Typing dungeon crawler Cryptmaster's demo is a delight

rockpapershotgun.com:

One of the best things in games is the freeform ability to type commands for another character, then having them respond with voiced dialogue recognising your weird directions. That's one of the joys of Cryptmaster, an upcoming typing-driven dungeon crawler where one of the first things you can do in the demo is get your disembodied necromancer pal to lick a mysterious metal object to help identify it (it's a helmet). He's like if Hand Of Fate's dastardly dealer was a bit of a dingus and also your only hope of escaping the underworld. I love this guy.

There we are in the underworld, awoken by a necromancer who oh so kindly wants to help us escape. Oh and if we could take his soulstone with us... it'll be fine, I'm sure it'll be fine. Cryptmaster is a real-time dungeon crawler, explored with arrow keys in a fairly traditional way. Only, the way to interact with everything and everyone is by typing.

To use attacks and abilities from your four characters (warrior, thief, bard, sea witch), you type BOOT and JAB and SOOTHE and such. To open a chest or box, you type CHEST or BOX. To squish a bug and claim its juices, you type the bug's name. To smash a shrine, you SMASH. And so on. But to even learn which attacks and abilities you have, you initially need to play a little guessing game.

By each character's icon in your status bar sits a series of blank boxes. Each box represents a letter in the name of an ability the character has. To start filling out these boxes and rediscovering abilities, you initially need to loot items, and the boxes will fill up with any letters the item and ability names share. A bit like Wheel Of Fortune, yeah? Unfortunately, you need the necromancer's help to identify items, and he's been dead a while so his memory is weak. You can type in commands like LOOK and he'll give a brief description of its appearance, or TASTE and he'll give it a go, or REMEMBER to recall when he encountered this sort of object in life, and he'll fill in one letter