Epistory - Typing Chronicles

 PC
User Score
7.6

Generally favorable reviews- based on 54 Ratings

User score distribution:
  1. Positive: 33 out of 54
  2. Mixed: 17 out of 54
  3. Negative: 4 out of 54

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  1. TitaniumDragon
    Sep 4, 2016
    5
    Epistory is a typing action game. You control a young lady who rides a fox around the world. In order to progress, you must hit the space bar, then type words which pop up over various items of scenery – or various enemies.

    At its heart, this is a very simple game – you spend most of your time either running around on your fox solving simple 2D overhead puzzles, or you are fighting    Epistory is a typing action game. You control a young lady who rides a fox around the world. In order to progress, you must hit the space bar, then type words which pop up over various items of scenery – or various enemies.

    At its heart, this is a very simple game – you spend most of your time either running around on your fox solving simple 2D overhead puzzles, or you are fighting enemies. Many enemies simply appear around levels, but there are 24 pitched battles throughout the game where you stand stationary while waves of enemies come at you. It is here that the game is at its most intense, and where strategy is most meaningful.

    But even still, there isn’t much.

    Over the course of the game, you unlock four special magical powers – a fire power (which burns away the next word over the head of a multi-hit enemy), an ice power (which freezes multi-hit enemies in place), a lightning power (which jumps from enemy to enemy if you hit an enemy with at least two words left, allowing you to greatly diminish what is coming at you), and a wind power (which allows you to blow back enemies, which is pretty much the weakest power in the game as the spark power is almost always more useful).

    You also gain experience points which allow you to upgrade your powers. If you are reasonably decent at stringing together kills, you can probably cap out your experience before the last three dungeons, at which point it is largely pointless. This experience allows you to upgrade your powers, your fox’s speed, and give you some convenient abilities, such as the ability to see things on your overworld map, and the ability to teleport to the entrance of the dungeon of your choice.

    There are various collectables in the game, hidden in treasure chests, and the game mixes up the combat a little bit by facing you off against some enemies who can only be harmed by a specific magical power (which you switch between by typing Fire, Ice, Spark, and Wind). The enemies themselves are pretty samey, with the main difference being number of hit points and the complexity of the words which pop up over their head. As you progress deeper into the game, you’ll face off with enemies which have extremely long words over their heads, and if you play the arena mode, you can even face off against enemies with words from medical dictionaries which are several dozen words long.

    Sadly, while the base mechanic is kind of a cute idea, in the end the game never really does anything very impressive. The story is not very involving, and while the voice-over work is good, the lack of anything really interesting coming out of the story renders it somewhat moot – more like background noise than anything. The game is reasonably visually attractive as well, with everything having a construction paper, cut paper, or origami aesthetic, but in the end, all of that is window dressing for the core action – and the core action, while okay, simply isn’t anything special.

