The keyboard is a popular peripheral, but few games move beyond the common WASD controls and pursue typing and transcription as a major game mechanic. Some classic games did require typing to go north, and everyone knows the classic educational games of the typing genre (shout out to Mavis Bacon), but most games use different control schemes these days — apart from some recent examples that make typing a central mechanic.
In Dead Letter Dept., set to release on Jan. 30, the player character is a small town schmuck down on their luck and starting over in the big city. In order to pay the bills, they take a temp job doing data entry. As the character, you work for a mysterious agency that sends you to a strange, isolated industrial area to transcribe bits of mail from the postal service that the computer couldn’t properly scan.
The player has to punch in addresses, names, and notes, starting off at their own pace. As the narrative escalates a timer can kick in, but at first it’s just perusing pieces of random correspondence between friends and family: smiling faces, vacation photos, cute cards. I started off finger-pecking and finding citizen addresses in the database, but slowly began to transcribe long and unhinged messages from people in mysterious but terrifying circumstances.
The imagery and text then become more surreal, and the protagonist slowly breaks down between shifts. A full run through the game takes approximately two hours, during which the agency delivers more randomized mail. The drudge work is made much more interesting with great scares set up by ominous narratives that play out over mail exchanges, clever audio cues and tech effects as the agency computer breaks, and a few slow build-ups to spooky jump scares.
A very different recent typing game I enjoyed is Cryptmaster, an old-school dungeon crawler. The stark black-and-white visuals set the mood early with scuttling cockroaches, baleful skeletons, and swarms of rats. Four adventurers are commandeered into service by the titular Cryptmaster, a sinister and sassy necromancer with a grand plan. In order to pull it off, he’ll need some cronies, and so he finds four ancient heroes: the fighter Joro, the bard Maz, the roguish Syn, and the wizard Nix. The group must work its way through crypts, swamps, and tombs to the surface — and in order to succeed, you’re going to need to type like you’ve never typed before.
Much like Hangman, Wheel of Fortune, or Wordle, much of Cryptmaster relies on filling in the blanks to guess a phrase, and mastering an existing vocabulary for battle. This starts off simple — if you approach a chasm, you type JUMP to traverse it. When you find a chest, the Cryptmaster gives you a few hints, and you have to guess its identity.
Being dead is terrible for the memory, so not only do our four heroes need to re-learn all of their skills, but they have to guess at concepts like a helmet or shield. As you defeat early enemies, the heroes slowly remember baseline skills like SOOTHE, JAB, and YELL, adding the commands to their repertoires. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to puzzle over a six letter ability with an O, a T, and an H in there.
The game is in stark black and white, with an old-school interface where players use the arrow keys to navigate one step at a time. It only takes about a dozen hours to beat Cryptmaster, but it’s such an inventive game based around a strong central mechanic that the time flies by.
Cryptmaster came out in May 2024, but it flew under my radar since it’s such a busy year for games. It’s great to see two inventive games so close together, each using typing as a core pillar, but in very different ways. After playing shooters, RPGs, and cozy crafting games, typing games are a different way to get my noggin jogging. Transcription may seem boring at first glance, but doing it in a highly atmospheric environment with a metaphorical blade of damocles dangling over my head adds a certain thrill. Hopefully, we’ll see creative developers continue to use typing as a way to navigate strange or scary worlds.
