May I Suggest? For Keyboard Warriors

If you want to creatively torment a digital dungeon master,

Cryptmaster

A dungeon crawler in which nearly every action you take is dictated by the words you type. Combat is a mad rush to recall each of your four characters’ action words, only to realise that the one you chose contains a T, and this particular bastard is immune to it. It’s oddly thrilling and evocative of a sorcerer madly flipping through the pages of his spellbook. Thanks to the encounters taking place in real-time there’s this additional pressure which makes mastery feel so rewarding. There’s more than just wordy brawls too. Fishing, bug-catching, riddle-solving, chatting up the local rat denizens, the keyboard does it all!

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The developers have reinvented nearly every RPG staple for these 26 keys. For example, in the absence of more traditional experienece and levelling systems, your grave-risen adventurers grow stronger by remembering skills that were forgotten long ago on account of being dead for centuries. Who can blame them, I’m surprised their brain matter is still intact in the first place. These terms are recollected through a campaign-long series of guessing games, where letters are slowly revealed through solving challenges, and the categories for each characters words are hinted at through their lore and backstories. The puzzle is reminiscent of Wordle, and is such a unique way to keep you engaged with your team, every character feels like a mystery to be unravelled.

You can earn the aforementioned letters for this system in a myriad of ways, but my personal favourite is by opening chests. When you find one, you don’t gain an item or fistful of gold. In fact you don’t even see it’s contents. Instead you play a shortened game of twenty questions with the titular Cryptmaster, the necromancer responsible for your shambling. In order to gain information about it, you must ask him to interact with it in some way. “Look at it. Touch it. Taste it. Wear it?” The responses to these odd orders will hopefully elucidate you on the identity of this item, and if you guess correctly you are rewarded with the letters that make up its name, which then fill in occurrences in your team’s current words. I would honestly play this title solely based on the fact that I can ask a skeleton wizard what a mirror tastes like. If you too are excited at the prospect of bothering a poor bony arcanist, while interacting with the most mechanically unique interpretation of a dungeon crawler around, then I believe you know what to do. I also think we should consider therapy.

If you wish to write a love-letter to Typing Of The Dead,

Bloodtypers

Horror thrives on disempowerment. It loves to take away your tools, limit your abilities, and see if you can survive despite it all. Bloodtypers is unique because it doesn’t arbitrarily force this feeling of weakness. Rather, if you’re a relentlessly accurate and nimble typist, you should be the one with the unfair advantage. It should be easy to quickly bust out three short words. But as you type the killing blow, you failed to notice the second zombie skulking behind the first. No matter, it’s just another alphabetic burst from your fingers. Except, in your haste, you mistyped. The creature before you exploits this confusion with vicious claws. Only furthering your panic, your eyes dart between the key you keep accidentally hitting, and the third beast erupting from your shattered barricade. You’re outnumbered and overwhelmed, and it’s your fault.

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I’m not a particularly big fan of horror games. Nor am I at all notable in regards to my typing speed. Yet somehow, these two facts made me feel like the perfect participant in this experience. I chose to play at the game’s normal difficulty, and at the typing difficulty suggested for my WPM. This simple design decision to split these two forms of difficulty allows this game to be simultaneously accessible yet still challenging for a wider audience. Are you an adrenaline junkie who only has a familiarity with console controllers? Crank up the game difficulty, but keep the words simpler and shorter. Perhaps you’re a scaredy-cat, who also happens to be a world-class data-entrist? May I suggest the “grandmaster” typing difficulty to handicap you with longer and stranger words, while selecting easy on the other.

Movement is dictated by typing short strings of letters that you see hovering above a space, after which your character will move to it. Similarly, opening doors, interacting with most objects, or engaging in combat involves copying on screen messages. This may seem like a simple design quirk that the developer chose to make the keyboard a more integral and consistent part of the game experience. Instead I see it as an interesting reinterpretation of the classic clunky third-person shooters which divided movement and combat into two sets of controls which needed to be swapped between. You may always be typing, but you will need to consciously decide whether you are standing your ground to ready your weapon, or attempting to slink away one word at a time. In simpler terms, this is not a movement shooter, and it is absolutely to the game’s benefit.

Throughout each level you are aiming to find and cache a number of mysterious crimson cassette tapes. Unfortunately, you have limited inventory space and will often find yourself making the difficult choice between progress and safety. You’ll likely have a weapon or two, a handful of ammunition, maybe a restorative hamburger or some planks for an impromptu barricade, and a red tape that you are ferrying to it’s receptacle. Another thing you have is constant dread. It takes the form of a meter that slowly fills, which once completed unleashes a horde which destroys everything in its path while relentlessly pursuing you. With every additional percentage that bar fills, you feel compelled to walk a little faster, and act a little more recklessly. Until you stumble across a film reel, tempting you from upon a shelf. These reels allow you to save your progress, but only when inserted into a film projector. You could take it there. Using another one of those few valuable inventory slots. All of which are full of equally life-saving items. Is it worth trying to find your way back, whilst leaving something in its place? Who’s to say you’ll even make it? What if you do, but can’t make it back due to the wave of death which chases you? Is safety the best option right now? Bloodtypers made me want to play dangerously. That’s why in spite of my genre preferences, I heartily recommend it.