    This game isn’t bad. It is just kind of mediocre, and I don’t think there’s much reason to go out of your way to play it.    … Expand
  2. somedude14
    Mar 19, 2017
    7
    Indie adventure RPG with typing as the combat system. Collect elements in each temple to solve its puzzles. Elements also have different effects when used in combat - fire destroys an extra word on an enemy, ice freezes that enemy, and so on. Leveling up gives skill points to enhance elements, increase XP gain, boost speed of world traversal, and mark points of interest. Has a decentIndie adventure RPG with typing as the combat system. Collect elements in each temple to solve its puzzles. Elements also have different effects when used in combat - fire destroys an extra word on an enemy, ice freezes that enemy, and so on. Leveling up gives skill points to enhance elements, increase XP gain, boost speed of world traversal, and mark points of interest. Has a decent chunk of side content, but easy to max character stats without. Story and narration are low points, ending is so cringey it's comedic. Over in just over four hours unless you're an achievement hunter, which at time of this review are present on Steam, while absent from Origin.… Expand
  3. PublicNuisance
    Aug 27, 2021
    7
    Epistory: Typing Chronicles had a great start to it and had me loving it’s game play; it’s mysterious story unfolding and it’s origami visual style. By the end though it managed to fizzle out in various ways but still was a good game. Sometimes when a game goes from great to just good the feeling of disappointment lingers more than if it were never great to begin with. The game play isEpistory: Typing Chronicles had a great start to it and had me loving it’s game play; it’s mysterious story unfolding and it’s origami visual style. By the end though it managed to fizzle out in various ways but still was a good game. Sometimes when a game goes from great to just good the feeling of disappointment lingers more than if it were never great to begin with. The game play is surprisingly engaging. I have never played a typing game before so it was more tense and I got into things more than I expected to. The voice acting was very well done and the story starts off as the telling of a girl’s tale and you learning more about their life as they remember more and more. The game handles exploration well and you need to not only find reveal points to be able to see more of the map but have enough XP to unlock them. You also gain points to use to unlock skills to help tailor the game to your liking. That being said I never fell short and there are always enough ways to gain XP. This actually became somewhat of an issue later on as I maxed out all of my skills with over an hour left in the game. XP after that was pointless as it couldn’t be used. The difficulty curve was another issue. I started the game off on the “insane” difficulty and for about the next five hours the game was what I would call challenging but fair. I died a bit but I always felt like I could tweak my strategy of what powers to use; which enemies I target first; etc and often I was correct and found ways to advance. During and after the mining level however the nests I encountered forced me to reduce the difficulty bit by bit until by the end I was at the “easiest” difficulty level. Not only that but I was having a tough time advancing even on that lowest level. There were no more skills I could upgrade and strategies can only be tweaked so much. This difficulty curve overall is nothing short of ludicrous and not a good design idea. One idea I would have liked to see was a health bar as you can only sustain being touched by an enemy once but several enemies can have multiple words you have to type in order to defeat them. At least having this on the lower difficulty levels or as a toggle option would have been nice. The puzzles you have to solve were fun and interesting to a point although a tad over done for some. For instance figuring out how to make three windmills spin at once was a good puzzle the first time but mundane by the fourth or fifth time. One thing I will also mention is that I found the game sometimes didn’t do a good job figuring out which word I was starting to spell if multiple enemies on screen had a similar word and it would act as if I wasn’t spelling it correctly because I was trying to target another enemy. I don’t have a good solution for this though. By the end even the mysterious story kind of fizzled out and at the end it just kinds of ends with little explanation or wrapping up of the plot.

    I played Epistory on Linux. It froze on me once during play but I encountered no other bugs. There was one graphics setting. Alt-Tab didn’t work. The game saves upon exiting and there is just the one save file. The performance was a mixed bag. Often times it ran just fine at a constant 60 FPS but it would dip sometimes down to the 40’s and the graphical detail wasn’t justifying this on my hardware. Don’t get me wrong the game is pretty and has a great art style but this should of ran at a constant 60 with no drops. There is a 60 FPS lock that can’t be disabled or changed. You can change difficulty at any time and there is an “adaptive difficulty” option.

    Game Engine: Unity
    Game Version Played: 1.4
    Graphics API: OpenGL
    Disk Space Used: 1.3 GB
    Save System: Upon Exit

    Graphics Settings Used: Fantastic, 1920x1080
    GPU Usage: 0-47 %
    VRAM Usage: 500-1273 MB
    CPU Usage: 3-19 %
    RAM Usage: 1.9-3.1 GB
    Frame Rate: 43-60 FPS

    Despite it all I was charmed by Epistory and believe it is a good game overall that just had some poor design choices and could use some optimizations. It’s presentation; core game play and world are top notch. I paid $7.39 for Epistory and finished it in 7 hours and 11 minutes. Overall aside from the poor wrap up to the ending it felt like a good length and value.

    My Score: 7/10

    My System:

