Epistory: Typing Chronicles delights in trawling the thesaurus

Typing as a learned skill is in a weird place. Initially growing out of the typewriter classes popular in the early 20th-century, lessons in keyboard etiquette have mostly disappeared from schools as computer literacy (and by extension, typing proficiency) becomes an assumed skill. Broadly, I think this is a negligible loss to curriculums. Teachers are taxed for resources as-is, and removing a class that will likely be self-internalized by students or become outdated with changes to technology (voice recognition, touch-screens, etc.) is preferable to taking cuts to programs that students will be less widely exposed to (read: the arts).

That being said, there is a certain joy to typing. Clicking keys and seeing ideas take digital form is a sort of magic deserving of at least some attention. Not for the sake of cultivating a skill - typing classes historically have only existed to turn typing into a marketable resource - but to foster an appreciation for language; the shape of words, weird idiosyncratic spellings, the way different sentences can feel to read versus to say. There is already research demonstrating a correlation between writing quality and typing skill, which is to say nothing of the self-efficacy for writing gained by lowering the barrier to putting words on paper.

Then again, learning to type is boring. Untenably boring. Typing games attempt to gamify finger drills and pattern recognition, but even Mario Teaches Typing (Interplay Entertainment Corp., 1992) failed to achieve more than a lesser tedium. One can only type J to bomp a goomba so many times before the letter begins to look like a cursed rune.

Two decades after MTT, Epistory: Typing Chronicles (Fishing Cactus, 2016) finds an unexpected niche within the dead genre of typing games by shifting the focus from typing drills to an exploration of language. At no point will Epistory ever tell you which finger to use for the letter A. There are no color coded layout sheets or four word speed drills. Epistory recognizes that typing is no longer a novelty. Everyone will be coming to the game with their own typing quirks, and rather than try to strong-arm the player into finally using their pinkie, Epistory wants every player to enjoy typing on their own terms.

How this works is through a brilliant and dense contextualized dictionary for every object in the game. Lena LeRay has written about the delightful way Epistory matches words to situations, summarizing it well by writing “for clearing fallen trees, all the words are tree-related; for planting plants, all the words are flower names; for clearing rocks, mineral names.” Linking words to the player’s actions might seem an obvious move for typing games, but Epistory is the first to actually explore this in depth. It relies on a rich appreciation for the particularity of language to enhance each scene through player interaction.

Not everyone has an internalized love of obscure words and synonyms, and those who do often fall into the trap of self-indulgent verbosity. Epistory threads the needle between a fascination with highly technical, multisyllabic curios, and an appreciation for simple, recognizable words. There is an inexplicable exhilaration to successfully typing “amphibology” and zapping a towering insect, and there is joy in quickly jotting out “fire,” “burnt,” “torch,” and lighting several lanterns. Seeing words take corporeal form, even if only tangentially related, never stops being delightful.

Regrettably, Epistory introduces a narrative element late in the game that tries to ground the fantasy dungeons and hordes of insects in the real word, concluding with a Shyamalan-ian twist that would be more disappointing if it had any connection to the rest of the game. It is a bizarre shift for a game that otherwise is firmly interested in the ways we use language, how the form of a story is as important as its substance, and that language is something to be indulged in. I would love to see these ideas expanded upon in Epistory’s upcoming spiritual successor Nanotale as there is nothing else comparable playing in this space.

I can understand the developer’s reluctance to label Epistory educational given the disappointing lineage of typing games it would be entering. But I do hope it sparks a larger interest in games as implicitly rather than explicitly educational. I did not learn to type from playing Epistory, but I learned some new words and got a bit faster at the ones I already new. Furthermore, I realized how much I enjoy the physical act of typing and how little exists to scratch that itch. Which I guess explains this essay.

Epistory: Typing Chronicles was reviewed on PC and is available on Steam.