Video Game / Cryptmaster

2 Following

Long, long ago, four heroes banded together in order to defeat the forces of evil, giving their lives in the process: Joro the warrior, Syn the assassin, Maz the bard, and Nix the sorceress. However, their eternal rest has now been disturbed by a necromancer, who has risen them as his thralls in order to help him escape the crypt his soul has been trapped in. The main problem with this plan is that the heroes have been dead for so long that their skills have faded away, and they must be relearned by exploring the underground world they're trapped in and remembering them one letter at a time.

Cryptmaster is a Dungeon Crawler/Typing Game, developed by Paul Hart and Lee Williams and co-developed/published by Akupara Games. It was released on Steam, itch.io, and GOG.com for PC on May 9, 2024. On October 3, 2024, the game was released on the Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 4, and PlayStation 5.

An anniversary update was released on May 29, 2025, featuring a new location and more Whatever cards among other new content.

Aside from the answers to chest puzzles and the player characters' skills and memories, some tropes will be left unmarked due to the reveal-heavy nature of this game. You Have Been Warned

Read the TROPES:

• Absurdly Sharp Blade: Syn's memory mentions that she would keep her blades so sharp, she could decapitate someone and they wouldn't notice until later in the evening when their head fell off.
• Abusive Parents:
  • Syn's memory mentions that her parents abandoned her in the sewers as a baby.
  • Maz's memory says his father would beat him.
  • Being honest with Goggo the toad king when he asks if you've been slaying his children, who are monster encounters throughout his palace, has him say he's perfectly alright with that because he knows it's just the kind of thing adventurers do.
• Achievement Mockery:
  • Refuser: After solving the first chest puzzle, you need to type HIT to unlock Joro's first skill... or you can just head towards the first toadman without unlocking it. The Cryptmaster will then break the fourth wall and guide you through refunding the game on Steam because he thinks this game isn't for you.
  • Pottymouth: Swear too many times, and the Cryptmaster snaps and puts one soul in a swear jar any time you type in a swear word from that point on.
  • Repeat Offender: Failing to enter the Gate and getting arrested the second time grants you this achievement along with Cedric the Paladin giving you a gentle lecture.
• The Adjectival Man: Syn's former mentor is known only as The Crooked Man.
• Adjective Animal Alehouse: The inn in the Downwood is called The Crooked Eel.
• Aerith and Bob: In a game with fantastical names for characters like Joro, Ulara, and Orthos, there are also characters with regular-sounding names like Steven.
• Affectionate Parody: Cryptmaster takes inspiration from and pokes fun at the Sword and Sorcery genre through the player characters' backstories. One notable example is that Joro is inspired by Conan the Barbarian minus the latter's positive traits.
• Anachronism Stew: For some reason, cryptocurrency, overhead lights, and loudspeakers exist in the game's fantasy setting.
• Anti-Frustration Features:
  • You can customize the game's difficulty level in the settings, which include switching real-time and turn-based combat at any time and adjusting the number of hints for chest puzzles and skull riddles.
  • There are also accessibility features included in the settings, such as turning off bug eating sounds, changing the background's color tint, and using voice input instead of typing.
• Anti-Hero: As the heroes recover their memories of how to fight, they also remember what their lives were like, and it's quickly apparent that they were far from heroic despite having defeated a great evil together. For example, Maz was constantly on the run for petty crimes and jilting lovers, and Nix was part of a cult.
• Art-Style Dissonance: Cryptmaster looks like a horror game at first glance due to its unsettling monochromatic art style, but it's actually a lighthearted dungeon crawling typing game with plenty of black comedy and quirky characters.
• The Bard: Maz is an adventurer and traveling minstrel, who mostly fills the niche of a support character such as buffing and healing his allies.
• Battle Trophy: Both Joro and Syn had collected macabre trophies of their victims; Joro collected teeth, Syn collected ears.
• Belated Injury Realization: Exaggerated in Joro's memory which says he was once stabbed in the back and didn't notice the knife was still in the wound until months later.
• The Berserker: Joro's memory describes him as a feared and frenzied warrior, who will attack friend or foe in the chaos of combat.
• Blob Monster: The glutinous block enemy is a cube-shaped Expy of the gelatinous cube from Dungeons & Dragons fame.
• Blood Knight: All of the heroes have memories indicating they were insanely murderous before they died, and that they enjoyed it (except perhaps Maz, who is said to be the only one with a conscience).
• Brainwashed and Crazy: Syn was conditioned to react violently whenever she heard certain obscure words her mentor found in a book about geography.
