Cleaning Up The Afterlife Has Its Perks
HIGH Engaging enemy design. Great platforming mechanics.
LOW One of the cooler combat features is hard to pull off on a controller.
WTF A boss called “Grief” is too real for a game about dead cats.
Crypt Custodian is solo developer Kyle Thompson’s third game released in four years. While he humbly admitted in a Reddit thread on how poetic it’s been to stick to such a schedule, it’s a doubly impressive feat considering that these frequent releases haven’t shown any drop in quality. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. Following in the footsteps of his previous titles Islets and Sheepo, Crypt Custodian has the level of polish, completeness, and whimsy of nearly any metroidvania released by a major studio in quite some time.
Crypt Custodian opens with Pluto, an animated cat who’s recently passed away. Thanks to the frog boss of the afterlife preventing him from gaining access to cat heaven (he was judged a bad kitty) Pluto is sentenced to be a janitor, tasked with cleaning up any and all messes that the residents of the afterlife leave behind.
Although not shown from the typical 2D side-on camera angle, Thompson’s top-down title is a metroidvania by any other name. There’s interconnection, backtracking, and item discovery, but Crypt Custodian offers those experiences between charming interactions with supporting characters. When not chatting with acquaintances, Crypt Custodian’s gameplay involves wandering the afterlife, tracking down other ghosts to meet, and cleaning up their messes. Pluto is armed with nothing but a broom that he uses to sweep his enemies away.
Crypt Custodian‘s world isn’t the typical metroidvania affair, either. It tasks the player with navigating through regions of the afterlife held together by… nothing in particular. Floating islands and drifting bogs are everywhere on the map, seemingly represented as pieces of worlds littered with trash ready for cleanup. The crazier landscapes range from a bioluminescent fish graveyard to a broken-down amusement park emblazoned with devil imagery. There’s a sense of disconnection between them all yet it makes a haphazard sense and brings a kind of messiness that Pluto needs to sort through.
Pluto’s mechanics are similarly erratic — there are buttons to jump, sweep, and roll out of the way of dangerous enemies, yet each enemy never posed any particular threat at close range, instead being much deadlier with projectiles they emitted. Some took normal shots straight at Pluto, but others released devastating area-of-effect strikes, homing projectiles, or waves of damage that move around the screen in unpredictable ways.
This combat actually accentuates Crypt Custodian’s themes of disconnection by directly linking to how the encounters are designed. In certain rooms, Pluto needs to cross many platforms to get to an exit, and these exits are often blocked by hordes of enemies. However, Pluto can’t just run around at random. Every room needs to be planned out carefully with a series of dodges, attacks, and jumps to sweep all the enemies off their feet. Add in Crypt Custodian’s “curses” (extra challenges like enemies shooting more projectiles or limiting Pluto’s health to one hit) and these skirmishes are more like precise puzzles rather than rooms to brute force through.
Bosses follow this same pattern. I fought about twelve throughout Crypt Custodian and while I didn’t find any to be particularly difficult, each presented unique challenges via their attack patterns. Some of the first few were just massive versions of smaller enemies I’d already seen, later foes were more creative. Between a lunar-faced man, a rail-riding devil, and bosses that phase-shifted in and out of reality each time I dashed, I was pleasantly surprised and challenged with every new opponent, and ultimately I found these encounters to be the most engaging parts of Crypt Custodian.
The only downside to the combat is that outside of the broom and a special attack that charges, there isn’t much variety. Pluto does eventually get the ability to throw his broom around as a “broomerang”, but it’s a bit clunky to execute on a controller.
Beyond combat and bosses, Crypt Custodian is littered with extra platforming challenges that give Pluto upgrade points, new special attacks, and upgrades to his damage and attack speed. A few noteworthy challenges involved phase-shifting platforms, a series of switches that Pluto had to press in a certain order, and dodging waves of damaging poison attacks. Many of them are on timers, but thankfully they don’t punish the player if they don’t nail them on the first try.
Finally, tying together the world navigation and combat is a fairly charming story. While Pluto’s main objective is to clean up trash and defeat bosses, the real objective is to make friends along the way. Pluto will be tasked with countless side errands from finding wandering souls to looking for someone who will listen to them. In a world of convoluted lore-based metroidvanias, it’s nice see Crypt Custodian offer hilarious (yet engaging) dialogue based on the most mundane situations of life, like getting ready for a dinner party or babysitting.
You could make an argument for any one part of Crypt Custodian being the thing that holds it together — the writing, the tactful platforming, or even the somber-yet-delightful world design. But while no single part stands out, these disconnected parts make the whole world worth exploring, experiencing — and yes, cleaning — to its very end.
Rating: 7.5 out of 10
— Jack Dunn
Disclosures: The game was developed by Kyle Thompson and is co-published by Kyle Thompson, Top Hat Studios, and H2 Interactive Co. It is currently available on PC, Switch, XBX/S/O and PS4/5. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher and reviewed on Switch. Approximately 10 hours was devoted to the game, and it was completed. There are no multiplayer modes.
Parents: This game has an ESRB rating of E for Comic Mischief and Mild Fantasy Violence. All of the violence in is in fighting the various enemies and bosses with a broom, and no blood or gore is depicted.
Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind options.
Deaf and Hard of Hearing Gamers: The only dialogue and sounds are communicated through speech bubbles. The text for these speech bubbles cannot be resized. There are no relevant audio cues needed for gameplay. This game is fully accessible.
Remappable controls: Controls are fully remappable.
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