Ulasan

• Ez

  Jul 30, 2022

  Okay, this is going to be a long one, do try to tolerate me, haha. My initial thought on this game is that the developers made a game, but forgot the important parts of a game: making it fun, and making it functional. While the first part is particularly an issue, the second part almost, in a way, makes it feel like the devs didn't really KNOW how to make a game, and ended up missing a ton of very glaring issues with their final product. Now, let me dig into this a bit. My biggest problem with this game is the fact that it tries to tell a story while you are, most of the time, distracted by the fact that you're running around typing a ton of words. It's honestly fairly hard to concentrate on the story the game is trying to convey when enemies are coming at you, especially because the game has no warning for enemies approaching (which led to me running into them and dying occasionally) so you have to always be on guard. Because of this, I felt often as though I was missing chunks of the story, which left me unable to get invested in it. Although, from what I did manage to catch, it was extremely trite, and the ending was...downright insulting, to put it nicely. But these issues with the game manage to put something forefront almost immediately, and it's a lack of consideration for how features will impact the player of the game (even if they look or seem cool) during their actual experience. The gameplay is riddled with issues and oversights. This is a typing game, but I often felt punished for typing too fast. There is a combo meter in the game with a timer that ticks down when enemies are not being struck, but if you go too fast, you may cause your combo to expire early because...well, you simply did too well, and there's not enough enemies to uphold it. This is the first sign of a large issue with the game. Similarly, the last magic that you get, Wind magic, is also poorly thought out. It pushes enemies backwards, which seems helpful...until you realize it can push enemies off-screen. Meaning you either have to switch constantly to another element when a swarm is near the end of a wave, or you have to sit and wait while the enemy crawls back on screen. This is not good game design, and is again punishing the player for doing too well. I found the text was sometimes not legible. Not because the text itself was a problem, but because the game likes giving some areas extremely brightly colored backgrounds, and white with a very tiny black border text on those backgrounds...well, it gave me a headache trying to squint at it, anyway! The text can also hide behind scenery (such as foliage) and overlap other text. This is not okay in a typing game. You should not be prevented from seeing the words that you MUST type or you will die, especially in a game where your character only has one hit point and you have to restart from the beginning of a battle if you get so much as gently poked by a bee. In terms of other oddities, there is an arena mode where you can keep going until you die in an infinite battle, but one of the arenas just...does nothing? It has a picture and a name, but clicking on it does nothing, and you can't load into it. I have no idea what the deal with that is. But you will need to go to the other arenas if you have any hope of 100% completing the game. This game is not at all kind to players in that regard and has some very user-unfriendly achievements. There is an achievement for killing 10,000 enemies. Having already been playing arena for a decent bit before really thinking about this achievement, and therefore basing it off a number that isn't totally accurate, I would say there are maybe 3,000 to 4,000 enemies in the storyline itself, meaning you are going to be grinding for several hours worth on the arenas to finish this achievement. Similarly, there is also an achievement for not making a typo for 1,000 characters. This achievement is downright nasty to players and I'm not sure why they didn't make the final achievement 500. Even just the smallest misstep will send you back down to 0. Perhaps the most egregious achievement, and to me the sign that the devs really didn't think about their game particularly hard, is that there is an achievement for having 60 WPM. This doesn't sound so bad on paper, I have an 80 WPM average. But what the game doesn't tell you is that it starts timing you based on when enemies first spawn, meaning before their words have appeared and you are allowed to hit them, as this is calculated as an average. This makes it borderline impossible to reasonably be able to hit this WPM, god forbid if you aren't a particularly skilled typer. This achievement was so unfair that a mod was made solely to get around it. I do think this game is very pretty. The art style is nice to look at, although I did find it fairly bright most of the time, which did lead to issues such as the aforementioned text legibility. Sadly, I think that is pretty much the only draw of the game, because it is otherwise a game riddled with issues that appear to be due to little consideration for its players. I wish the devs the best in future works and hope their future products are more ironed out.
• LittleMissLegacy

  Nov 12, 2022

  Bought this game to practice typing, ended up genuinely enjoying it.
• gamedeal user

