies using
abilities you type out. To gain the abilities, you need to find
letters, which you can come across in a variety of ways, which fill
out a series of blanks for each of your four characters, and then
guess what the full word is, similar to a Wordle or a crossword
puzzle style. This, objectively, is a weird and really cool system.
And it feeds into the other elements of the game, encouraging you
to engage in combat and explore the world, complete sidequests and
play the in-universe card game. On the other hand, many of the
things you have to do can become a bit tedious, especially relating
to the soul resource you have to manage in order to engage in
combat effectively, not to mention the huge number of riddles you
have to solve with no artifice really over top of them. That being
said, the end product is still extremely cool, builds an effective
tone which walks the line between being funny and building the
feeling of an underworld in a serious way, and is probably worth
looking past the irritants if you’re looking for something novel
and interesting. We’re going to be talking about how we responded
to the challenge the combat posed, the different mechanical choices
that did and did not work for us, and how mastering the combat
requires the memorization of an educational curriculum in
vocabulary. Thank you for joining us this week! Cryptmaster
generated some light buzz when it came out earlier this year, and
it was clear it was a game that fit into our preferred level of
weirdness. The overall idea here is so cool and I think it’s still
great even with some of its contents working against your ability
to have fun with it. Did this game overcome its flaws for you as
well, or are you just a huge fan of riddles? Let us know in the
comments or over on our Discord! Next time we’re finally finishing
up our October games and preparing to move on to greener, less
horror-themed pastures, but we’re closing out the theme with
Amnesia: The Bunker, so we hope you’ll join us for that!