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0 Originally announced in 2019, Touch Type Tale was released on Steam earlier this month, having previously been released in March 2023 on Epic Game Store. This is the first full-game release from Pumpernickel Studio, an independent German development team. Winner of Best Expert Game at the 2023 German Computer Game Awards 2023, Touch Type Tale features a mix of Real Time Strategy (RTS) gameplay and typing controls. Join me as I discover if I can figure out the key to victory.
Keyboard Warriors
In a small town in the faraway land of Minsteria, lives a little orphan boy called Paul. Strong name. Often bored and wanting to avoid being in the orphanage, Paul spends his time lending help to a busy wizard. One day, when Paul heads to the wizard’s house to assist with organising troll toenails, he discovers a magical typewriter. Curious about the machine and fascinated with the sounds the keys make, Paul begins typing. After a bandit invasion and the King’s death, Paul travels with his magic typewriter and gets caught up in tricky situations, often being taken advantage of.
As the name helpfully suggests, Touch Type Tale is a game where typing is your main interactive link between yourself and the action. Your role as Paul sees you affecting the world through words typed on your keyboard, simulating Paul using his enchanted typewriter. As you type you’ll be creating or gathering resources, commanding army units, or even making pizza. There are 3 modes of play: Campaign, Skirmish and Online Multiplayer. Let’s start by taking a look at the Campaign.
Gameplay
In the first mission, you learn how to earn gold, construct buildings, hire workers and combatants, and navigate the map. This skill set is critical because it’s essentially how you will begin every level in the game. Hire workers to gather the gold you mine, build a farm for consistent income, and build your first barracks. I did feel that this cycle became repetitive, and perhaps we could just start the level with a couple of workers and a farm to cut down the monotony. Thankfully, as the game progresses there’s a good variety in the missions to keep things interesting.
A few scenarios require you to build an army to recapture a village. The win condition is the capture of the opponent’s Town Hall. Along the way, you can occupy buildings and strategic locations to advance across the map and increase resource pools. Different units are at your disposal to help you achieve your goal, each with certain advantages or tactical benefits. For instance, cavalry and swordsmen units deal more damage when charging enemies, so you’ll want to keep some distance between them and the enemy until you want to engage. When these units are attacked whilst standing still, they will take additional damage. Spearmen on the other hand are built to defend waypoints and can deal additional damage to cavalry. Archers are great for damage at a distance but will crumble under melee attacks. You’ll need to create a varied force to overcome your opponents.
Challenge
There are five difficulty settings in Touch Type Tale. Out of the five, the recommended difficulty is the middle one, Hard. I played the first two areas under this difficulty before switching down to Normal. Looking at the leader board info in-game, a majority of players are also playing on these settings. I found that with a few attempts at sussing out what the level would throw at me, I could adapt my strategy accordingly and win. However, in the interest of time for this review, I had to drop to Normal to get through more of the game.
I often felt that approaches were limited in how to complete a mission. 9 times out of 10, my winning formula was to create spearmen first to defend the oncoming attacks, bolster them with archers and finally add aggressive swordsmen and cavalry. On longer levels I could eventually add some special units, such as large, tanky Golems that can hold an area on their own for a prolonged period of time, allowing me to advance more freely. It was potentially my typing and planning skills keeping me back from higher difficulties that would force me to work in a different way.
The game certainly doesn’t shy away from being challenging and even explicitly tells you when you start a new game. The AI was quite unforgiving on a few levels. If I didn’t get a solid foundation built within a couple of days, I quickly found myself with no way back into the fray. Given more time I’d like to experiment on higher difficulties to see what changes in enemy behaviour and if that then forces a change in my tactics.
Spell It Out For Me
Getting further into the game did unlock some more tactical options in the form of spells. Early on you gain access to a spell to slightly boost your cash. A little while later you also get the Root spell which can stop enemy units from moving for a short time. Eventually, you will unlock a large arsenal of other spells which can help turn the tides of battle if used wisely. These include the ability to poison a location with a plague to deal a bit of damage over time, or the ability to teleport your units across the map. While these can help you in a tricky situation, it is another thing to keep your eyes, and fingers, on.
