Cryptmaster Tells You To Refund It If You Fail The Tutorial

No matter how much a game might try to teach you its rules, some people will just never learn. And hey, there’s nothing wrong with a game not being for everybody! But what happens when the player just wants to be difficult? In the case of new indie dungeon crawler Cryptmaster, the game’s titular narrator and guide will get so fed up with you that he will ask you to refund the game.

As discovered by a user on X (formerly Twitter), during the game’s opening tutorial the Cryptmaster will get so annoyed with players who refuse to learn the first attack that he will ask you to kindly stop playing. See, Cryptmaster is a dungeon crawler with a twist—it’s also a typing game. The way the player interacts with the world is through typing single words. You control a party of four adventurers, each with their own special attacks, but to trigger them you must first guess and then type in the specific word. Hints for letters in these words are gained as “drops” from slain enemies.

But X user @countzio discovered that if you never deduce those early attack words, the Cryptmaster gets really pissed off at you. “I refused to learn the first attack in Cryptmaster and my reward was the Cryptmaster calling me dumb and telling me how to refund the game (and an achievement),” they write in a post. The screenshots on the post show exactly that. First, the Cryptmaster breaks the fourth wall and complains that all the player had to do was type “HIT,” and that after a while they straight-up instructed the player to do so, still to no results. He then asks if the player has been playing for two or more hours, as that’s the limit for when you can no longer get a Steam refund. The Cryptmaster then suggests when asked for any additional comments the player should write, “‘I’m an imbecile’ or words to that effect.”

Frankly, I don’t think this is the game for you. All you had to do was type in the word ‘hit’. I hinted and then I outright instructed you. I even used two separate tooltips. What I’m saying is, it isn’t my fault you didn’t get it. Now I do hope you haven’t been playing for more than two hours, have you?

It’s a pretty hilarious moment, and seems to all be in good fun as a player would have had to actively go out of their way to ignore the instructions and reach this point. In some ways, it’s emblematic of Cryptmaster’s overarching approach to an open-ended structure that allows the player to use their own words to interact with the world in interesting ways. In response to @countzio’s post on the matter, the official Cryptmaster account responded succinctly, “You disgust me, but I like you.”

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