Having games focused around typing has always been a neat weird little concept, but Epistory just lacks a long-staying hook after the first hour or so. Movement and exploration feels half-baked with awkward free movement controls despite having areas built out of tiles and a confusing map that feels needlessly interconnected and large. There's very little variety with combat despite unlocking some form of complexity in the form of different spells you swap between because the only way the game ups the challenge is increasing the enemy count and how fast you have to react to them, which increasingly begins to feel unfair because of words that very regularly repeat themselves across multiple enemies. It's far too easy to end up in bad situations because you think you'll be typing a word for one enemy, only to see something else in the corner of the screen get hit instead or maybe sometimes getting stuck because you hit some other letter and got stuck typing that word with no way to backspace out. I wish I could care for the story but it's so overwritten trying desperately to sound poetic about what depression feels like, and even harder to care for in the moment when you're fighting off enemies or wandering around figuring out where the next thing to type is.

Honestly the biggest problem of them all is Epistory's core focus on typing just doesn't feel as satisfying as other well known titles with its gimmick. Typing of the Dead may be sort of a meme game, but it's still the best in its class because of how it fundamentally makes typing tense and satisfying to nail and get faster at. The loud tactile sound and instant visual feedback makes those games so much stronger as typing games, whereas Epistory has one sound for every time you finish a word and the same enemy fade out for finishing all of them, and one of its core mechanics weirdly even discourages typing fast with the combo meter being timed. Playing too quickly weirdly punishes you more, which should have been a red flag from the get-go.

It's a neat seeing a new attempt at this kind of game and I didn't lose very much considering this was free on the Epic Games Store at one point, but playing it just made me want to go play Typing of the Dead again or even just loading up Monkeytype to see how fast I could slap something out.