I have a history of being scammed by games with a nice art style and cute foxes, and I was pleasantly surprised that this is in fact a legitimately fun game. There is a surprising amount of gameplay in the typing itself, and I enjoyed the RPG elements and exploration for about the first two thirds of the game.

This game overstayed its welcome for me, especially because I was maxed on everything before starting the final chapter, and I got tired of checking the map for where else I could unlock new areas. The story was vague, but the narration style is pleasant, so I'm not mad about it. Overall, fun and creative take on a typing game which I never knew was possible.

I've always had a soft spot for typing games but I also found myself thinking how awesome it'd be if there was a game that combined the typing mechanic but used it in a creative way and made a modern title out of it, complete with a story, fun mechanics, maybe interesting graphics...there's so much untapped potential there!

Epistory is that game.
It uses the typing mechanic as a way to attack hordes of enemies coming at you, and throughout the game, you get granted different elemental powers you have to use to combat different enemy types and it gets increasingly more and more crazy as it goes on. It's very fun!
The difficulty was just right but you can change it if you're struggling, so it's very much accessible.

Besides the combat, the game has a gorgeous origami-esque art style, and plays out on a map that you progressively unlock areas of and you are free to explore this map at your leisure. There's puzzles you solve and you can find treasures and the like hidden in places.

Overall, I really enjoyed the game and can highly recommend it to everyone.

I absolutely love typing games. Why? Because it’s a skill everyone needs to learn and it’s a unique way to play a game that you can only do on PC. I remember Mario Typing Tutor back in the ’90s and various programs on the Apple II and original iMac back in the early ’90s in school. Then there was Typing of the Dead and Typing of the Dead: Overkill. These games were so much fun and there just doesn’t seem to be enough of them. Epistory is a Zelda like an adventure in which you type for every action. It’s a game I unlike any other and no other typing game does something like this. Rather than an on-rails shooter or just a series of exercises you go on an adventure trying to cleanse the land of evil and darkness. The story doesn’t really make much sense, and there’s not really much of one, but it’s the adventure that counts here.


There’s also not really any characters to get attached to as you are the only one. You are a girl riding a three-tailed fox and whenever you see something flashing like a log, stone, chest, or anything like that you press space and you enter combat mode in which you type the words shown above the item. It’s a lot of fun running around gathering chests, increasing your score count, and in the dungeons solving extra puzzles to collect fragment pieces. While these just unlock art pieces that are mostly meaningless, the game’s adventuring is highly addictive and the challenge slowly increases as the game goes on. When you see bugs on-screen that slowly crawl towards you that’s when you can press space and type the words above them to attack them. In the beginning, it’s rather easy and slow going. Some smaller bugs just have a letter, while larger enemies have larger words. The largest word of them all is actually an optional “arena” with a boss that has something along the lines of a 30 letter word and it was the hardest arena in the game.

That’s not all though. You go around collecting four different elements in these dungeons to progress further in the open world. Fire, ice, wind, and electricity. You can switch between each ability by typing the name such as fire, ice, spark, and wind. These also need to be used in conjunction with strategy and the game’s arenas throw more and more waves at you. Some enemies can only be hurt with a certain element and your upgrades can make combat much easier and is essential to even finishing the game. Even if you can type 100 words per minute, you won’t finish the later arenas without upgrading such as spark which will burn a word on the adjacent enemy, or fire which will burn the next word for that same enemy. This is a great strategy for enemies with long words strung together. It lets you type as little as possible so you can deal with smaller enemies. If there are a lot of small enemies coming at you spark will jump around knocking them out as they only have one or two words each. Wind allows you to blow enemies back and ice will freeze them in place for a second.


You also need these elements to solve puzzles in dungeons, but not every puzzle requires typing. Some require sliding on ice in a certain pattern to press buttons, some require deciphering a code in a certain order. The puzzles are mixed up nicely and the dungeons are all different. One dungeon is full of darkness and you must type a word above a crystal to light up the area for a few seconds to proceed. Each dungeon was a blast and the open world was also really fun to explore with lots of hidden chests and optional arenas. I highly suggest trying to complete the game 100% as you will have a lot of fun, but the game does have some issues.

For one, the map is terrible as you can scroll around the map or hover over something to see description. You can only zoom in on yourself and zoom out all the way. The enemy variety is also atrociously small as the same bugs repeat throughout the entire game and it gets old. Like I mentioned earlier, there’s pretty much no story outside of a woman narrating your adventure is broken up sentences that don’t really add up to much other than feelings of what the girl on the fox might be thinking at that moment. However, I found the visuals to be strikingly gorgeous. Papercraft art similar to Tearaway scatters across the screen with bright vivid colors and a lot of detail. It’s not something I expected but the game never got old to look at.


Overall, Epistory has a great typing adventure mechanic that’s highly addictive with great dungeons, fun puzzles, and challenging arenas. The game looks fantastic with gorgeous papercraft art, but the game is lacking a story and any characters to care about. The overworld map is also mostly useless and hard to navigate and there’s no real reward for finding everything outside of Steam achievements. My biggest gripe is the severe lack of variety in enemies that just repeat for 5-6 hours straight over and over. At least the game provides a fun challenge and uses typing in a game that we haven’t seen before.

Story completed with 100% of achievements unlocked. Epistory presents an entertainingly unusual take on an adventure game, being based wholly around keyboard controls and typing as a combat mechanic. Players control a fox, traveling through a diverse range of environments, stylised with storybook-like graphics, which expand as you progress though the game and its light but entertaining story. Combat here is achieved through typing words that appear above enemies that you encounter, complemented by (again keyboard-controlled) spells, which serves to create some impressively frantic and challenging encounters, scaled to match your skills as a typist - perhaps even with the incidental benefit of improving your typing skills!

picked it up because I like typing games, and it definitely delivered on that. Especially the "boss fights" were really fun. Overall I wish the game were harder, though, and it would definitely have benefitted from a difficulty setting (which should be very easy to implement for a typing game - just toggle longer words!)

the game itself is pretty as it unfolds, but it gets a bit boring fast when there's really not much to do in the world. For me it quickly turned into just checking the map and just walking from A to B as instructed.

Epistory is a beautiful game that mixes artistic visuals with text-based combat and does so extremely well. It is without a doubt one of the best-looking games I have played, and the unfolding nature of the world's map continuously offers a new experience worth looking at.

The gameplay is pretty simple, enemies walk towards you with words above their heads, type those words and they shall be defeated. This gets intermingled with a gimmick of having different magic you can use that applies different effects, such as temporarily freezing enemies or burning their next word automatically. The game's difficulty is really determined by your typing capabilities, it can be rather hard in the endgame if you aren't proficient at your keyboard but a relaxing experience if you are. The words you have to type vary in length depending on the enemy, with some of them being short while others incredibly long. This in turn makes the game pretty good for expanding your word knowledge.

Overall, Epistory is definitely a game worth playing if you enjoy typing and wonderful aesthetics. It was a real treat to play and highly enjoyable.

"i'm good at typing, i don't need prove anything." so i decided to get this on switch. but if you're good at typing it's all the more reason to play this on a keyboard because the waves of enemies can get very chaotic very fast and suddenly you're mashing ABXY and wishing you just had listened to the warnings, dug out your usb converter from the closet, and connected it to the damn keyboard. also the switch screen is damn SMALL and you'll be squinting and crying and you can't see the words through your tears. good game otherwise