Touch Type Tale Demo (Steam Game Festival)

I both am and am not the target audience for Touch Type Tale. I’m not a huge fan of the RTS genre, but boy, am I a sucker for anything where the main way of interacting with the world is through typing. This is the first game I’ve ever seen combine the two, and I honestly didn’t expect it to work all that well, but so far? It certainly seems to.

You play as Paul, who is called upon to save his village by using a magical typewriter. In each scenario, you have set goals and a small map, and everything you do – from harvesting resources to building structures to deploying troops, you do by typing the words on the map for the object you want to interact with.

I can see this getting pretty chaotic – it seems easy enough to type words to mine gold, but that gold does you no good if you don’t hire laborers to haul it. Farms need to be planted, harvested, and planted again. Building a barracks will let you start auto-recruiting soldiers, but if you run out of money, the training will stop until you get some more coming in. You can split troops by using the Ctrl key (and typing commands), and cast spells using Alt (and typing commands). You’re going to also need the Shift key, because everything in Touch Type Tale is case sensitive. Trust me when I say you wouldn’t have time to use the mouse, even if it did anything for you.

The demo currently available as part of the Steam Games Festival gives you three levels to play through, and that was enough to convince me to add this one to my ever-growing, more than slightly out of control Wish List. There are five difficulty levels – I played this one on the second easiest and probably still would have been successful had I bumped it up to normal – and they are planning to have a skirmish mode as well as competitive multiplayer options in addition to the campaign mode in the full release.