  Nov 19, 2022

  (It is important to insert a caveat here before I go into the body of this review. A prospective buyer of this game should attempt to type the alphabet without looking at their keyboard before they even consider hitting “Add to Cart.” It's not a necessity to be able to do it with the “correct” fingers as you are taught in a typing course, but you should be able to have a sense of where you need to go without thinking about it a whole lot. Anyone who struggles to find letters on the keyboard is going to struggle with this game, and it's not going to be an enjoyable experience for you at all. I say that out of kindness since this game is definitely meant for people with at least a little aptitude for using the keyboard.) I am going to follow that warning by saying that Epistory - Typing Chronicles is one of the best games I have ever played on Steam. I have played word games in the past that required a great deal of typing on the keyboard, but this game takes all of that to an entirely new level. Everything that you do in this game depends heavily on your ability to use (and often think fast with) the keyboard. This includes killing a variety of different insects by typing the words that are shown above them. The elimination of some of these insects often requires typing multiple words, and some of the more difficult antagonists require typing some very difficult words that have an unusually large amount of letters and syllables before you are able to defeat them. I am by no means a spectacular typist, but I know where the letters are on the keyboard largely due to a couple of typing courses in my teenage years (that was before the Internet), and I was naturally able to hold onto that knowledge over the years since computers quickly became a part of everyday life. I only mention that since I needed every bit of that ability to succeed in this game, and there were a couple of the 55 achievements that were beyond my personal skill level (more on that later). There is a great deal more to this game than just typing words to wipe out insects. The story is of the fantasy variety and appears to be about a writer searching for inspiration for her next work as she experiences an incredible imaginary world vicariously through the adventures of her muse (a girl who rides a giant fox); that said, is there more to the story than simply writer's block? I will not spoil anything, but I found the story to have a great deal of heart to it, and my personal take is that there is no definitive answer to what happened once you reach the conclusion. It is not that there is an unsatisfying ending (quite the contrary), but there are a number of things that are open to interpretation. There is an early scene that is shown in the gallery (on the “pause” menu) that becomes available after you collect some artifacts, and you see a little girl bandaging the injured leg of a young fox in the woods; the fox is visibly grateful for her help. This scene was very touching to me as it reminded me of some memories I had with my late German Shepherds when they were puppies (I'm a man, and you don't have to be a woman like the protagonist to appreciate the story in its entirety). It was just a reminder that there are still some things of beauty in our world, a world that is often very ugly, regardless of who you are or where you stand on anything. My impression is that the developers put a great deal of time and love into this game. The world itself is full of beautiful scenery, and it is always amazing when more of the world appears in a way that points to more pages being added to the story. The narration (and other voices) by actress Rachael Messer is perfect for the game, and it didn't come as a surprise that she has done quite a bit of work of this nature during the past decade. The music is also excellent and fits the various scenes and moods superbly. The combat system was touched on above in some detail, and it's a brilliant idea that challenges those of us who want to put our typing skills to the test (the “Arena” mode, separate from the main story, is a great way to work on some of the trickier achievements). I put a little over 21 hours into this game in less than a week, and it was one of those experiences where you just wanted to keep going a little longer. I “unlocked” all 55 achievements, but I am going to put an asterisk next to a couple of them since I simply don't have that level of skill and didn't truly earn them. I earned 52 of the achievements just by grinding away for hours, but the “Angling a dry ocean” achievement required some help from a guide (it's trivial in the grand scheme of things, and was a humorous nod to the developers that they undoubtedly put in for that reason); I don't consider needing a hint for that achievement to be a big deal. The two asterisk achievements are “Typist” and “Advanced Typist,” as I simply don't have the dexterity to get out of the low 40s in terms of words per minute. The developers have allowed for modifications to the game in the Steam Workshop, and I admit I added a mod (after I had earned the other 53 achievements) that allowed me to type simple repetitive characters in Arena mode in order to increase my speed to qualify for those two achievements. I hate myself quite a bit for that (hahaha, I guess not enough to have stopped myself from using the mod...one of the great moral quandaries in life), and there's no way I can honestly say I was a fast enough typist to actually earn those achievements; I tip my hat to those who are that fast on the keyboard. I can grind away in Arena mode and kill ten thousand insects with no mod, though...just not at the rate of 45 or 60 words per minute. I bought this game for 70% off during a sale over three years ago (I get around to almost every game in my library fairly quickly hahaha), and it is an absolute steal at that amount for someone like me who is clearly the gamer the developers had in mind when they put this masterpiece together. I would easily pay full price and then some for the game with no reservations as it is simply that good in my eyes. There are countless positives (including some I didn't touch upon in this review, as it is long enough already) and no negatives beyond the two typing speed achievements, which will haunt my records forever (or some facsimile of “forever”). I understand that this is a bit of a niche game in a world where people largely prefer controllers and/or mouses to the keyboard, but I wish there were many more games like it. I give it my highest recommendation, and it may very well go down as one of my favorite games of all-time.
• Striker_EVE

  Dec 30, 2022

  A fun, relaxed typing game with soothing voice acting and story telling. If you're not a fast typer, some sections may be intense.
• narbs

