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Typing Games Hurt My Hands and I love Them For It
recommending a couple of typing games that I've been playing recently.
Blood Typers
A friend of mine recently brought to my attention a new typing game on steam, Blood Typers. It was a resident evil inspired horror, where all actions were input via typing mechanics. The thing that caught my eye, was it wasn't on rails - unlike Typing of the Dead. No! Even the act of movement itself was typing based. This small change really brought a level of tension to the genre that i found incredibly refreshing.
There's an amount of powerlessness in horror that's required for the genre to truly thrive. Ideally some push and pull, a tug-of-war between the game and player where as the player becomes more adept to the game's mechanics, developers pull new tricks from their sleeves to destroy that comfort zone and raise tensions again. You attack enemies by typing randomly generated words that appear on them. For the most part, you can only attack one at a time, and even then, a single enemy could have 3, 5, or even more words (of varying lengths) to take down. This makes for VERY tense moments where as little as 2 enemies rushing at you can cause a panic where you're struggling to just type AMPHIBIAN correctly!! Same with trying to retreat. The words for traversal are usually much smaller, usually 3-4 letters. The thing is, if you get caught off guard, it's incredibly easy to forget what the words for the nodes behind you were. Now you need to slowly move the camera (while you're being attacked) until you can see the word again.
The co-op is fun, and makes getting the necessary items to progress much easier. My friend group decided on who takes the top, middle, and bottom words when we're taking on the same enemy at once - which was hard learned after a couple of moments where 2 people are typing out the same words, see the other person typing, and both stop and move to the same different word...again. The game's VOIP is proximity-based, but looking at how we played, it's probably for the best that we stuck to discord.
Be warned, the game is new and there's a modest helping of indie-jank to be seen. On my second run, I got soft-locked in an area I couldn't escape while holding critical items. We had to restart the level. There was also some wonky combat interactions where you'd be targeting one enemy, but while you're attacking, the game auto-targets to a different enemy. Otherwise, I've been having a really good time.
Glyphica
Another typing game I picked up while I was in the mood was Glyphica. This one was much more straight forward in being a typing game. Enemies with words appear, you type to destroy them. More enemies will spawn with increasing frequency and little quirks to keep things interesting. I really liked the boss that jumbled the words that entered its area of influence. Having to mentally swap from typing out full words you recognize to absolute gibberish tripped me up more than I'd have thought it would.
I really appreciate how you don't need to backspace at all in this one (Having to backspace has lead to quite a few deaths in Blood Typers). You're free to jump straight to the next target without penalty. The time lost from messing up is punishment enough. The roguelike elements are fun as well. There's a good array of pickups to help you along your way, as well as a vanilla mode you can enable if you just want to type away, without all the extra fluff. There isn't much to dissect. Glyphica is just a fun typing game.