Epistory Puts Your Combat Typing Skills To The T-E-S-T

I’ve never typed so hard in my life.

When I last played Fishing Cactus’ beautiful typing adventure it had just been released via Steam early access. I wandered the striking paper fantasy countryside, spelling out words to make flowers bloom, crumble rotting logs, open treasure chests and defeat the odd encroaching enemy. It got a little intense at times, but it wasn’t anything I couldn’t handle.

Today is launch day for the keyboard-powered story of a writer riding her foxy muse through a fantastic bookpaper land in search of inspiration. In honour of the event I picked up where I left off in my previous play through, and ran smack-dab into one of the game’s more vigorous challenges.

Deep in fire caverns unearthed by a falling meteor I encountered my first major challenge in Epistory. Wave after wave for creatures skittered, oozed and crawled towards our heroes. My job was to type them out of existence before the creatures overwhelmed them.

I tried seven times before recording the video below. Just when I though this game would be a delightful journey of discovery and joy and wonder it began beating me about the face with word bugs.

I loved every frustrating moment. My eyes flicked rapidly between the screen and my keyboard, which was one of the reasons I failed so many times. As my attempts progressed I found my groove, remembered the proper finger placement I learned long ago from a far less interesting game, and I finally triumphed.

Perhaps knowing some of you would be watching the video helped. Or maybe thinking about video length and sound levels kept my eyes focused on the screen and distracted my brain so my fingers could work their magic.

Soon I’d left the cavern and wandered out into the open world once more, exchanging red and brown and bugs for green and blue and more bugs. Spiders, even. Not a big fan of spiders.

But between the beautiful paper world, the intense typing challenges and the puzzles that began popping up as I progressed, not even insistent arachnids could stem my enjoyment of this mildly diabolical typing test.

Epistory from Fishing Cactus launches out of early access today on Steam.