I: Crypt Custodian

Recommended by: my metamour Spirits

Crypt Custodian is a 2024 metroidvania by Kyle Thompson. It's one that I was primed to like: its protagonist, Pluto, is a menace of a black cat who goes O_O a lot, and I, a menace of a black cat that goes O_O a lot, was immediately sold. Pluto has recently died and found himself awake in the afterlife, where he meets Kendra, a bullfrog who judges the lives of animals to decide if they should be let into paradise or sentenced to an eternity of janitorial service in the afterlife. Pluto found a broom on the way to Kendra's and broke a bunch of pots, so he's sentenced to the latter. (If I had a nickel for every time I've played an indie game in which the protagonist's primary weapon was a broom, etc etc...)

So, y'know, it's a light game that opens with a cat's death and then with that cat being sentenced to eternal servitude. Normal Ammy game. (Normal Spirits game too, really. We're Like This™.)

Despite the immensely heavy-in-theory framing, this game honestly mostly just manages to be really cute. Mechanically, it's an extremely tight top-down Metroidvania (think Hyper Light Drifter or Death of a Wish and you're close). This is the first thing I noticed: Spirits is an animal who cares deeply about readability and parseability in games, and unlike the other two games mentioned, Crypt Custodian is immediately readable. If something can hurt you, you know. An attack's hitbox is a Final Fantasy XIV raid boss-esque red shape on the ground. Your dash timer is right next to the playable character, boss phase transitions are marked on their health bar; everything is transparent and readily readable. Comparing this to the last game like this I played (Death of a Wish, which I loved but also roughly thought was readable despite seemingly making attempts to be as unreadable as possible), this all was a big breath of fresh air.

Throughout the game you meet a bunch of other animals who have also been consigned to trash pickup and solving their problems so you can recruit them to a different cat's scheme to invade Kendra's palace. In the process of this, you can find collectables that tell the story of their death: a crow who collected shiny things and then collected a shiny live electrical wire, a mole who dug too deep into the earth and ended up trapped in an oil field, a cat who led a gang of cats who was killed by a rival gang of foxes. These stories lend a bunch of emotional weight (as well as making the tone of the game Kinda A Lot at most times), especially as you start to realize that Kendra just sentences everyone to service, and sitting with the implications of that.

So, yeah. This game's really fun, and really cute, and also it is almost cover-to-cover deeply steeped in a framing device that sees you constantly engaging with animal death. Proceed accordingly, but I did really enjoy it. I'd give it a 3 or 4 on the Doll Scale, explained at the end of this post from last year if you need a refresher.