When you and your opponent have had time to build your armies up, it can be really hard to keep track of everything and jump between your myriad tasks. It was easy for me to get overwhelmed in the backend of the mission and make mistakes, or simply not be quick enough to move units or accumulate gold. This is all part of the challenge though.
Variety Elsewhere
While the levels described above were similar fare, Touch Type Tale does experiment with its typing premise and medieval setting. One such level tasks Paul with running a local tavern, preparing meals and drink orders to be delivered throughout a village. Another has you co-ordinating a carnival-like performance in a rhythm mini-game. An early level that I found quite difficult involves escorting a caravan of wagons from one side of a scrolling map to another, protecting them from bandits.
These additional levels provide a nice change of pace to the typical RTS-style missions. Don’t be fooled though, these scenarios will push your typing skills to the limit, perhaps even more so than the main ones.
Additional Modes
Alongside the Campaign mode, the game also features Skirmish and Online options. In Skirmish mode you can test your skills against a global leaderboard of other players. At the time of writing, there are 15 different Skirmish levels to choose from. The online mode consists of the same 15 maps as the Skirmish mode. You have the option to matchmake for a random opponent or create a private lobby for play. I tried matchmaking a couple of times but didn’t manage to find anyone to test my skills against on those occasions. Probably best for the ego that way.
Graphics & Audio
Touch Type Tale is presented in a hand-drawn cartoon style. While the maps and villages are fairly simple in their design, they are clear and understandable. This works well for being able to visually analyse the current tactical situation fairly quickly. Equally, although the army units are quite small when on the maps, I found it easy to tell which type of unit they were.
The UI is also well designed. At a glance, you can see your available gold and ink, and the amount of each army unit you have at your disposal. The positioning of action words throughout the UI avoids making the scene look cluttered. I was always able to tell which word was associated with a certain outcome, even if I wasn’t always able to be entirely accurate with typing them out.
Where the visual presentation excels is in the character design. There’s a lot of personality poured into each character in the story, even just through their appearance. I particularly like the design of Khatunara, who reminded me a lot of early Disney’s villains. When paired with the voice acting, there’s a lot of charm injected into the game.
A Surprise To Be Sure, But A Welcome One
Speaking of voice acting, this provided the biggest shock to me when starting the game. I’d not heard of Touch Type Tale before Thumb Culture were offered the chance to cover it. So when I loaded up the game for the first time I immediately went into the credits to understand the size of the team behind it. A name jumped out at me straight away, Jim Broadbent. I couldn’t believe my eyes at first so I went to the internet to confirm. Surely enough, it’s Oscar winner Jim Broadbent from films such as Iris, Hot Fuzz, and Paddington 2.
Jim voices all the characters in the game, doing several brilliant accents while doing so. He has said his favourite character to play was Roderick, a Scotsman you encounter in Noxfort. His range of vocal performances is really impressive. It was certainly a real boon for Pumpernickel Studio to have him involved.
Longevity
Given how challenging the game is, and that in theory, you could improve your typing skills and speed, you could spend a lot of hours mastering Touch Type Tale. That’s only considering the offline modes. If you found a good group of other players you could get even more out of the game through online battles.
In the roughly 10 hours I’ve played I’m about halfway through the main scenarios. Having earnt about a quarter of the stars available. If I was going for full completion I imagine I need a whole lot more practice to get there. There’s no doubt dozens of hours of content available for players to discover and beat.
Final Thoughts
As an RTS novice and a semi-skilled typist, I found my skills called into question playing Touch Type Tale. The game prides itself on being difficult, so go into it expecting to be pushed to improve constantly and learn. There’s enough content to entertain you for a long time, even more so if you can get friends involved. The best of the game was on show when it was experimenting with the scenarios and mechanics. I think there’s probably more that could be explored with this concept too. If you like the sound of a fast-paced RTS that’s going to keep you on your toes, even at middling difficulties, then this game might be the one for you.
Touch Type Tale receives a Thumb Culture Silver Award.
Disclaimer: A code was received in order to write this review.
If you enjoyed reading this, why not check out my Metaphor: ReFantazio review.
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