Crypt is a short horror game developed by Valefisk. On the surface, it's a limited palette first-person Survival Horror about being sent to a giant tomb by an unknown voice to find keys and get a certain "prize." All the while, something eventually appears and stalks the player character.
However, the game was deliberately designed to mislead and troll unsuspecting players. The map was designed with a confusing layout and trial and error puzzles where the game straight-up lies to the one playing it. The creator describes it as less of a "game" and more of a "human torture device," and exists to get reactions out of players as they try to figure out puzzles that simply aren't solveable in a conventional sense. It is, in short, purposefully designed to be unfun.
Valefisk's first video on the game, where he subjects four of his friends to a blind playthrough of it and explains a bit of its development, can be seen here.
It can be played on Steam as a free download here, with a major difference being that the game is actually beatable.
Because this game is a joke with a short length and the video explaining it already gives away the inner mechanisms behind these jokes within the first few minutes, all potentional spoilers are unmarked.
This game provides examples of:
- Deliberately Monochrome: The entire game has a minimal orange palette.
- Excuse Plot: The story boils down to "Voice commands you to find something, find it."
- Gaslighting: The game was designed to trick players like this.
- One room has a series of rotating cubes with symbols on them that appears to be a puzzle, and symbols can be found drawn on the walls of the maze. Except the symbols on the walls do not match up with the correct order of the symbols to solve the puzzle, and solving the puzzle is pure trial and error.
- The room with the levers shows that some levers can make bridges appear, giving the idea that there is a specific combination based on how the levers are pulled. But there is no way to get the correct answer from this, the last bridges will not extend unlesss the switches are in a specific order, and there is no way to know this outside of trial and error.
- Hopeless Boss Fight: The monster becomes this after getting all keys, as it cannot be defeated or outran, and will make a beeline towards the player's location.
- The Maze: Most of the map is made of a giant, three-layer maze filled with dead ends and twisting, looping corridors. The only key in it is inside a tiny, narrow space barely visible among the walls.
- Retraux: Crypt was made with a Unity plugin that replicates the Gameboy palette. It has a simplistic, blocky style with a limited color scheme as a result.
- Stealth Parody: The entire point of the game is that it looks like a legitimate indie horror game, when in reality it messes with the player and works in unpredictable ways. Valefisk encourages people to send it to their friends without knowing anything about it and record their reactions; he did this with his own friends as his way of debuting the game to the Internet.
- Survival Horror: The game looks to be of this genre on the surface, with the player being thrown in a dark dungeon needing to avoid a monster within. While it has survival horror elements, a closer description to its genre would be a "Troll Horror" game.
- Trial-and-Error Gameplay: This is how all of the puzzles are actually meant to be solved. Simply brute force them, since none of the in-game hints work.
- Unwinnable Joke Game: There is no way to actually win the original version. Gathering all four keys only makes a message appear saying that the real exit opened elsewhere. Except there is no other door. The player is simply trapped while the monster is coded to beeline towards them faster than they can run.
