Enlarge / Sometimes you gotta get your nose in there to remember the distinct aroma of 1980s RPG classics. (credit: Akupara Games)

There are people who relish the feeling of finally nailing down a cryptic clue in a crossword. There are also people unduly aggravated by a puzzlemaster's puns and clever deceptions. I'm more the latter kind. I don't even play the crossword—or Wordle or Connections or Strands—but my wife does, and she'll feed me clues. Without fail, they leave me in some strange state of being relieved to finally get it, yet also keyed up and irritated.

Cryptmaster, out now on Steam, GOG, and Itch.io for Windows, seems like the worst possible game for people like me, and yet I dig it. It is many things at once: a word-guessing game, a battle typing (or shouting) challenge, a party-of-four first-person grid-based dungeon crawler, and a text-prompt adventure, complete with an extremely goofy sense of humor. It's also in stark black and white. You cannot fault this game for a lack of originality, even while it evokes Wizardry, Ultima Underground, and lots of other arrow-key-moving classics, albeit with an active tongue-in-cheek filter.

The Cryptmaster in question has woken up four role-playing figures—fighter, rogue, bard, and wizard—to help him escape from his underground lair to the surface, for reasons that must be really keen and good. As corpses, you don't remember any of your old skills, but you can guess them. What's a four-letter action that a fighter might perform, or a three-letter wizard move? Every time you find a box or treasure, the Cryptmaster opens it, gives you a letter count, then lets you ask for clues. "SMELL," you type, and he says it has that wonderful old-paper smell. "LOOK," and he notes that there are writings and drawings on one side. Guess "SCROLL," and he adds those letters to your characters' next ability clues. Guess wrong, well, better luck next time.