Time to Finish: 7 hours

I didn’t learn to type until the year after I graduated from college. I had a job that required a lot of data entry and it was frustrating relying on the ole’ hunt and peck method. It turns out, typing wasn’t actually a hard skill to pick up I just never put in the time. It would have been so helpful in college, especially since I majored in history, so much time would have been saved on papers. Oh well.

This might be weird but I find typing oddly…relaxing. So when I found a game that relied solely on typing I wanted to try it out. I had played this before for about 2 hours. As always, I thought I had gotten farther but my original profile was only on chapter 2 so I decided to start over from the beginning.

Overall, Epistory is a solid game with a fun mechanic. If it taught me anything it’s that I’m good at typing 3-4 letter words and anything more trips up my fingers!

Things I liked:

The Narration: As you progress in Epistory, the narator will often pop in to give you some story tidbits. Combined with the visuals, this makes it feel like your playing a pop-up storybook. It’s a really neat effect.

Typing Combat: It’s like stressful Mavis Beacon software but in a good way. The monsters spawn with a list of words above their heads. To defeat them you have to type all the words. You end up with four abilities: Fire, Ice, Spark, and Wind that all do different things to the monsters. Fire will burn the next word in the list for that monster making it easier to kill them. Spark will jump to bugs and erase the next word on their lists. Ice will freeze the monster and wind will knock them back. Where it gets really fun is the nests where your stationery and have to fight multiple waves of enemies before you can progress.

Exploration: It’s just fun to run around the zones and find the collectibles and new areas. While it’s still a fairly streamlined experience there are a lot of chests that require a bit of exploration to get. I didn’t end up getting all the collectibles in my playthrough but went out of my way to find most of them. It would be a much shorter game if you just went from dungeon to dungeon without looking around a bit.

The Arena: There’s an arena mode where your just fighting waves of enemies for a high score. If you find that you enjoyed the game and want more this is the perfect mode,

Things that could have been better:

The Story: While the narration makes it feel like a storybook the story itself feels jumbled. It could be because there’s a lot of time in between the narration that I just forgot what happened last time. It didn’t bother me too much though. I figured a jumbled story fits a game that focuses on typing random words very well. I will admit, I didn’t see the ending coming.

The Controls: The movement keys are E,F,I,J. It’s so that your fingers rest on the home keys and you have an easier time typing quickly. It took me half the game to finally understand how to move in this new way. It wasn’t until I finished the game that I read switching the movement keys to ESDF would have the same exact effect!