At the time of writing, Akupara Games’ Cryptmaster is featured in the current Humble Choice bundle. I suppose it’s some kind of unwritten societal rule that there must be at least one horror-adjacent game in a bundle for the month of October, so Cryptmaster is an excellent choice to feature in said Humble Choice bundle. I would consider Cryptmaster to be the “headliner” out of all eight games in that bundle, and I quite enjoy playing it. I thought I might as well review Cryptmaster, as if to back up my own opinion, and so here we are.

In Cryptmaster, you play as a party of four long-dead adventurers who have just been reanimated by the titular Cryptmaster’s necromancy. As it happens, the same four adventurers you control played a pivotal role in stopping the Cryptmaster’s evil schemes nearly two thousand years ago. Now that the Cryptmaster has raised you into undeath, however, you’re bound to serve him forevermore. I guess the saying “no good deed goes unpunished” really is true, even if it takes seventeen centuries for the heroes’ misfortune to come back to bite them. The story begins when the four heroes suddenly awaken in the Cryptmaster’s, well, crypt.

The Cryptmaster explains that he’s returned you to the mortal realm as undead husks of the heroes you once were. The Cryptmaster, and all the restless dead in the world, have been magically sealed deep underground and largely forgotten by modern society. The Cryptmaster raised you from the dead because he wants you to help him rectify that. He’ll guide you from the depths all the way up to the surface so that you can ultimately subjugate the living world. Since you’re now magically bound to serve the Cryptmaster, you don’t have much of a choice in the matter.

Because the adventurers you control are now undead and had been dormant for so long, they start out with very few of the abilities and memories they had before they died. That brings me to Cryptmaster’s core gameplay loop. My best attempt to describe Cryptmaster is to say it’s what you’d get if a grid-based RPG from the 1990s were crossed with Typing of the Dead, except you play as the dead (or undead, as it were) in that scenario. Let me try to explain what I mean: All combat and dialogue in Cryptmaster requires you to type in single-word commands.

Since the W, A, S, and D keys are used for that purpose instead of movement, you’ll have to use the arrow keys to move by default. It took my hard-wired PC gaming brain a little while to get used to that, but moving with the arrow keys felt natural again after not long. You’ll frequently notice that your characters have blank grids in their character portraits. These are intended to be filled with a certain word. Once you figure out what that word is and type it, the corresponding character will either unlock one of their memories or a new combat ability.

You could spend quite a while trying to guess what all those words are, or you could get help with that process by engaging in combat. When you defeat an enemy, you get to choose between one and five letters in that slain enemy’s name and see if it fills any of the blanks in your characters’ portraits. If so, that letter will be given to all applicable party members who haven’t fallen in battle. One thing I really like about this part of Cryptmaster’s gameplay is that it doesn’t follow any kind of naming scheme you might expect.

As a few examples, you might end up battling a gelatinous blob whose name is an incomprehensible mass of consonants, or you might fight a skeleton named Ebeneezer, or a lizard-man named Jeff. You might expect these enemies to all be called “skeleton” or “lizard-man,” but that couldn’t be further from accurate within Cryptmaster. Speaking of combat, you can choose to play Cryptmaster in either real-time or turn-based mode. If you have issues typing quickly and accurately, especially in the heat of battle, I would strongly suggest trying out turn-based mode in case that makes combat easier for you.

From an accessibility standpoint, I’m really glad that option is present. Another huge point in Cryptmaster’s favor is that, since it relies so heavily on in-game text, I haven’t spotted a single error in any aspect of its gameplay. For once, I finally get to praise a text-heavy game for not having copious spelling and grammatical errors, and I’m going to savor the chance to do so. Cryptmaster also earns another point in the accessibility department because it has several options that allow you to customize much of the gameplay’s difficulty. Even if you don’t have accessibility issues, that’s always great to see.

I can’t believe I’ve gotten this far into this review without even mentioning my favorite parts of Cryptmaster. You’re not limited to typing in single-word commands during combat or dialogue encounters with NPCs: You can type in whatever, whenever, and chances are good that the Cryptmaster will respond to anything you type. The Cryptmaster has voiced responses to tons of things you could type, as well as catch-all responses to things he wasn’t expecting. Based on what you type in, he might reprimand you for having a filthy mind or ask you what the heck you’re talking about.

It’s not just how many responses the Cryptmaster has that really puts the icing on the cake. The Cryptmaster’s retorts would be far less enjoyable if his voice was unpleasant to listen to, which, thankfully, it absolutely is not. Lee Williams, the Cryptmaster’s voice actor, managed to nail a Vincent Price impression that I could listen to for hours on end. I could listen to the Cryptmaster read a phone book (ask your parents) and enjoy every second of that experience. Granted, I’m not sure the Vincent Price comparison was the goal, but my point still stands. The voice acting in Cryptmaster is exquisite.

In summary, Cryptmaster is what you’d get if you crossed Typing of the Dead with a 1990s-era grid-based RPG and had a younger Vincent Price as its narrator. I don’t know why that combination appeals to me so much, but it really does. Cryptmaster nails just about everything it sets out to do. If you think a game like that would be up your alley, I can highly recommend Cryptmaster. There’s a free demo available on Steam if you want to try it out before buying it, especially if you’re concerned you might be affected by its potential accessibility pitfalls.

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Cryptmaster

$24.99

9

Score

9.0/10

Pros

• Fantastic voice acting.
• Immersive atmosphere.
• Highly engaging core gameplay loop.
• Customizable difficulty and accessibility options.

Cons

• Gameplay may present accessibility concerns for some players.