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 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 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