Epistory - Typing Chronicles

Fantastic fun! This game looks great, sounds great, tells an engaging story, and has a phenomenal typing mechanic. As you walk around, you interact with the environment and attack enemy insects by typing words. You'll also learn special abilities that will imbue your words with special power. Fire will burn the next word for multiple-word enemies or light torches and bushes on fire if used on the environment. Ice will freeze an enemy in place or freeze water. Spark will zap multiple enemies at once or activate electric devices. Wind will push enemies back or activate wind turbines. These abilities can greatly sway combat in your favor, allowing for interesting strategies to tackle the larger enemies or hordes of smaller insects. I found spark to be the most effective as attacking several enemies simultaneously is a huge help when facing a large swarm of insects. Later battles require you to use specific powers on specific enemies, so you'll need to constantly shift between your abilities while holding back the swarm of insects. The map is broken up into several areas that you can unlock as you explore, as well as metroidvania aspects that reward you for revisiting areas you've explored previously. There are also several simple puzzles to the game, so you're not merely walking around and just typing words. The one thing I didn't like about the environment is it let's you access Chapters out of order. This doesn't affect the game at all, but I'd rather unlock the story linearly. The game features an adaptive difficulty, so you should enjoy it regardless of whether or not you're a dual finger-wielding keyboard pecker or a proficient typist. I type at 90+ words per minute, and I felt challenged playing this game. Part of the challenge here is that the words will overlap or blend into the environment, making it difficult to see what you're supposed to type. Also, the Wind-specific font color is very similar to the generic font color, so it's often difficult to tell when an insect needs to be attacked with wind. This leaves you typing a word repeatedly wondering why the insect won't die. TLDR Pros: - Great storytelling - Great voice acting - Adaptive difficulty - Beautiful environment and art style - Interesting, fun, and challenging typing mechanic - Great merging of words into the environment - Supports large selection of keyboard layouts, including QWERTY, AZERTY, and DVORAK Cons: - Words can be difficult to read during combat (stack on top of each other, blend in with background, move quickly, etc) - Able to progress story non-linearly - Difficult to tell which enemies must be attacked with Wind - Inaccurate typing statistics -- words per minute is recorded anytime words are on the screen, regardless of whether or not you're typing them -- game records an error if you switch to a new word before finishing the first one (sometimes you need to do this to attack a fast-approaching enemy) - Difficult to switch between abilities during heavy combat - Uses several esoteric words for big enemies, making you have to try and read the word letter-by-letter to see what you're supposed to type (refer to Con #1 to see why this is bad)

Epistory is one of thew most unique games I've ever played , it has a very interesting concept where the game unfolds ahead of you like an origami , you play as a girl who's riding on the back of her fox trying to find their way in the mysterious paper world. at first i found the controls weird , you can move around with J I E F, which is weird they tell you it's recommended for better typing experience , you can switch to WASD but your hands would be on one side of the keyboard and you will suffer when trying to play the game as it picks up the pace in speed, writing this review feels much faster now I've tried it . when you move about across paper islands in the sea , you encounter obstacles , you need to press Space and switch to typing mode to type whatever word appears above the obstacle and that obstacle will be destroyed ,removed or whatever depending on it's nature, it's very simple yet very important. you will read the story on the grounds as you move, and you can find upgrades by finding magical chests in the forests and upgrade your abilities like jumping further or increasing movement speed, you will be attacked by other creatures at times and you need to type to kill them, it's pretty fun and i love it since i'm a fan of typing of the dead. some areas i found were locked because it's still in early access, hope it will progress faster because i'm curious about the story and the locations they have locked. graphics are amazing and look very colorful and cute, the music also is very soothing and picks up when you get attacked. this simply is a must play.