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.

Game starts off pretty chill, its nice. You type to kill some pests, crack rocks, solve little puzzles, find treasures, get exp from them. Then you repeat. Over and over until you see The End.

Okay but what's wrong with that? Why would killing mobs and solving puzzles all game would be a bad thing? Because they never get better. The puzzles, enemies, environments, they all stay the same as the first 10 minutes of the game. Epistory gets unbelieveably boring after so little time. Because it never shows you anything more thrilling than the first moments of your game time.

It makes me sad that a game with such good ideas and visuals would get crushed by its padding, looping, unimproving gameplay. Nevertheless, I'll be looking forward into Fishing Cactus' future projects, since Epistory catches the idea very nicely, just lacks development.

TL;DR:
If you are wanting an okay typing game, buy Epistory
If you are wanting a game that transcends the genre, look elsewhere.

I enjoyed my time with this game, although I do not think that it deserves the lofty praise that Steam's review structure affords it. There is more good than bad, though the good is more middling than excellent, and the bad is perhaps more personally felt than indicitive of the games appeal. The art direction is its strongpoint, the exploration, collectability, and discovery is enough to create a half-decent hook, and the music is pretty well done. However, while typing is its focus, the gameplay doesn't capture the rythmic movements of typing itself, and while promising a more involved story-driven game, it does not deliver.

First, the typing. It is a strange complaint, I know, but I do believe the control scheme could have been better implemented. When typing a sentence, you rely on the space-bar to string together words. In Epistory, the space-bar initiates typing but it also ceases it. This creates a disconnect with how you type normally and how you type within the world the game has created. This nitpick of mine is just that - a nitpick. But it is the difference of the gameplay feeling natural and familiar rather than stuttered and almost-familiar. For a long while I could not understand why I struggled with reaching my natural typing speed in-game (45WPM vs. 35WPM) and why stringing combos together was more difficult than it should be. If this input had instead been the Enter key, with each new word needing the space-bar to begin, I think it would have resulted in a more free flowing and enjoyable game.

Why Epistory initially appealed to me was through its unique gameplay, art style, and the promise of a narrative that would engage. It is not an engaging story. The narrators vague ruminations were never able to burrow itself deep enough within me to care about what the game was trying to say. I started the game actively trying to piece together what had happened and why, though I quickly gave up on this. Epistory does a poor job of holding the players attention, telling the story in loose, generalised statements rather than with something poetic. We are told early on that something has happened, with the main character struggling to remember what, but the hints offered after are just variations on this first mystery. The environment gives clues but nothing relevatory, no inspired ending - in fact, no story to speak of, just a plot point that sadly does nothing except give the false impression of motivation. I'm all for sparse, emotive storytelling, but Epistory does this in the most forgettable way.

Halfway through I gave up on the story as I did not care, instead enjoying it for what it is - an okay exploration-based typing game. But for a typing game, this seems to be enough to garner what seems to be universal praise. Had the story and the gameplay meshed in a more satisfying way instead of an easy-to-ignore telling of a half-baked premise, it would have been easier to recommend. Instead, the game doesn't offer much more than typing words in an aesthetically pleasing manner. It commits what I think is the cardinal sin of gaming - it becomes boring.

I do recommend it to people that want a decent typing game - it is that. But it is not as good as what the Steam reviews indicate. There is enough here to warrant a purchase if what I have said hasn't put you off, but considering what it could have been, Epistory was a disappointment to me.

Epistory - Typing Chronicles is an unique action adventure/typing game hybrid. You control a girl riding a strange fox and explore a gorgeous origami world. Since this is a typing game, all your actions (apart from movement) are performed by typing words.

The visuals in Epistory are gorgeous and easily the best aspect of the game. The origami art looks superb, especially when new areas are revealed.

The soundtrack is quite nice and the voice acting is solid too. Unfortunately there are some issues with the ambient sounds as some of them are extremely loud compared to the rest of the sound effects and there's no separate volume adjustment for ambient sounds.

Unfortunately the gameplay is rather shallow. The battles are pretty much a pure test of your typing skills. Picking the right spell adds some limited tactical depth, but overall I feel the game could have done much more with the concept.

There are some simple puzzles to solve too, but overall I didn't find the puzzle and exploration aspects of the game particularly satisfying.

The game offers a number of different difficulty levels, including adaptive difficulty (based on your measured typing speed). These should cover a wide variety of typing speeds.

The controls aren't particularly great and it's rather easy to get stuck in the scenery. In practice this isn't as bad as it sounds since most of your playtime will be spent typing.

The story is rather vague and not particularly enjoyable. The writing is surprisingly weak too considering the subject matter.

While I did not encounter any major issues, the game has lots of small glitches and feels rather unpolished. For example enemies sometimes get stuck in the scenery and some of the puzzles suffer from glitches.

Personally I found Epistory - Typing Chronicles a rather disappointing experience. The presentation is great but the gameplay is quite shallow and overall the game feels unpolished. I didn't find the game particularly fun and I wouldn't recommend it unless you are a big fan of typing games.

I played through the game on normal difficulty (with adaptive difficulty turned off). This took me around 5.5 hours.

As someone who is into the idea of typing words at things, Epistory should be right up my alley, but it's just too clunky at basically everything.

First off, you can't rebind the movement keys. Your only choices are the extremely awkward EF/JI and WASD. Since Epistory's only gameplay involves typing words, not being able to rebind the movement to something like ESDF or IJKL, so you're on the home row nubs, is a really dumb design decision. You're going to be moving around on the map, only to come against some enemies to type against and then have to remember to re-position your hands on home row. Like I really can't understand why you don't have rebindable movement controls in 2016.

