Cryptmaster Is A Fun Dungeon Crawler Where You Can Type DAB And Your Skull Friend Will Reluctantly Dab For You

22 5月 2024

~~Parser games are back, baby.~~

When I read about the history of interactive fiction and early computer games, I learned that people bought the first text adventure games not because of their puzzles but because they were amused that a game could respond to them. Typing > fuck in Zork 1 leads to the response, "Such language in a high-class establishment like this!" It felt like the computer was talking to you like a tabletop dungeon master. I'm not as impressed now that I know games are just a bunch of inputs and outputs, but it must have been revolutionary at the time.

But when I picked up Cryptmaster, the titular character responded to my every input by speaking aloud and I was fooled into thinking the game was speaking to me. I thought of every word that came to mind and I was impressed by the illusion that the game understood everything I said. It felt especially real when the Cryptmaster articulated my words with their voice and brought up something relevant.

It came close to capturing a fraction of that magic of text adventure games.

That was my experience with the game in a nutshell. While it's ostensibly a dungeon crawler where you control four characters brought back from the dead, it's more about exploring the limits and possibilities of the built-in parser. There are battles and puzzles, but they're all just smoke and mirrors for playing with text input. How much you enjoy the game depends on how innovative and fun you find interfacing with the game.

The parser takes one word and that's it. You never have to chain words into sentences or perform complex actions: everything is reduced to typing simple words like "Yes", "Jab", and "Piss". This greatly reduces the complexity of the puzzles and combat, but I find that much better.

This game is about knowing how the parser interacts with other mechanics of the game. Each combat skill is hidden by default, and you have to type in what you think the skill might be, based on the letters you've recovered from fighting enemies and opening chests. The more you do this, the easier it is to fill in the blanks and unlock the next level of skills for a character.

Let's take the mundane activity of opening a RPG chest: you ask the Cryptmaster to look, touch, and even taste the item you're trying to guess. Correct answers don't give you the item per se, but they do give you the letters to help you solve the skills you're stuck on. Wrong answers will make the Cryptmaster close the chest and shrug, but you won't lose anything. All the chests are doing is giving you clues.

The same goes for combat: you can use the skills you've unlocked by typing the words. There's a sort of ATB system where the characters can't move until their stamina is fully replenished. You can make Joro hit the enemy and Maz yell to give Joro another turn. Simple stuff that doesn't build upon itself. Higher skills use some of your resources and enemies may block certain letters that you can use, but there's never been a time when I've had to manage my resources. Instead, it's more about exercising your typing muscles and getting clues to unlock more skills and memories.

I enjoyed this gameplay loop a lot. I didn't worry about losing progress and I just moved on, racking my brains on the next set of riddles. The game never punished me for being terrible at them, and it even offered options to make the game work for me (I turned on clues for the treasure chests and puzzles and found it to be a more appropriate difficulty for my brain). It's fun to just zoom through the game and solve puzzles like this.

And I'm also in love with the witty writing and excellent voice acting. A lot of the jokes land for me, and I'm always amused by how the game has so many vocal responses queued up for me to trigger. I laughed when I typed "scissors" and the cryptmaster complained about the choice of paper. The non-parser jokes are also great: every character has their own voice, and there's a great mini-game that takes the parser responses to a whole new level.

For people who want more game-like features, there's also the optional card game called "Whatever". You can play with NPCs you met throughout the game and collect cards based on their design. It's pretty fun, but I didn't like the fact that you had to grind the battles to buy new powerful cards.

The music by Surasshu is also fantastic. I consider "Pantry" to be one of my favorite town themes of all time and there's so many good dungeon and combat tracks that I still listen to after completing the game. The soundtrack evokes a kind of vibe that I haven't seen in games before, and I think the game is worth an admission for the soundtrack alone.

My only complaint about the game is that it just kind of ended. I was pretty invested in the world building and the characters, so to see the story just stop and say "it's over" was kind of disappointing.

But I guess that's a sign of a good game that actually won me over. I played a few games after Cryptmaster, and I still come back to how enjoyable the typing crawler experience was. I was impressed by the technical chops and entertained by the writing, gameplay, and music. It's incredible to see how all the elements work together to create a strong and compelling package of a short game.

Cryptmaster is an ingenious piece of entertainment that made me marvel at the technology of video games, and I know for a fact that it's just a bunch of clever illusions that make me think the game is more complicated than it really is. It's just not a game I'm eager to see someone take a deep dive into and explain the inner workings of the game.

I'm cool with being fooled by it: it's a great parlor trick to play with friends and it deserves more recognition.