Please do not underestimate the importance of what I have to say next:

This typing game did not aggravate my dyslexia.

For those of you without learning disabilities, please understand that my dyslexia interferes with my enjoyment so much so often. Learning disabilities are so painful and this game did not make it worse on me (I have no expectation for it to ammeliorate, only accommodate).

I cannot express my gratitude enough. I learned Dvorak, and abandoned it. I need to practice up my qwerty again. I had a stressful day, dyslexia never goes away, and I, being the older-than-21-years-old adult I am, sat down to this game and a few drinks. Drinking makes us all prey to our inner learning disabilites, and this game is STILL not devouring me alive in the self disdain that is visual dyslexia. This game has so much to praise in aesthetics, crisp controls, precision in theme detail, and 4th-wave feminism, but damn all that and let me praise that I am a drunk dyslexic who can still play unhampered because the developers gave an actual care about learning disabilites because this magic doesn't happen by accident.

Thank you.

Please understand, from someone whose learning disability was hardly a care for anyone: Thank you.

Playtime: 8 hours (87% achievements; details in "Achievement details" subsection)
This was my first time playing a typing game with story progression, so I didn't know what to expect. The result: I got hooked by the gameplay and beautiful environment and couldn't wait to unlock each new area.

Epistory - Typing Chronicles is a game where you play as a girl riding a fox, exploring an expansive world. You interact with the world with typing - clearing logs, melting ice, lighting lamps, and fighting enemies... all done via keyboard. The story is told in a minimal manner, and is up to interpretation, but still had me thinking about it hours after completing the game.

I was thoroughly impressed by how well the world was built. Each section has a theme, which (loosely) ties into the main story. For example in the industrial levels, the narration alludes to the character's memories of moving to the city.

The way that typing is integrated into the game world is seamless - for example with your ice abilities often the word prompts are water related: "ocean", "waterfall", to name a few. You type "spark", "fire" and so on to switch between your elemental abilities. Even the movement is controlled by keyboard (it takes a while to get used to but a couple of hours in, it became second nature).

I used the standard QWERTY keyboard layout, and there are many more options to choose from. You can even make/use a custom dictionary or keyboard layout with Steam Workshop.

I enjoyed the puzzles in the dungeons, and so took my time finding and solving the optional puzzles and clearing the "nests" (waves of enemies) scattered throughout the game. By the time I completed the story, I had only missed 2 chests and 1 nest, that were easy to go back to find.

Overall, beating the story and finding all chests and clearing all nests took me around 7.5 hours. The rest of the difficult achievements require you to type a certain amount of words and kill certain amounts of enemies, going up to 10,000 enemies total.

I personally didn't want to spend the time, but there are many guides in the community hub and workshop items that can help you without tearing your hair out. Regardless, for fellow achievement hunters I still highly recommend this game for the story.

I highly enjoyed my time with this game, exploring its world and beating all the dungeons. Its world building, level design, integration of typing mechanics and other positive aspects made me forget it was a typing game. One gripe is the sound design, in battles the music is very repetitive. In addition, I encountered a couple bugs, for examples enemies getting stuck and making me unable to progress. Restarting the game fixed this every time for me.

I would be willing to pay full price, or close to full price, but I got it from the Humble Bundle $1 tier. What a steal!

I planned to write a novel about this game as a review but then I played the game and got tired of typing.

Do you like to type?
Then play this.

It is also good to practice on your typing speed while playing a fun game.

Hey, I am an achievement hunter!

~8-9hours long story and a lot of additional grinds required if you want a perfect game / earn all achievements. You need to open all 64 chests you can find in the story game but you can keep playing it once finished so you can backtrack. After that, you can farm the kills/words in the arena and if it is acceptable to you then you can speed it up with workshop mods.

This review was created for Average Achievement Hunter curator

Follow my curator if you like to see achievement related information (completion time, difficulty to get all achievements) on store page of the games.

https://store.steampowered.com/curator/30168383-Average-Achievement-Hunter/

The curator group doesn't mark any game as recommended so it shows useful information about achievements on the store page of the games without influencing the main store page of steam with recommendations + all games sorted to lists based on expected completion times. No point not to follow!:-)

This is a must-have if you're interested in typing, this game will surely improve your typing speed, and there is no violent feature whatsoever in game so it is suitable for all kinds of people.

