I’m in a bit of a bossfight rut. As a self-professes Souls freak living in the proliferation of the Souls formula, I should be over the moon- yet every boss fight has just kind of melded together into a mess of circle-strafing followed by the odd dodge roll and a two-hit punish.
Glyphica Typing Survival, a solo-made game by aliasBlack and published by Squeaky Wheel, about the merits of a typing certification, seems to fix that.
It’s not the first typing game, or the only one still in development, either- Typing of the Dead is an infamous entry of the genre, combining arcade shooters like House of The Dead with your own audition to be a secretary or write minutes.
Glyphica , More Like Dictionary Survivor
No, where Glyphica Typing Survival excels is what it uses the typing for. Yes, you’re rapidly typing words as they fly towards you. But there is no end in sight. Instead, you’re in an almost Vampire Survivors-style survival, unlocking abilities that flood the screen with more nonsense to help keep you alive before you need to ice your joints.
I love how much Glyphica Typing Survival hinges on its typing- abilities are automatically triggered, like giant fan blades that appear if you hit certain letters. It’s a chaotic blitz, and you level up at such a decent rate you almost wonder why you can set up such lethal kill-rooms.
You wonder, that is, until you see the boss fights. The very first boss I’d fought in the game was called The Poet. Rather than have one word, The Poet demands I type out a whole poem. The catch? The level was still going on. You didn’t have to type the whole poem all at once, but you absolutely had to be cognizant of windows to get as much prose in as possible.
Suddenly, all the buffs made sense. Thank goodness I had my array of ghosts, mines and fan blades because they would help keep the weak chaff away while I suffered through the stanzas.
The third wave even added an extra modifier to the Poet: double-bagged words, meaning you had to type them out twice to delete them.
Just The Poet as a concept would have already been plenty cool- but the game has other bosses too, including one that scrambles words so your petty knowledge of words can’t save you. You thought living in the moment was about having more gratitude for your life as-is? No, it’s about being able to react to anagrams being thrown your way and hitting them with the same efficiency you’d award to real words.
Glyphica is available in early access now, so if you’re looking for a good use of your APM I’d definitely recommend checking it out. It’s a simple appeal built up excellently, with Indonesian language support and even Chinese down the line.
Just be sure to prep some ice if you’re planning on white-knuckling this game.
Early Access code provided by Squeaky Wheel