  Mar 22, 2023

  I would buy it on sale. I would say to be a fast typer is a must. If you ever peck at the keyboard this isn't for you. Also, it's not accessible for people with color blindness. But it's fun if you like typing games, little bits of puzzles. Can't play for too long in one go because then my hands ache from the typing.
• Gurd

  Mar 27, 2023

  Props to Fishing Cactus for setting the groundwork for a solid typing tool and turning it into an actual video game that has plenty of heart and charm. It’s fun to see these kinds of things used creatively to explore what you can do with a game and how you can tell a story with it. But Epistory can sometimes feel more like a proof of concept over a fully realized video game, which could leave some people feeling a little disappointed. I don’t necessarily think the overall smaller scope is a bad thing, especially considering how many games seem to be designed to take up as much of your time as possible. I think both the price point and tightness of design both accurately reflect the smaller scope too, which means you won’t be spending too much money, and there aren’t many fatty bits left on the game. As the game’s store page description says, the story literally folds out in front of you. As you progress, paper tiles fill the area and turn into the environment around you. It might not be subtle, but there is something pleasing about watching the paper world form around you, something that’s helped by solid sound design and direction. But one downside I found with how they present the story is that it can be rough (for me, anyway) to focus on the environment and the narration itself. The game encourages you to keep up your word combos, so when a new area unfolded in front of me, I would try to defeat enemies, plant trees, destroy logs, or type out any words that popped up on my screen to keep that combo going. Unfortunately, that meant if a bit of narration popped up, it didn’t get my full attention. The way the narration was told could have been paced differently to the environment and I think it would have made it just a little better. It may have been because of that issue that I didn’t find myself grabbed by the story. It wasn’t bad, and I liked the little isolated story bits in each dungeon, but it just isn’t something that really sticks. It’s a shame, because the rest of the game is so colorful and fun to look at, but the game does feel the most “proof of concept” in its story. That said, I really enjoyed the gameplay. It’s not overly complex. Words pop up above an enemy, you type the word, and the enemy either dies or has another word appear for you to type. As the game progresses, you get different elemental magic you can use. Those have their own effects and benefits on regular enemies, and some enemies can only be defeated using the matching magic. The magic can be used for a few simplistic puzzles that only barely get tougher toward the end of the game. The biggest challenge in the gameplay comes from the nests (unfortunately, the achievement of completing all 24 of them is bugged for some people, including myself). The nests throw waves of enemies at you, some with extremely long words, so those are where the meat of the gameplay comes from. They’re all pretty fun, especially as you get upgrades, but the Spark magic is substantially better than the other magic for clearing them. It makes it a little imbalanced, but the other magic types do still have their uses. There also was an issue where it seemed like my key inputs weren’t being registered properly. This wasn’t frequent, but it made clearing some of the more challenging nests a little harder than they probably should have. I have seen some people say that typing too fast can make the inputs a little off, but it was so inconsistent that I couldn’t say for sure what caused it. Outside of those things, there really isn’t much to say. The game is kind of insubstantial, but it wasn’t trying to be a bloated mess either. It took me around 7 hours to beat most of the content. If you like typing, or want to improve your typing, this game will probably be right up your alley. If you don’t like typing, or get easily frustrated, it might not be for you. Although this game might help improve your ability to type or be a good way to apply some practice. A few little annoyances aside, I’d recommend this game. It’s pretty relaxed and isn’t trying to be a lot more than a fun little typing game. You can sit back, enjoy the colorful world and its unique art direction, and refine your typing skills in a pretty solid experience that doesn't overstay its welcome.
• gamedeal user

  Mar 31, 2016

  Really, really great. It's a typing game in terms of its game mechanics, but really it has much more in common with games like Bastion. The game is a little buggy in places, but nothing game-breaking. And the gameplay is really, really fun. The story is a tad cheesy, but decent. And the voice acting is actually pretty decent, which is much more than can be said for many indie games. But the gameplay is where this game really shines. Intuitive, addictive, and fun. I'm REALLY enjoying exploring the world. And, bonus, it's kid-friendly, but not childish. And it looks really great. Highly reccomend.
• gamedeal user