You expand the map by exploring the world, you gain lots of collectibles and turn wastelands into forests by typing. And it is quite challenging when you reach the nests of enemies in game, you have to type as fast as possible to beat all of your enemies which is a lot of fun and moreover you practice your typing speed during the process and improve your vocabulary even.

What else surprised me is that it even has Chinese gameplay language in game! So don't worry if you type too slow in English, your native language might be included in game!!

pros:
+ beneficial for all kinds of ppl
+ nice graphics
+ a big world worth exploring
+ interesting narrative style

cons:
- FPS drops in some areas

All I can say is WOW! This is the first "typing" game that I have ever played. Didn't know what to expect, and was blown away. The presentation of this game is outstanding. The story is told with a book motif from words (100% voice over) being typed directly on the world to new areas being opened up on pages of a book and poping up like the pop-up books. The art style is a paper origami style. The presentation of the game is top shelf.

For the game, you play as a girl riding a fox trying to understand the world around her. The entire game is played with the keyboard, of course. As you explore, you may find items in your path. Press the space bar - if words appear above the obstacle type the word to destroy it. Combat is handled in the same way. Monsters will hone in on your character. Some will move faster. Some will have simple words. Others longer words. Most will have banks of words and all words will need to be typed before the monster is destroyed. Each successfully typed word will award you with experience points and a timer. Chain together successes to rake in the experience points.

As you progress you will gain access to four types of magic: fire, ice, electricity, and wind. Each one of these does something different. Fire magic will burn the next word in the bug's word bank. Ice magic freezes enemies. Using the spark magic will zap words from adjacent bugs' word bank. And wind magic will blow monsters back.

If you are not much of a typist there is what is called adaptive learning. The game will change the difficulty based on several factors. From what I read, there is a scale from -80 to 100 that is given as you play. Typing words without error will increase the score. Dying will decrease the score. The entire score is then multiplied by your WPM value to give an overall difficulty. In this manner, if you are not a fast touch typist, you can still enjoy the game.

Epistory isn’t without a few issues. Right out of the box, the movement controls are awkward. You can use the E and F keys on your left hand and the J and I keys on your right hand. But, for me this was not intuitive. You can also use W, A, S, and D for movement. However, then your hand is out of place when you want to type. There is a mod you can download that allows you to use the E, S, D, F keys in place of the W, A, S, D keys for movement. This is a great solution and one that should have been thought of by the developers. Second, this is a typing game. When there are a lot of insects on the screen sometimes all the words get jumbled up and it can be difficult to determine which are the most critical words to type. One touch by a monster and you are dead. Thankfully, deaths don’t cost much. The last item is more of a nitpick, but I am not sure how the words per minute are calculated on the stats page. I have gotten over 40 WPM but not much more. I also found a couple of words are not possible to type if you have certain magic enables. One I remember is FIZZ. Since typing FIRE changes to fire magic, if you type F-I the game registers this as the FI for FIRE and won’t let you complete FIZZ. So, you can only type FIZZ if you have fire magic enabled. Not something you are thinking about in the middle of a battle.

The issues are definitely not a show stopper. More of an annoyance I hope the developer addresses in any future games of this type they may create. This is an extremely well developed game. The story is interesting with 100% voice over. But it is the presentation that steals the show. The graphics are amazing and the presentation and world-building are phenomenal. I didn’t know what to expect with a typing game, but Epistory is an excellent game.

...is a keyboard practice adventure. Explore a world that unfolds before you as you recall memories of the past while practicing your typewriting skills.

The core goal of the game is to practice your keyboarding skills, having you type words without mistakes as fast as you can. Combat segments usually consists of waves of critters advancing to your position from all sides, each with random words above them you must type to strike, some requiring multiple words to defeat them. The more words you chain in a short time, the more experience you get from the encounter, leveling up to unlock perk points you spend on passive skills.

You expand the world by reaching Reveal locations, each requiring an increasing amount of experience to show more of the world, creating new paths or connecting islands to the main continent. There are also dungeons you can explore to collect fragments for experience, solving puzzles, and learning new powers (using fire burns enemies whose word you type, ice will freeze them, etc.), some creatures and interactive world elements can only be affected by certain powers.

It is an absolutely gorgeous game. Everything is themed around literature, from the story segments that are narrated to you as you progress through the game, to the exploration where pages of text flip open to create the land, trees and rocks. Every world object is built from origami-like art or paper mâché, same goes for the critters you encounter. This fits perfectly into the mechanics that, after all, consists of typing words.