    AMD Ryzen 5 2600X | 16GB DDR4-3000 CL15 | MSI RX 580 8GB Gaming X | Mesa 21.1.3 | Samsung 970 Evo Plus 500GB | Manjaro 21.1.0 | Mate 1.26.0 | Kernel 5.13.11-190.current    … Expand
  4. Mobile
    May 1, 2018
    6
    ENG
    A cute game with a sad story. Could be better, though we are told through words and the environment about the fate of the heroine, when we come to the end we explain everything quite quickly and crumpled, which is not much upset, so the game would be even better. Perfect for those who want to try out the new keyboard in action, or just learn faster/better to print, plus after passing    ENG
    A cute game with a sad story. Could be better, though we are told through words and the environment about the fate of the heroine, when we come to the end we explain everything quite quickly and crumpled, which is not much upset, so the game would be even better. Perfect for those who want to try out the new keyboard in action, or just learn faster/better to print, plus after passing you can go to the arena and to continue to improve, as well the achievements that are pushing to be better. The words are repeated quite often and you can roughly estimate how many of them were invented, it would be better if there were more variety in them. But it will come down, these games are quite small, and then there is also the performance is not quite ordinary. I almost forgot about a couple of points to mention: when a lot of enemies that the words are confused, some are seen, some do not appear immediately, but the main disadvantage is the silent Fox and a girl and a complete lack of humor or pleasant moments.
    RU
    Милая игра с грустной историей. Могло быть и лучше, хоть нам и рассказывают через слова и окружение о судьбе героини, когда мы приходим к концовке нам объясняют все довольно быстро и скомкано, что не много огорчило, так бы игра была бы еще лучше. Отлично подойдет для тех кто хочет опробовать новую клавиатуру в действии или просто научится быстрее/лучше печатать, плюс после прохождение можно зайти на арену и продолжать совершенствоваться, так же ачивки которые подстегивают быть лучше. Слова довольно часто повторяются и можно примерно прикинуть сколько их было придумано, было бы лучше если бы больше было в них разнообразия. Но и так сойдет, игр таких довольно мало, а тут еще и исполнение вполне не заурядное. Чуть не забыл про пару пунктов упомянуть: когда много врагов то слова путаются, некоторых не видно, некоторые появляются не сразу, но и главный минус так это молчаливый лис и девочка и полное отсутствие юмора или приятных моментов.    … Expand
  5. jsommer7345
    Sep 10, 2022
    6
    This game is a great way to learn how to type on the computer. It works! I frequently got lost in this game, and playing the story mode can sometimes be tricky as the puzzles sometimes take over the typing in the game. I wish the game focused more on the arena aspect and the fighting aspect of the game. Instead, the game puts much time into random puzzles, and I didn't buy the game forThis game is a great way to learn how to type on the computer. It works! I frequently got lost in this game, and playing the story mode can sometimes be tricky as the puzzles sometimes take over the typing in the game. I wish the game focused more on the arena aspect and the fighting aspect of the game. Instead, the game puts much time into random puzzles, and I didn't buy the game for puzzles but wanted to learn to type better. Because of its lengthy puzzles and running around the world map, I was just okay with this game, and likely won't play it.… Expand
  6. myval2012
    Aug 27, 2023
    7
    Gameplay: It's perfect, definitely a great typing game. Sometimes the words you are supposed to type are hidden behind terrain which is not ideal. 4,5/5

    Visuals: The origami like graphics look great, sometimes you see animals walking in void, but tbh not even 3A studios can figure this out. 2,5/2,5 Story: I'm surprised how well a game can perform on previous fronts and then    Gameplay: It's perfect, definitely a great typing game. Sometimes the words you are supposed to type are hidden behind terrain which is not ideal. 4,5/5

    Visuals: The origami like graphics look great, sometimes you see animals walking in void, but tbh not even 3A studios can figure this out. 2,5/2,5

    Story: I'm surprised how well a game can perform on previous fronts and then completely suck at last one. The story is complete garbage. Half of the time i don't even know what is going on. The story talks about 3 things, how the place looks like (why are you telling me this, i'm looking right at it wtf), how main character feels (starts to be pretty annoying after some time) and how she magically fixes everything by committing mass slaughter of wildlife (wait... what). There is no story, just a collection of random locations with random feelings with random images in gallery once you complete them. 0,5/2,5    … Expand

Critic Reviews

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Metascore
74

Mixed or average reviews - based on 16 Critic Reviews

Critic score distribution:
  1. Positive: 7 out of 16
  2. Mixed: 9 out of 16
  3. Negative: 0 out of 16
  1. GameCritics
    Apr 23, 2018
    75
    Minor quibbles aside, Epistory is a solid typing adventure. The story mode is around five hours long, and a leaderboard offers plenty of opportunities to test typing skills against the rest of the world. While the plot never builds to the kind of interesting levels that the introduction suggests (in fact, an end-game twist is something of a headscratcher) the gameplay is so well-made that it’s hard to fault the rest.
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  2. Games.cz
    Feb 6, 2017
    70
    Epistory is an imaginative adventure game with sophisticated RPG elements and well-designed typewriting learning cleverly disguised as a game. Too bad the game content is often repeated.But still, Epistory is worth trying not only because it supports Czech language.
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  3. Pelit (Finland)
    Sep 28, 2016
    70
    Combining an ARPG template with typing-based combat is a brilliant idea. Unfortunately, Epistory is a bit too easy and simplistic to really pull it off. I can only hope for a sequel with more challenge, enemy types, skills and the like. [Aug 2016]
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