  Apr 1, 2016

  I bought this blindly to test out a new keyboard, so you can imagine my surprise when a "typing game" actually turns out to be an expansive RPG with a challenging and complex battle system and a touching story. In fact, the typing-game-connotations aren't doing this game any favors, since it has more in common with Bastion, Okami or Darksiders - it has a gradually expanding overworld, themed dungeons, elemental powerups that also act as gating abilities to access certain areas, secrets and collectibles, side activities like monster-nest removal, etc. The combat tests more than just your typing skills, asking you to switch between elements on the fly (by actually typing the element's name) and using the right elements on the right targets (by judging their size, the complexity of their words, and the speed they're approaching you) in the right order. It makes for some pretty nail-biting encounters, and more than a few deaths. I was pleasantly surprised with how the story integrates into the gameplay. The game has no cinematics, and never leaves the isometric perspective, so storytelling falls to the voice-over narration and, more importantly, the level design. The girl-riding-a-fox-and-fighting-insects fantasy plot allegorically tells the biography of a woman, and every dungeon depicts a pivotal moment in her life. E.g., the "water temple" is a puzzle-filled greek ruin under constant threat of a flood, mirroring the woman's stressful college years. This is conveyed through visual design, subtle narration (occasionally in another voice, which always signifies the woman in question speaking outside of the fantasy plot), details like the enemies having academic terms as their "health bars," and that dungeon's collectibles, which together make a picture of a graduation ceremony. It's a really nice way to freshen up the classical Ocarina-of-Time level progression.
• gamedeal user

  Apr 1, 2016

  I'm a fast typist and have always wanted a challenging typing game. I bought this game on a whim and was pleasantly surprised with a great dramatic story dialogue, a mix of simple puzzle elements (mostly a hybrid of Legend of Zelda and Undertale-esque floor puzzles), cool upgrades, hidden-item secrets and thoughtful level design. The game is presented to you in a dungeon format and features an unlockable skill tree progression of your choosing. This is neat, because you can cater to your own play style for an easier or more challenging game early on (although you'll eventually unlock all skills). Everything in the game is done through typing - including the ability to navigate the pause menu (opened with the Tab key, how clever), movement, attacking and changing skills. Enemies crawl towards you (on easier difficulties, they move slower) and if you're hit once, you have to redo the encounter from the beginning. If desired, you can change difficulty on the fly with no penalty. For achievement hunters, note that there are no achievements related to difficulty setting. I used to play Typing of The Dead on my SEGA Dreamcast a lot and even picked up the new one, but it always lacked a challenge and isn't difficult to complete without dying if you're a good typist. With Epistory, the hard mode in combination with adaptive difficulty feels just right. Skills affect enemies in different ways and on harder difficulties, you need to use them effectively - being able to switch skills on the fly opens for really unique ways to tackle different situations. As a learning tool for typing, I can see this game as being quite effective. The game itself has only cartoon monster violence and no explicit language in it's stock dictionary list (the author plans on implementing Steam Workshop support for community submitted dictionary lists, however). Multitasking is encouraged with skills, but you are only typing one word at a time - not sentences. Since the majority of the dictionary has short words, this has the benefit of reinforcing muscle memory quickly. The game would be best used for learning in combination with another typing tool or website utilizing full sentences, however. My only complaint is that I do not feel in-game statistics (viewable at the title screen) of words per minute are accurately assessed. This isn't a huge deal and beginning typists should familiarize themselves with knowing where the keys are before chasing such numbers. I can only surmise this inaccuracy is due to the way words will slowly crawl onto the screen, as well as the typing of short bursts, but I don't know how the game timer calculates WPM. In other words, in a real world scenario, you will be typing full sentences and not waiting for words to crawl onto the screen at a varying pace. During boss encounters, the game throws hordes of enemies at you. This is when the game gets very fun and tests your ability to type short bursts of words in as little time possible. Once you defeat the boss, however, you cannot replay that same boss battle again without starting the game over (normal dungeon and overworld enemies will continue to respawn upon re-entry, even after completion). At the time of writing, the multiplayer mode is not present, but it's my understanding the online multiplayer aspect will feature a boss battle sort of scenario - allowing you to continue practicing in this fashion. Epistory took me about seven and a half hours to complete with all skills, unlocking all of the overworld and doing a lot of optional stuff on the hardest difficulty with adaptive on. Further replayability lies in multiplayer and achievements, which are mostly just replaying the game again to get more kills. Still, this is the best typing game I've ever played and worth it even at full price!
• gamedeal user

  Apr 4, 2016

  Think Typer Shark meets Bastion. If you like typing or if you are at least interested in it. The gameplay is adaptive to your skill level and will help you improve your typing skills to become a fast writer. My mother language is Arabic; not English. So learning to type in English was a bit of a challange for me. I used to play a game called Typer Shark when I started learning blind-typing. Thanks to that game, my typing skills have improved beyond of native speakers. This game is far better than typer shark because it has story in it narrated with a beautiful voice. Furthermore, as you progress in this game, you will become faster in typing and you will be able to do your school reports faster than you were before. Sounds good? One of the rare jewels you can find on Steam. 10/10 Original, creative and beautiful!