The story is a mystery for you to discover. You’re a girl riding a fox as you recall your memory from exploring the world. You enter an area where fond or eerie segments of the story are told, either by a narrator, or from recalled voices of events from the past. You will spend the whole game not getting closure on what is happening until the end of the game where the credits conclude and reveal exactly what this whimsical adventure was about.

You can’t learn proper keyboarding technique from this, as it only gives you your finger placement once in the early game and never gets back to it. You also jump right into typing entire words, rather than gradually memorizing your keyboard a few additional keys at the time, or using any proven keyboarding learning methods from typewriting edusofts.

Narration and story won’t make sense as you play through the story mode, and may even come out as an obnoxious attempt at being artsy, you actually need to complete the game for you to make out a coherent pattern. But you’re unlikely to replay the story mode a second time to finally understand the narration, as once you’ve reached the level required to complete it, re-doing the story mode will feel too easy so you’ll limit yourself to Arena challenges if you wish to continue perfecting your keyboarding.


I liked Epistory – Typing Chronicles and am happy I played it. If you don’t want to practice keyboarding skills or don’t already know a proper keyboarding technique, this may not be for you. But if you do and are looking to practice, it is undoubtedly the most beautiful keyboarding practice game there’s ever been on the market before, and that’s where this gets my recommendation.

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This was just my opinion.

If you found this review helpful, please consider giving it a thumbs up, and feel free to check out more of my (purely opinionated) reviews.

Story, RPG, typing game where you follow a girl on a fox.
It was my first experience with this type of game but I was really great surprised.

This game is challenging typing game in some sort of way for example: you need to switch between your powers - "multitasking" - fast and correct writing is important because if you failed you will die.
You can also play this game in many languages: English, French, German, Spanish, Polish, Portuguese-Brazil, Russian, Czech, Japanes and Simplified Chinese. That's another plus right there.
Also soundtrack is amazing. For a visual site I can't say anything bad because this game is wonderful. Great puzzles.

By killing monsters and destroing nearby momuments etc. you get points to upgrade your girl.

You can get all of the achievements by playing this game - 7 hours total +- (some achievements are like: type a certain amount of words and kill certain amounts of enemies which is not bad).

This game isn't for a "slow people" or for people who still have to look down at their keyboard to type each word. If you enjoy typing Epistory - Typing Chronicles is game for you. Go for it!

(Edit: for some reason, the bullet-formatting doesn't show up in Steam's Review 'quick-view', so if you want to read the review, but also want to avoid large blocks of text mashed together, you can click on the review itself, and the opened page should show the bullets properly!)

Summary: Epistory - Typing Chronicles is, not so surprisingly, a typing game at heart, combined with aspects from your typical progression-based RPG, along with some basic puzzle-solving ingredients as well. The world consists of a relatively large, multi-biome hub that connects the game's levels together, though you only have access to a percentage of the hub at the beginning of the game, and unlock access to more of it as you progress.

Story: Since the story revolves around the main character re-learning lost memories as the story goes on, I will do my best not to spoil anything there. In a nutshell, however, you play as a young female antagonist who rides a large pet fox, that serves as your main form of transportation throughout the game, battling insectoid enemies with typing-based combat, and earning 'points / experience' to level up various perks that make the main character faster & more powerful.

Combat: As mentioned earlier, you fight the insect enemies you come across in your travels by entering into a typing mini-game when they appear. The insects slowly approach your character, but can be defeated by typing words that will show up above their heads. Again, I don't want to spoil too much here since they are unlocked as you progress with the story, but there are four "elements" that all have some benefit within combat (some enemies can only be damaged by a specific element type). These same elements are also required in order to open up more areas of the main hub.

Pros:

• Art: The story-book, origami-esque artstyle is both beautifully done (aesthetically-speaking), and also helps to tie a lot of things together in the game thematically (Hopefully there are some good screenshots out there to give you an idea of what I'm describing). To give you a quick mental picture to those who have also seen the movie, I just recently watched 'Kubo and the Two Strings', and the art-style was immediately reminiscent of my experiences with this game (and I mean that as a very good thing!).
  
• Unique Game Genre: IMO, there aren't a ton of good word-building / typing games on Steam, and so it was really refreshing to play one that was (Letter Quest: Grimm's Journey is another one of my favorite word-game / RPG crosses).
  
