If you grew up playing typing games, you’ll adore Cryptmaster

Over the past few weeks, I’ve found myself reflecting a lot on the kinds of games I played as a kid growing up in the 1990s. That’s not just for nostalgia’s sake; several new releases this month hark back to that era.Crow Country is a throwback to PlayStation 1 horror games, while Endless Ocean: Luminous almost plays like a big-budget educational game. But nothing has brought me back more than Cryptmaster.

Published by Akupara Games, Cryptmaster is a traditional dungeon crawler with a very untraditional twist: It’s a typing game. If you instantly know what that means, there’s a good chance you’re nursing some mid-30s back pain right now. Games that taught kids how to type on a keyboard had a mainstream moment in the 1990s thanks to high profile games like Mario Teaches Typing.

Cryptmaster imagines what it would look like if that genre broke out of the education realm and evolved into something all its own. It won’t teach you how to type, but it’ll test how quickly you can tap out words to attack hordes of monsters. The end result is one of 2024’s most creative games, one that proves that we’ve still only scratched the surface of the inventive ways a game can be made.

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Typing of the dead

In Cryptmaster, players control a party of four dead warriors trying to escape a dark dungeon with the help of a creepy companion. It immediately leaves a strong impression before even getting to the signature gameplay that makes it so unique. A stark black-and-white art style makes it look like a graphic novel penned with thick ink, while delightfully hammy voice acting makes the adventure feel like a high-end tabletop RPG run by an enthusiastic dungeon master.

The main hook, though, is typing — and Cryptmaster gets the most out of it. Aside from using arrow keys to navigate labyrinthian