• Breaking the Fourth Wall:
  • If you manage to fail the tutorial (during which, the Cryptmaster simply asks you to type the word "HIT"), he gives you instructions on how to refund the game on Steam before its 2-hour window is complete, reminding you to select "This game is too hard" as the reason because evidently, this game isn't for you.
  • One of the walls on the Crooked Eel Inn has a note that is the only object in color among the game's monochromatic visuals. The Cryptmaster wonders what it's doing on the inn's fourth wall, which the developers confirmed is a hint to a real location with a prize.
• Brick Joke: The Cryptmaster mourns the loss of his own hair when you find out the objects of two separate chests (a comb and a wig). It turns out that Audo, his former self, has long hair.
• Brown Note: The bard Maz's extraordinary voice could sing notes high enough to break glass or low enough to cause involuntary bowel movements.
• Card Battle Game: One of the mandatory quests unlocks a card minigame called "Whatever" that can be played against other characters and the Cryptmaster himself. In it, players are given a starting hand of four cards and a set of letter tiles, and must pick two adjacent tiles each turn; one damage is dealt to the enemy per time those letter appear in a card's name, and filling out the full name over multiple turns triggers the card's special effect, such as extra damage or increasing your hand size. The anniversary update expands on Whatever with the addition of cards that add towards the extra damage or heal extra points if the other cards contain a symbol that matches its own.
• Company Cameo: Akupara Games's turtle mascot makes an appearance as one of Nix's summoning spells.
• Crapsaccharine World: Pantry-Below-Ground has been voted the happiest place to live in the Underland, even though the Countess's guests rarely return from her tower.
• Cruelty Is the Only Option: Even when you learn about Agda’s sacrifice and she finally recognizes you, you don't have an option to heal at the altars unless you destroy them.
• Death Is a Slap on the Wrist: The heroes die (again) once they lose all of the letters in their names, but since they're zombies and the Cryptmaster is a necromancer, he'll just revive them at full health at the last altar you saved on. The only downside is that the Soulstone resets to either 20 souls if an enemy kills you or the number of souls you initially had before running out of them.
• Deliberately Monochrome: The entire game is presented without color.
• Dem Bones: You sometimes have to fight skeletons, and one quest line has you going through tombs to find the remains of four monarchs. Of course, each monarch is just a crowned skeleton on a throne, but you still have to answer their riddle to get their crown.
• Developer's Foresight: As a game built around inputting words to do everything, from conversing to combat, there are a ton of responses that have special interactions.
  • When you guess a similar word to the item in the chests, the Cryptmaster acknowledges it by saying whether the word is too long or short, or providing a hint that leads you to the right answer.
  • One of the first challenges is to convince the Eyestone you're really human by telling it the last fruit you ate, and answering "tomato" has it make a unique comment about how it counts despite some people thinking it's a vegetable.
  • When Marta the Wise gives the riddle of "what can run but cannot walk", the answer she expects is a river, but will make a special remark and accept alternative solutions of a nose, or any machine, like an engine. Likewise, Edgar the Just's riddle is "what has an eye but cannot see"; the answer he's looking for is a needle, but he also has unique dialogue accepting the alternate answers of a potato, a storm, or a hurricane.
  • When the rat guard is asking you questions at the start of the Bonehouses, his last question is "On a scale from 1 to 10, how helpful do you think I've been today?". You can actually answer "Eleven", which flatters him immensely.
  • You can earn a secret achievement by starting a new game and going straight to the first toadman without unlocking Joro's "HIT" skill. This would require ignoring multiple tooltips telling you to do exactly that. This will result in the Cryptmaster Breaking the Fourth Wall to tell you that maybe this isn't the game for you and then ask you to refund it if you've played for less than 2 hours.
  • One of the objects in the chests is described as "a solid cylinder, bone white, with a little tail at one end." This fits the description of a candle… or a tampon, which the latter has a unique response to.
  Cryptmaster: Oh… oohh… it may look like it but it's not a sanitary product, no…
  • If you offer the Fishing Rat a kiss or anything sex-related in exchange for a fishing rod, he considers accepting your offer, but then turns it down because he's already married.
  • If you suggest DONG or SCHLONG for Vitus's diss track, he'll tell you to keep it clean because Steven’s nearby.
• Disney Owns This Trope: One of the Piper's rhymes seems like it's about to end in the words "gelatinous cube" but he stops himself, saying he doesn't want a lawsuit.
  • In trying to guess characters' abilities or memories, if you type in any IPs like "ABBA", the Cryptmaster will remark that for copyright reasons, he can't comment on that one.
• Dungeon Crawling: Most of the game is spent exploring the different levels of the Underground City the crypt was buried underneath, fighting monsters and completing quests in order to progress towards the surface.
