I saw Spoony playing this and was intrigued right away. English is not my first language and I'm having trouble with obcure words and puns in all those riddles. I started using external help, but I hate to alt-tab out of the game to do it. Makes me feel dumb. This game is pretty demanding on a cognitive level. When you play with real-time combat you need to think fast and memorize many commands and that list gets longer and longer. Also I'm bad at typing even though I wrote a lot in my time.

Nevertheless playing something like this is a nice change of pace. I really like the atmosphere and attitude of the writing. It's tongue-in-cheek but retains its gloomy and mysterious mood. It isn't short either. By now I wasted a lot of time collecting bugs and fish and because I got lost in the swamps but mainly because I like the card game so much. Didn't expect to find something like that in there.

Navigation is a little slow but there many QOL features so I can't complain too much. Actually from what I have experienced so far Cryptmaster is all good. I find it astounding how much of what you write is acknowledged and spoken out loud. Must've been a real hassle to record and implement half the dictionary. Since you can only give one-word responses and inquiries, the repertoire of all iterations from yes to no could be a little richer. Some NPCs didn't understand my extravagant answers like 'naturally'.

I have the feeling you could spoil your own experience when you watch someone else do it or a video compiling all easter eggs. Or worse consult a guide. Not knowing what you should type to discover things is the whole point. You should experiment on your own, figure stuff out. You might find some treasure you never expected. And when that happens, it's hilarious. Although it might be fun to have an audience while you play. Share some of the burden. Unlocking outlandish memories and solving riddles on your own could make your head smoke.

It's kinda daunting but also amazing seeing how each character has dozens of skills but also non-skill memories that serve as a hurdle. I believe the progession of your skills is deterministic. Also what artifacts are in the chests. Should that be the case it harms the replayability. If I could make a suggestion, it should be randomized to some degree.

I tried out voice control with gamepad controls. It works but isn't too helpul because your operating system handles the voice recognition and it has problems with homophones and all those fantasy terms. There is an on-screen keyboard to fall back to but it's pretty slow. I would only recommend playing it this way if you're really having troubling typing in the first place.

I still have ways to go. Maybe I'll update this review later but as of right now Cryptmaster is just pure awesomeness.

Edit:
I've seen one ending. It was pretty underwhelming to be honest. While the presentation and writing stay good all throughout, I'm afraid the game gets worse the longer it takes. It is only half as long as I thought, doesn't have many quests and still there are three times as many skills as needed. When you really want to complete it, you need to do a buttload of grinding. And the crypticisms are just ridiculously obscure and misleading. Gladly they addressed some difficulty spikes on the main path since release and increased the playability. Didn't get to benefit from that much, though. Still nice to see a developer care, if you couldn't tell from their attendance in the forum.