Epistory - Typing Chronicles Reviews

Good

I can tyep so much fatser now!

Easy play and nice story line

It's a really fun game and my kids love playing it!

Epistory is an adventure game where combat is determined by... typing words. Yes, typing. And this works surprisingly well. You play the heroine riding a three-tailed fox. There is some light RPG elements, as you gain ability points as you accumulate XP, and ability points can be added to various abilities to upgrade them, such as "increase running speed", "word combos slows enemy more", increase damage caused by typing, and so on. The combat gets more complicated when different elements are introduced... Fire, ice, spark... when you get swarmed by enemies of multiple elements, it can get interesting. Type the element name to swap attack mode. Some things are only vulnerable to certain elements. You will need to destroy obstacles, and sometimes, freeze water (with ice attack) to reveal new paths. There are also some puzzles to be solved instead of pure combat. Sometimes, you have to flip switches (by zapping it with spark), sometimes you run over certain squares to turn their color to green... If you get all of them green (with time limit or other mechanisms) then you pass that region. Between combat, you move via WASD (though with a mod you can shift it over to ESDF, which means your left hand is at the right position). Solve puzzles, find treasure boxes and open them with attacks so you can claim the treasures. Some "dungeons" have additional "fragments" (up to 5) you can find for bonus. Add teleporters enemies, and "nests", where you battle swarms of enemies coming from all directions, it can get really hectic. As you explore and unblock more areas, more areas are revealed, and more of the story are revealed, as you try to restore the world from corruption of some sort... why have insects turned on the world? You will find out... eventually. And you will learn how to type when you finish. :)

Hmmm, for a paid game, sure seems like an asset flip. The enemies have such a small dictionary assigned to them. The arena segments of the game are very boring and slow. Sometimes enemies would spawn waaaay too slow and id be stuck waiting. Idk how to say in the nicest way that it just stinks of a unity game. The very little art and music is nice though I guess but the epi-story was kinda lame. I don't wanna hear "it was up to the player to interpret the story's meaning". Would recommend if on sale for learning typing but I wish there was more polish.

Cool story and fun gameplay. It's a very creative unique game.

I thought I was looking for a typing game, but this is beautiful. The dynamics are beautiful; the game play is absolutely good. I know I so So so Sound like a nerd typing fanboy. This game is really amazing 10\10

I like the game for it's novelty game mechanic of typing words in order to unleash spells either to do combat and unlock doorways, bridges, or treasure chests. Each level has it's own atmosphere, evoked by the vocabulary of words that are presented to you as challenges to type. I am not a "touch typist" and I found the game quite playable and the challenges were also fathomable after only a small amount of investigation. You collect points for succeeding in the challenges, and the points can upgrade your skills, so that you stay ahead of the game. While it only takes one touch for you to die (ie, the protagonist has no Hit Points), it is easy to restart the game from the last checkpoint and the game still remembers your progress. This means that even seemingly very difficult challenges can be offset by doing as much damage as you can, dying, reloading the game, and continuing from where you left off. What marred the game for me was that it was a tad boring in places and the music didn't always change when going into combat mode (especially when reloading from a checkpoint). The boring bits don't matter as, if you are patient enough, the game does eventually pick up and find it's own way with some new ideas. The background music problem was more annoying, as it meant that what could have been exciting combat, instead remains as this whimsical explorer music that fails to capture the sudden change in pace. I liked the game partly because I could do it without looking up a walkthrough cheat on YouTube, partly to discover my own typing skill, and because of the way the words change as the protagonist moves from one level/scenic theme to another level/scenic theme. Oh! I also like the way the protagonist's thoughts get written into the scenery, as that helps with atmosphere and also helps with keeping track of where you have already visited or not visited.

As a way to improve your typing, I don't think it's particularly effective compared to other methods. As a game it's only mildly entertaining. [i]However there is another, probably unintended, application which I think this game actually excels wonderfully at:[/i] [b]Foreign language learning.[/b] Hear me out: One of the most effective ways to actually acquire language is just huge amounts of exposure with different contextual cues. The outmoded conventional language learning approach assumes that we learn by memorizing grammar and mapping words to and from our target language to our native one. In this model, we "learn" a word by translating it. But that kind of learning will never make us fluent. It will give us a halting, practical knowledge that will help us trudge through various situational needs, but it will never give the open, intuitive, and natural understanding of native speakers. To achieve this, we need hundreds and perhaps thousands of hours of exposure to form a large collection of synaptic links in different networks across the brain, which recreate the holistic structure of the language in our brains. The practical application of this theory is known as "Comprehensible Input," and is advocated for by a lot of polyglots online, with many resources you can explore. But surely just typing random words would do absolutely nothing to help us learn them? Well, the great thing about this game is that the words are non-random in a rather unique way: they are thematically linked to visual elements of the game in the same vague way that we link concepts in our mind. "Fiery" elements have words like "burn" and "campfire," sure, but also "oven" and "wick." Even without knowing the words, you are forming a network of verbal relations, without the intermediate step of translation, in a way you wouldn't in most normal circumstances. For a native speaker, the number or words is not huge, and so you see a lot of the same ones over and over, which feels a bit boring. But, in a foreign language, the relatively small dictionary is actually a plus, because you will type the same words (most of which will be new to you) over and over. It's annoying in your native language, but it's very good practice for language acquisition. Often the first hurdle to listening comprehension is simply knowing which words exist so you can separate them mentally. Knowing how they are spelled will help you identify them in speech and be able to look them up in a dictionary, and gives you another peg to hang them on in the mind. These are all various forms of "acquisition" without "learning." And in general, writing, or typing, is a separate neurophysical process from listening, speaking, or reading. That means you are establishing a whole other network of intuition to store your foreign language model in. I don't know about you, but I often have the surreal experience of "remembering" my internet passwords only by muscle memory on a keyboard: that is, I have passwords which I could not write, speak, or imagine a visual projection of, but which come out on a keyboard automatically because they are now stored primarily in "muscle memory." You will develop this kind of memory for foreign language words by typing them, and this will help you recognize and recall their spelling and provide yet more network effects. Another great thing about the way this game is designed, is that the menu and game language are separate settings, and additionally, the "story" is always read in English voice. This means you can play the game multiple times with varying levels of exposure depending on your language level, you will get more out of it each time you play. So, in short, if you are a foreign language learner and your target language is one of the 11 included here I would highly recommend this, even over most other "language learning" games on Steam, which tend to lean on conventional "learn the translation" approaches and seldom provide any mechanics to encourage the kind of repetitive exposure this gives you. Obviously, you will need many, many, many more hours and types of exposure to learn a language than this game can provide, but the kind of exposure it provides is rather unique and a great addition to a curriculum.