• Easter Egg:
  • Ulara has a secret room hidden in her library. To access it, you need to go to the East Library, find a shelf of erotica, and type PUSH. You will encounter a chest puzzle and get an achievement for snooping.
  • The Crypticisms in Ulara's East Library are optional riddles that are tied to the carvings you encounter in the Underland. Once you know the answer, you need to find the carving that matches each Crypticism and say the answer. You will be rewarded with new potions and Whatever cards.
  • You can cross the bridge to the Bonehouses after progressing past the Sunken Sea. In the middle of the bridge, you will find a secret shrine room dedicated to Payn, with a message written with Payn's alphabet on one of the walls. Translating and answering that message earns you another potion.
  • There are some rare fish you can collect throughout the Underland, each containing a ring with a letter on it. Getting all of the rings and rearranging them will reveal the name of a secret location: ZELDA. Warping to that location leads you to the Master Rod, a fishing rod that allows you to choose any letter of a fish's name without randomization.
  • You can earn every single achievement in the game by standing on a secret tile in the Temple and typing RECOMBOBULATE.
  • The anniversary update features new Whatever cards, where some of them can be earned by going up to some gravestones and guessing how each person died.
• Enemy Without: The Cryptmaster, the necromancer that raised you, and has been guiding you up to the surface, is the discarded darkness of Audo the Pure, the Big Good (and Final Boss).
• Evil Mentor: Syn was abandoned by her parents and raised by The Crooked Man, who taught her to kill.
• Fantastic Racism: Most of the characters despise the rats for being filthy creatures and the Toads for being mere Mooks. They're also kept in the City's zoos along with other species from the Underland.
• Fishing Minigame: After getting the fishing rod in the Bonehouses, you can catch some fish by typing the name of a fish and waiting for it to swim towards you. Once you catch one, reeling it in and selecting one letter from its name reveals hints that can help the party remember any words.
• Flavor Text: Each adventurer's skill and memory words have descriptions that share an aspect of their past.
• The Fog of Ages: While the heroes not remembering their own abilities can be attributed to their status as undead, the necromancer can't recall the names of basic things like a rat or an arrow without the party having to guess the right answer from context clues. Granted, he's not actually a human being and never really saw the surface world. Or maybe he does know, and is just being vague on purpose.
• Foreshadowing:
  • There are hints throughout the game that reveal the Cryptmaster's true nature:
    • If you type SHALLYA, the Cryptmaster notes that he felt a connection to her despite being on opposing sides. That's because he's the mortal soul of Audo sealed inside the Soulstone.
    • After Syn killed the Crooked Man, she told Audo to resurrect him so that she can kill him again. Now which character also has the power to raise the dead?
    • The Cryptmaster laments that he has no use for a comb since his hair is gone, and he considers taking a wig from a chest. Then we see that Audo has long hair.
    • One of Maz's memories mentions that Audo hates it when the former drums his fingers, which the Cryptmaster agrees is a horrible noise. The Cryptmaster also groans at the memory of Maz making fun of Audo's nose in a song.
    • When you read from the theology and liturgy shelves in Ulara's library, the Cryptmaster says that they feel familiar.
    • Looking at the credits reveal that the Cryptmaster and Audo share the same voice actor.
• Gameplay and Story Integration:
  • You can only type one-word responses since the game can't register full sentences, spaces, or phrases with two or more words (with a few exceptions). It's also because the player characters have been dead for centuries and can only reply with single words.
  • Each adventurer's skills tie into their classes, backstories, and personalities. For example:
    • Some of Joro's skills damage both enemies and his companions due to his berserker tendencies.
    • Syn's geography-related trigger words stack damage onto her MURDER skill.
    • A few of Maz's skills boost Syn's MURDER skill, symbolizing how he's in love with her.
    • Any of Nix's spells that target a specific letter of an enemy's name starts with that exact letter. (For example, CACKLE deals two damage for each C in a name.)
  • Syn gives you a disapproving moan when you type in geography words, including ones that aren't part of her memories.
  • One of the chest puzzles reveals that the Cryptmaster is afraid of chickens. He reacts in disgust if you walk towards one in Pantry and near the Gate in Downwood.
  • Completing quests in certain ways affect how many enemies appear in the Underland; for example, sending Vitus's diss track to Ulara results in her butlers appearing in the Bonehouses.
• Genre Throwback: To old school dungeon crawlers and text based adventure games from the 80s and 90s.
• Grave Robbing: To get past the rat guard at the entrance to Vitus's tower, you need to obtain the crowns of four monarchs in the tombs. The deceased monarchs are fine with you taking their crowns after solving their riddles, though.