Second, movement feels a bit sluggish, and maneuvering around the map is quite boring and I think the game would of been better off toning down that aspect. You also die in one hit, and though I only died twice in the two hours I played, I can see how this could become very annoying. It doesn't help that both times I died was because I was running around the map and bumped into an enemy that appeared nearly out of nowhere.

You also have to hit the spacebar to engage and disengage typing mode and it just feels a bit tedious to do so. Switching between "types" of typing also is a thing and comes off as more unnecessary busywork in the name of adding depth to the system. Just let me type words at things.

For being a game that's somewhat about writing, the story is terrible in the most bland and purple way possible. Almost everything the narrator the says is forgettable about 10 seconds after it's said. You could not procedural generate a less interesting series of words. Just so bland and made worse by trying to sound sophisticated.

On the upside, the typing recognition is solid. The game also has a strong visual design, though it's one of those games where it looks better in screenshots than in practice, as you'll mostly see a ton of the same nondescript enemies, burnable branches, trees, etc.

I didn't hate Epistory as much as this review may make it sound, but after two hours or so, I didn't see myself wanting to play anymore of it. It already started to feel repetitive and the various clunky aspects of it made it difficult to think of it as a casual, leisurely wind-down game.

In short, if you want to type words at things, maybe give Epistory a shot, but go in with lowered expectations. Also do not think of Epistory of a typing tutor sort of game, because it's not. There's no real teaching aspect to it.

A bit torn on this one. It's a typing game that starts off enjoyable but gets old super quick. I was honestly just looking for a chill game that had a semi-interesting story, and it starts off that way. But it's just that the game is obsessed with 'horde mode' encounters. There's soo many of them, and sometimes the screen is filled with so many enemies that make it impossible to read the actual words I'm supposed to type. These encounters are long, boring, uninspired and numerous. I have all the power-ups and I believe I'm near the end but I'm literally so drained, I can't imagine actually wanting to finish this game.

At first i though this game was pretty cool and fun. Then throughout the game it gets sort of repetitive and boring. i wish there were boss fights that you can roam around. One of my favorite parts is when your are in the wind area (where you are getting your wind language) you have to move as fast as you can, evading enemies and destroying the blocks in front of you. I hated it when you had to stand in one place during those boring ass 'final area' fights. hopefully they incorporate more of the fox running. i liked how i had to fight my enemies (i never played a typing game before). And bruh that story, like wtf was that. Tea Spiilled

While the visuals looks nice and have a neat aestheic of "book paper world", the game is flawed.

Typing games are always fun and the core princible even in this game is still fun, it's just the rest around it that makes it both incredibly boring and at times annoying.

Most of the time you're exploring a big world, unlocking more parts of it, when you reach a certain point thresshold and then stand in a circle.
Which means most of the time you're just running from 1 circle to the other with little to no interest in between, this is even worse if you don't upgrade your movement speed, as the starting speed is painfully slow.
The other parts are the locations in which it changes to a smaller level where you do various puzzles and combat, and is better than the open world for certain.
Both in the open world and in the smaller levels, you'll have to do "arena" fights, in which you stand in a big cirlce and enemies will slowly walk towards you and you have to defeat them by typing out the word that is on top of them.

It can be fun, but it is at times so slow it becomes boring and tedious than anything.
On top of that, multiple times enemies can pass by eachother, meaning their words will be obscuring eachother, so you can't make out what the words are.

The game introduces 4 elements that will affect enemies in a different way, fire burns the next word the enemy has, ice freezes the enemy in place for a time, spark eliminates a word on a bunch of enemies close to the one you hit and wind pushes enemies away.
It gives the gameplay a bit more variety, the lightning is inconsistent and wind made it annoying so that every enemy would fly out of the screen so you'd have to wait until they slowly reappear into the screen again.

All the the things you do in the game is just rinse and repeat until you reach the end, while repetitive gameplay can be fun, it certainly wasn't here.

How difficult it is all comes down to how good you are to write words fast, for me it wasn't immensly difficult, and it had slimmers of time where the mechanics hit correctly, but the majority of time, it was just "meh".

It felt like the devs wanted to tell a story first and a game second , for that the game felt lost and directionless, heck even the story did.

If you want a typing game, go look through the tag instead of playing this.

Would have been a fun little title to use to learn a new layout, but it is ruined by the controls. Because they wont let you rebind the movement keys, you can only choose between WASD or the keys they set up as the default for learning qwerty. If you're not using qwerty, these are both poor choices. Either key-set is painful on my layout, making the game completely unenjoyable. Its baffling that such a small design decision makes the entire rest of the game useless to me, especially when this one change would have made the rest of the game helpful for learning any layout.

Looking for a typing game where the typing is fun, but you also like navigating a beautiful, off-axis grid using WASD keys, where movement is not purely left/right nor up/down?

You'll love Epistory.

However, if you aren't used to awkward WASD (or similar) movement across off-axis maps, this will cause you to overlook the game's beautiful style and artistic design, and otherwise fun and fluid typing components...

...then prepare to be frustrated, especially when floors of ice and precise navigation are encountered/demanded.

I didn't purchase the game for it's movement controls. I bought it to have fun typing, set against a beautiful backdrop and intriguing story. I experience more frustration than fun.

Form definitely leads function in terms of the game's structural design.

I wouldn't have left a review, but the dev's don't seem to wish to consider other forms of navigation and appear to blow off my frustrated experience. I guess that I'm the only person who feels this way; I'm skeptical though that this is the case.

I'd like to like this game. I've really tried to like it. I put six hours into trying to do so. But I now consider it a wasted opportunity and move on.

YMMV. 4/10