Epistory - Typing Chronicles

This is a nice, quiet sort of game that can safely be called an action title -- it's just not the pulse-pounding, violent variety. It might build your vocabulary, but only inadvertently, as the words that pop up on-screen for you to type and dispense with are largely arbitrary and very rarely coincide with what's on-screen. This is where some of the difficulty comes from, as it creates a degree of (funny) mental dissonance -- for example, trying to understand why you're typing about oxen and livestock when all you see is a tree or a bug crawling by you.

This is good, ultimately, because this is the sort of action game that doesn't feel the need to add lots of layers and needless complexities to hook you. True, the more words you rack up -- and the faster you type them -- the more points you accumulate, which can be spent to level up different statistics such as how quickly the fox moves or to get occasional assistance obliterating on-screen words without needing to type anything. But all these rewards streamline your experience and get you back to the meat of the game, which is walking around and typing when prompted. There are some environmental puzzles, such as whizzing around on ice fields to activate a series of switches, and deviations such as this are where the game crawls. Fortunately, these are minimal, and most of the focus is on what makes the game amusing and odd in the first place: walking around, typing, and making the simple act of churning out words quickly feel intense. That's no small feat.