• Half-Human Hybrid: Living among the anthropomorphic rats is Steven, the son of King Vitus. Vitus says that he and Steven are the only two humans there, but Steven looks to be half-human, half-rat.
• Hilariously Abusive Childhood: All four heroes have a reason to be a gang of murderous hooligans.
• Inexplicable Treasure Chests: There are chests, boxes, receptacles, and so on scattered throughout, and they all contain a single unique item, including things like a rat that you wouldn't want stored. Rather than actually obtaining the items, however, correctly identifying them reveals if any letters from its name are in the words the party are currently trying to remember.
• Interactive Fiction: This game is a modern take on the genre, as it relies on typing in words and commands to interact with the environment.
• Ladykiller in Love: Maz was obsessed with Syn, the one woman who never returned his affections. The closest she ever came to saying something nice to him was telling him he was the person she least wanted to murder, and even then she once bit one of his nipples off.
• Last-Second Ending Choice: Upon defeating the Final Boss, the party must choose whether to side with either Audo or the Cryptmaster against the other...or to Take a Third Option.
• Loser Deity: Throughout the Underland are statues dedicated to the goddess of life and rebirth Shallya, who is obviously on bad terms with the necromancer, who tasks the party with defiling those statues with vulgar and violent actions. The goddess' flaming-headed acolyte Agda will appear and speak up every time, but can never do anything more than say some petty insults.
• Necromancer: The game's story is centered around one reviving four heroes to be his thralls; he then acts as the narrator while they accomplish their mission of freeing his Soul Jar from the crypt it was left in.
• Never My Fault: Often, when you defeat an opponent in a game of Whatever, they will come up with some excuse for losing, like blaming your victory on chance (with some exceptions like Iss and Orthos).
• Noodle Incident: The heroes' memories are filled with mentions of their past adventures, without explaining much. Like the time Joro was caught in a blizzard and sheltered in a cave with three bears, or when Syn fought an enemy called The Elephant King and strangled him with his own trunk.
• Our Pixies Are Different: The Piskies are winged balls of light that shout out letters of the alphabet and annoy anyone who gets in contact with them. They're also afraid of metal and can be repelled if you say the name of an iron object hidden within their cloud of letters.
• Our Zombies Are Different: Despite the people in the surface viewing the undead as horrifying monsters, the ones in the Underland are benign at best. The player characters have been dead for several centuries and while most of their flesh is intact, their vocabularies have faded away and they can only speak one word at a time. Meanwhile, zombies such as Ulara's butlers and Curly still retain some human conscience and speech.
• Painting the Medium: Your player characters' and enemies' names double as health meters, where any damage dealt causes one letter to fall off. If an enemy's name has two or more words, the spaces between each word are represented by armor symbols.
• Pyromaniac: Burning things was an outlet of frustration in Syn's traumatic youth.
• Retraux: The visuals of this game are inspired by ink-on-paper illustrations found in fantasy gamebooks and manuals from the 80s.
• Reused Character Design: Some of the Whatever tournament players are reused character models from other NPCs, including the riddle skulls and Edgar the Just.
• Riddle Me This: Throughout the dungeons are possessed skulls that will reward letters to help the party remember their abilities if they can solve their riddles, most of which are also puns.
• Schmuck Bait:
  • Pantry has a few snake pits with signs that say "Keep Out!" One of the pits has a chest on the other side. Guess what happens if you try crossing the snake pit.
  • You are not allowed to type words with the letter S in Rumpus or else Iss's snakes will bite you. There are chests and some fish and bugs that have that letter, which can catch you off guard if you don't pay attention to their names. Similarly, you can't type the letter O in Mornay or else a crab pinches you.
• Shout-Out
  • One of Joro's memories is that his father asked him "what is the riddle of copper," a reference to the riddle of steel from Conan the Barbarian.
    • Another Conan reference comes from one of Syn’s memories when she went to the tower of the Elephant King with Joro and Maz.
  • Telling the Cryptmaster ILOVEYOU has him respond with "I know."
  • One of the fish you can catch is called a Steerpike.
  • Sometimes the Cryptmaster appears on the screen and yells "STOP!" with a thunderclap, just like the Gatekeeper from Atmosfear.
  • If you return to Ulara and haven't collected all of the gods' books yet, there's a chance she will say "Have you found my books yet? I've simply got to catch them all."
  • If you tell the the Cryptmaster to destroy a ring during a chest puzzle, he'll say he can't do that unless he throws it into a volcano.
  • The first thing that the Cryptmaster can say in one of the chest puzzles is "It's going round and round. Poor old thing."
