Things get real weird in this dungeon crawler where you type to succeed

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There's a demo, so plunge right in.

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The strange, stylish Cryptmaster has released on Steam, a text-driven graphical dungeon crawler with a striking black-and-white aesthetic. The pitch?  Everything in Cryptmaster is controlled by saying anything you'd like. Typing in a word is what gives you powers, solves puzzles, and moves your game forward.

Nyx the sea witch, for example, can deal extra damage using the letters in your enemy's name—so an enemy named Babbler would take lots of damage with an invocation based on the letter B. That's not a real example from Cryptmaster but may as well be.

PC Gamer's Mollie Taylor greatly enjoyed her time with the Cryptmaster demo during Steam Next Fest this past February. She found, for example, making people eat things to be very efficacious—among less mature pursuits.

"I'm freshly dead and being bugged by a necromancer, but I can't help but repeatedly stand among the skulls and debris and say the same thing over and over again. Horny. Horny. Horny. Horny. In a game where I'm required to type my way through a scraggly noir dungeon, I'm suddenly adopting the comedic intelligence of a teenage boy. Without thinking, my fingers skate across my keyboard to pen a real banger: Poop. The necromancer emerges, cloaking my entire screen and proceeds to monologue about my choice of language. Just the reaction my silly little goblin brain wanted," she said.

There's plenty of fun to discover in here. There are weird blobs of goo, tuxedo-wearing undead butlers, a strangely flirty toad. This is not an exhaustive list, merely a representative one. The whole thing is presided over by the eponymous Cryptmaster, a necromancer who has a hell of a lot to say and is making you crawl this dungeon.

You can find Cryptmaster on Steam  where it's $25, 10% off until May 23. There's a demo, so plunge right in for that.

Jonathan Bolding
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Jon Bolding is a games writer and critic with an extensive background in strategy games. When he's not on his PC, he can be found playing every tabletop game under the sun.