At the beginning of every tale, all you are faced with are empty pages. Jump into Epistory and become the muse that helps fill those pages with a fantastical journey.
In Epistory – Typing Chronicles you will take on the role of a girl in a brand new story. This girl, along with her fox, will need to investigate mysteries, solve puzzles, and defeat hordes of insects. As you tell this story, you will see wondrous places, and ultimately hope to be able to find your way home.
Epistory is adventure typer that feels a lot like Bastion combined with Typing of the Dead. Featuring a total of 8 levels, you’ll adventure through a gorgeous origami world and you type away obstacles and enemies, and also use words to change the area around you. As you gain points, you will level up and gain access to even more of the world.
I absolutely fell in love with Epistory when I first saw it. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again – I love artsy types of games and this fits perfectly into that. The world looks absolutely gorgeous, and the origami-style of unveiling is absolutely spot on. That said, some of the areas are absolutely brutal on your eyes when you’re trying to discern what words you actually need to type out. This became increasingly worse as I progressed through the game, ultimately culminating at the end where I had points I could not see a word at all against the bright background.
Epistory features quite a few difficulties, though I played through most of the game on the Adaptive difficulty. Near the end of the game I changed it to a static Easy difficulty and didn’t really notice much of a difference from the adaptive one. I have seen a friend mention that even Insane wasn’t difficult enough, although they were speedrunning the game.
Pretty much every enemy you face within Epistory will be some sort of bug. You will mostly face these on encounter circles, but you will also be able to face some randomly in the world. Often before you get a new power you’ll find yourself frantically trying to escape from some enemies since you’ll have no way of defeating them. Should any enemy catch you, you will die in one hit and be respawned at the last checkpoint. Checkpoints are, thankfully, quite generous, and it only really gets annoying if you die within an encounter circle.
Encounter circles will consist of waves of enemies coming at you that you’ll need to defeat before they make it to where you are in the middle. The game’s Arena mode is pretty much this same concept except instead of having a limited number of enemies it will go on until an enemy makes it to you. These circles will grow increasingly more difficult, and you’ll need to make good use of the four different types of powers you get.
While the game features a total of 8 levels, only four of these levels will grant you an additional power. The power of fire will burn the next word on an enemy, the power of ice will freeze them if they have any words remaining, the power of electricity will shock a chain of enemies if the enemy you attacked had more than 1 word left, and the power of wind will push enemies that it hits back. Other than wind (which is obtained fairly late), I made major use of all of the other powers. Each and every one is definitely useful, and sometimes they will be required to even try and attack enemies.
As you level up you will gain access to ability points. These points can be used to power up your character in a variety of ways. You’ll be able to gain access to the power of teleporting, improved movement speed, improving your different powers, and so on. Should you gain more ability points than you currently have upgrades to purchase, you will be tossed into the upgrades list every time you try and access the menu (especially the map). This got fairly annoying for me before I had picked up the wind upgrade since I had already maxed out my “level” by this point and had 4 spare points just sitting around waiting for that upgrade. Considering how often I was checking my map, I had to switch over to that tab fairly often since it kept putting me into the upgrade menu with no available upgrades.
Much like the art direction, the sound direction in Epistory is absolutely fantastic. The voice acting is amazing, and the music and sound effects fit perfectly. I do wish there was sometimes I bit more warning if an enemy was near you since I had quite a few deaths due to running and suddenly having an enemy in my face.
I recommend Epistory to pretty much anyone who enjoys an absolutely amazing story. You will need to be careful with it if you suffer from carpal tunnel since the game is (pretty obviously) controlled only by keyboard. The game did get a bit unnecessarily hard towards the end due to the words being extremely hard to distinguish from the background, but other than that it wasn’t that difficult. So if you’re looking for an amazing story with extremely good graphics and sound then be sure to check out Epistory on Steam!
Epistory – Typing Chronicles Review Score
4.5/5
Epistory – Typing Chronicles is available now on Steam.
I would like to thank the developer for providing me with a code to use for review purposes.