  • Defied if you type other media and characters such as the Cryptkeeper, Pokémon, ABBA, etc. The Cryptmaster can’t tell you anything about them due to copyright reasons. Similarly, Vitus was about to mention a gelatinous cube in one of his raps until he realized that it would be copyright infringement.
  • Some of the new Whatever cards in the anniversary update have characters from other Akupara Games's titles, like Liza from Cabernet.
• Soul Jar: The Necromancer's soul is bonded to his Soulstone, which the party has to carry with them up to the surface to complete their task. It can also absorb the souls of defeated enemies, as well as caught fish and bugs, in order to cast magic with them.
• Spoonerism: It's mentioned in Maz's memory that he would tease his teammate Audo with, "I'm a shining wit, whereas this fellow..."
• Story Breadcrumbs:
  • There are pages scattered throughout the Underland that describe what happened to the City after the heroes saved it from the Horned King. These pages were ripped out of a book on the history of the City, and the author, Orthos, doesn't want anything to do with them.
  • Each skill and memory you unlock contain descriptions that reveal each adventurer's aspect of their past.
  • You can learn more about the characters and the world in this game by asking NPCs about different topics.
• Take a Third Option: The third, hidden ending: In the end, you are offered the chance to kill Audo and release the Dead upon the city, or Destroy the Cryptmaster and keep the living from the dead. Or you can just say NO. That would force a compromise: Some of the dead can go up to the surface, but even in that case, they find the light unsettling and prefer the gloom of the underworld. Everybody is happy. The End.
• Take That!: Red Duncan stealing money and souls to make cryptocurrency is a blatant jab at cryptobros.
• Thieves' Guild: Syn's mentor, The Crooked Man, was the head of the thieves' guild. After she killed him, the guild disbanded and plunged the City into chaos until the Horned King attacked.
• Toilet Humor: Typing in words like POOP, SHIT, FART, SHART, PEE, or PISS, lets you do just that, much to the Cryptmaster's annoyance.
  • These commands can be used to desecrate Shallya's altars, much to Agda's disgust.
  • Once you find Ratty, he tells you to dig up some treasure that he buried in the swamps before bringing him home. The treasure in question? A fart trapped inside a hole he dug.
  • If you tell the Gate in Downwood that you’re from Squadron Two, he complains about how smelly you are for coming back from a week-long latrine duty.
  • One of Joro's memories mentions that he attended the "Brown Wedding" in the court of King Balfa.
• Two Aliases, One Character: After defeating Audo, he reveals that the mortal soul he sealed away is the Cryptmaster himself.
• Underground City: The party's mission to get the Necromancer to the surface is a challenge because multiple layers of these were built over their crypt in the years since death, with each layer being the home of different species like ratfolk or humans.
• Unholy Matrimony: In order to exit the Bonehouses, the party needs to prove that they're nobility. They accomplish this by marrying a monstrous toad king that's had 73 brides, most of which are monsters, and looks forward to polygamy with the undead when asked because he thinks they'll last longer than his past lovers.
• The Unpronounceable: Every character's health, including the party's, is represented by how long their name is. When the party remembers enough of their pasts to level up, they can add any letter in the alphabet to the end of their name, potentially resulting in things like "Mazv" and "Nixj"; the first time it happens, the necromancer will try to pronounce it before deciding he doesn't like his minions rebranding and will continue to call them their default monikers. ^note It was a necessity from the developers, of course: the voice actor for the Cryptmaster recorded himself pronouncing (or trying to pronounce) every one of the 26 combinations you can make after leveling up. But it would have been impossible to record 26 variants of every dialogue after that, and then 676 (26*26) variations of every dialogue when you reached level 3!
• Video Game Perversity Potential: Since this is the kind of game that lets you type anything, inputting any inappropriate words is expected along with some amusing responses from the Cryptmaster. This is even encouraged when desecrating altars.
  • You can type FUCK, BANG, or SEX during the chest puzzles and get some legitimate responses. They sometimes reveal aspects of the Cryptmaster's past similar to typing in REMEMBER.
  • Certain NPCs can react to you typing naughty words. Some aren't bothered and even find it amusing, while others call you out.
• Video Game Perversity Prevention: The swear jar that the Cryptmaster pulls up after you swear too many times is more of a discouragement than a prevention since you can still input naughty words, but he will add one soul to the jar if you continue doing so.
• Warp Whistle: Once the party learns the name of an area, they can summon a portal to warp to its entrance by typing it out. Usually you're just given the name when you enter, but Ulara tasks them with learning the name of four otherwise-inaccessible islands so they can warp there and loot some rare books.