In a powerful move, one of the two devs behind Cryptmaster announced the delightful typing-based dungeon crawler's release date last night during his acceptance speech after it won the Independent Games Festival award for Excellence In Design. Powerful. May 9th is the day, so you have time to practise your touchtyping with Mavis Beacon. I really enjoyed playing Cryptmaster's Steam Next Fest demo, so I'm excited for the full game.
If I were to attempt to clumsily describe Cryptmaster, I'd say "Legend Of Grimrock meets Typing Of The Dead but with loads of different fun puzzles about typing and oh it's funny, like actually funny, like I actually laughed aloud at its jokes, how rare is that, too rare considering how many games cram in joke-shaped dialogue, right?" It's a first-person dungeon crawler starring a party of long-dead heroes resurrected by a necromancer to carry out his definitely-not-evil plan. While you do attack by typing names of abilities and spells, it's so much more than Typing Of The Dead. Screenshots and videos hint at oodles of different puzzles and combat conditions that require clever and careful typing, and I already enjoyed the few I experienced in the demo.
One fun early puzzle type is unlocking your abilities by guessing their names. Some come from opening chests and trying to identify the item within by typing commands for the Cryptmaster to interact with it in the hope of jogging his memory. I very much enjoyed making him lick what turned out to be a rat. Then the game introduced killing enemies to loot letters to help guess more abilities, and fighting enemies with shields that block attacks containing specific letters, and lying to a giant eyeball, and... I'm excited to see where it goes, especially with marketing mentioning multiple solutions to situations. And I want to see how the Cryptmaster reacts to them.
I adore the Cryptmaster. A bit like in Hand Of Fate or Inscryption, he's an adversarial presence you develop a relationship with,
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