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.
2.0