You play as a girl riding a three-tailed fox (kitsune). You use WASD to move (there’s an alternate control scheme available too) and pressing spacebar or enter activates a typing mode. If there are enemies to attack, or objects to interact with, words appear above them. You can then type the word in. Sometimes there’s a stack of words to type, so you need to type a sequence of words.
Typing a successful sequence of words creates a combo where you gain more score/experience points. When you level up, you can gain some enhanced abilities. Earlier on, it’s simple stuff like increasing movement speed, dash, or additional icons on your map. Later on, you can upgrade your magic attacks.
On the main world, you unlock more parts of the map by obtaining a certain amount of experience. Once you stand on the circle to activate, you see the next area created in front of you, with square paper panels assembling themselves, and objects such as trees and cliffs popping up. The papercraft visual style is very beautiful.
At certain points, you leave the main world for what I would refer to as “dungeons”. Some of these are great ways to gain more experience, but there are four main areas where you find your four magic abilities. You can switch between these magics by typing fire, ice, spark, and wind.
In combat, some enemies require you to switch to a particular magic in order to attack them, which is denoted by the font colour. If any magic can be used, the font is white. I should point out I found that the white and the wind colour looked quite similar on some backgrounds.
For the larger battles, you stand static in the middle of an arena, and waves of enemies spawn in. These can be quite long and really test your typing skills. Clever use of magic and strategically attacking enemies in a logical order is key on the harder difficulties. I’m a fast typer and I found some sections really challenging.
Each of the magics has a different effect. Fire burns the next word on that same enemy, ice slows them down, spark can also damage nearby enemies (it will only do so if the enemy you attacked has another word - killing blows don’t allow the spark to jump), and wind pushes multiple enemies back. I often found spark was the most useful for “crowd control”.
Although these magics were useful it can feel a bit awkward in some situations. Eg if you attack an enemy with fire then want to start typing the next word (since the word will be burning, your typing is redundant). If you attack with wind and they are pushed off-screen - you will have to wait a few seconds for them to come back on.
Outside of battle, the magic is used to interact with certain objects. So fire can burn certain blockades, ice can freeze water to create new paths, spark can power nodes, wind spins turbines.
There’s a few puzzles in the game which often have simple solutions such as running over tiles in a particular order. There’s a dungeon where you need to slide over ice to hit certain tiles. I felt this was really clunky since you can slide in 8 directions and you could change direction if you clip into an object mid-slide which didn’t seem like an intentional feature. I felt this would have worked much better if you were locked to 4 directions to be more reminiscent of those ice puzzles in the old Pokémon games. The more complex puzzles involve hitting switches to open/close gates to navigate a maze.
There’s chests to find which give you fragment pieces, and collecting all of them in the area unlocks an artwork.
I found the map was really unclear, but there is an unlockable ability “intuition” which shows a trail you can follow to the next area. It only works on the world map though, but the dungeons are usually clear where to go.
As you move through the areas, there is some narration which I felt was a bit cryptic what it all means. Maybe it is a spoiler, but at the end it shows a woman in a hospital bed. I’m sure I’ve played a few games that chose the “magical world that’s imagined by someone in a coma” reveal.
The story isn’t really important in the game though. It’s very visually appealing, has a good sound, and the typing gameplay is really good. It lasts around 5 hours which I thought was a suitable length.