• Non-Linearity (a): After you successfully complete a few of the beginning levels, you start to unlock additional areas by walking onto glowing circles scattered throughout the hub, provided you have met the circle's listed "point" requirement (continued below).
  
• Score Chaining: These points can be found in treasure chests scattered throughout the game's world, but will primarily be earned by chaining together successful [typing kills?]. As mentioned earlier, words appear above the heads of enemies, but also above numerous inanimate objects scattered throughout the hub & the levels. After the player scores points for successfully typing any of these words, a countdown timer will appear, during which the player can chain together additional [typing kills?] to essentially receive a score multiplier and also refresh the timer back to full.
• Non-Linearity (b): There is absolutely no requirement to move quickly to chain scores together, but I found that chaining large scores together rewards the Player with the ability to access additional sections of the main hub earlier than otherwise would be possible, thereby allowing for multiple progression paths (and hence the 'non-linearity' tag!). I thought that was a really cool game mechanic on the part of the developers!
  
• Little Details: The words that show up above both enemies and inanimate objects have some relation to the object themselves (e.g. there might be a tree blocking the main path that requires typing "birch" to remove, or a fire pylon that needs to be lit by typing "pyromaniac", etc.). There are a number of other small touches like that scattered throughout the game, and they all help to give the title character!
  
• Difficulty: There is an option to have the difficulty scale with the Player's typing ability, so while the combat mini-games started out very easy, the game successfully scaled the difficulty up to what I thought was an appropriate level (see second-thought in cons).

Cons:

• Difficulty: I honestly didn't see it as a con personally, but I think a lot of experienced typers will find the game a bit too easy. To me, Epistory was a game I played when I wanted to relax and simply explore the in-game world, and so I appreciated that it wasn't frustratingly difficult, but I think it's still worth listing here.
  
• Story: Again, a minor con, but one that bears mentioning. There is a story within the game, but it's delivered in a somewhat cryptic / disjointed narrative. Again, the main character is trying to regain lost memories, so I recognize that this might have been an intentional design element to fit with the theme, but I found myself lost in trying to follow the story on many occasions (especially if there were gaps in between my playtimes).
  
• On-Screen Clutter: A lot of enemies require multiple words typed before they die (which is synonymous with a bulky enemy in your typical RPG). In a nice touch, the game shows 2-3 words from the list required to kill these enemies (above their heads still), highlighting / bolding the top-list required word, but also showing the next couple of words in the list in smaller lettering, which helps the Player micromanage which enemies to "aim for" in the approaching waves. This is an awesome feature on moderate-difficulty waves, but on the harder ones, the screen fills up with baddies really quick, and when they start to condense in a small area around your character, the word lists can sometimes overlap, which makes knowing what word goes with which enemy difficult at times. Not that you want the enemies that close to your character to begin with, but I definitely recall feeling like I got gipped in a few of my deaths that way. Fortunately, this problem was fairly rare, but still worth mentioning.
  
• Movement: The controls on some of the ice levels got frustrating at times. Sections of the ice biome follow the classic "move-onto-ice-and-keep-sliding-in-that-direction-until-you-hit-an-object" scheme, which isn't an issue at all by itself, but with isometric controls, I found myself sometimes repeatedly going in a direction that I did not want to go in.
  
• Replayability: Really not much of a con at all, because I felt that I received much more than my money's worth, but after completing the main story, I don't personally feel a lot of incentive to pick the game back up. There is an endless-enemy-wave arena mode with online scoreboards that you can test your skills on, that seems like it could be pretty neat if that's your thing, but it just didn't appeal to me all that much.

Bottom Line: In my opinion, the Pros largely outweigh the cons in Epistory, so if you like typing games, or unique RPG's, you'd be doing yourself a disservice by not picking this one up! (And even for those new to the genre, I think there are still a number of things that will satisfy -- enough so that the game is still worth a shot!)

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.

So I'm more of an XCOM, Witcher or Total War guy. So picking up a game where you're a girl riding a fox through a whimsical land is not something I would normally pick up..i'm glad I did, the art style is sublime, the music enchanting and the gameplay addictive and tense during final battles; it is here that your typing skills will really be put to the test especially when multi elemental enemy types are skittering their way toward you. Purging the landscape you explore of the insectoid corruption is satisfying while making things grow to the- already mentioned- enchanting soundtrack is cathartic. A true Indie gem.