Rapidly tapping away at a typewriter in an underground facility while a masked guard holds a revolver to my head is just my kind of jam, so why was I still left somewhat unsatisfied with the viral demo of Final Sentence?
Perhaps it’s because I knew what I was getting into. Look, I’m a TypeRacer kind of guy. A 100 words per minute kind of guy. A charisma is my dump stat kind of guy. I actually own a fancy faux-typewriter, and I used to have a real one, too. So all I’m trying to say is that typing as fast as possible is kind of my jam, and I find it fun to do so in the context of a video game.
And while I love many of the ideas involved with Final Sentence, I have just as many criticisms and concerns about the experience.
Type A personality traits
First, the good stuff. The basic idea—try to type out a string of text as quickly and accurately as possible in the context of a race—is nothing new. TypeRacer, a browser-based classic, has been going strong since March 2008. Clearly, there is some sort of a fun game experience here to explore. Final Sentence adds a simple but effective aesthetic of a bone-chilling underground lair, captives and guards, grisly murder, and ominous music. It is easy to make me tense up, but I found it to be a genuinely fun addition to a basic “type quickly” sort of game experience.
Turning the game into a battle royale rather than a simple race also comes with some interesting quirks. While it’s still a “first past the post” kind of deal, things can go wrong very quickly along the way. If you misspell a character, the text automatically jumps back to the beginning of the line, and you get a strike. Three strikes and you might be out—meaning you must endure a round of Russian Roulette, courtesy of the masked guard standing next to you. Even if you survive, you lose a lot of time awaiting your fate, and should you fall afoul of the text three more times, your odds are that much lower to survive the punishment.
The game forces mandatory breathers on you between predetermined segments of the text, giving you a few seconds to rest and recuperate while also resetting your three strikes. While I personally find those breaks too long, they do serve as a good opportunity to check the standings and your competitors on the UI. (All players’ activities are simulated in the same room, so the flash and bang of the shot eliminating an opponent serves as a genuine distraction and greatly adds to the mood and the experience.)
While you have no ability to directly interact with your opposition, there is an interesting risk-reward balance between fast and accurate typing, with this game heavily favoring the latter with its harsh resets. I think that is a good idea: while my 100 WPM average is nothing spectacular in the world of committed typists, it is way beyond that of a regular player, but the way the systems are set up genuinely makes a slower but steady competitive style viable. There were multiple occasions where I was multiple segments ahead of everyone, but a few small errors led to an untimely end by revolver in a round I would have clearly won otherwise.
While I see this as a positive, I can’t say the same about the rest.
Errors in the text
Everyone is writing out the same bit of text throughout a round, and they range from classical excerpts to binary code. Sometimes, they are mind-numbingly repetitive, and that surely has to be on purpose. Occasionally, you are asked to type out the sort of character strings that are used as teaching and practice tools for typists: think asd asd asd asf asd asd asd and the sort, devised with the intention of drilling into you the precise finger movement and key location without having to look down at your keyboard.
It’s a fine teaching tool, but an excruciatingly boring task during a game. It’s also exacerbated by the fact that certain strings don’t make sense in the context of a non-US keyboard layout. In my case, Z and Y are swapped around because my native language uses the former much more often than the latter, which means that a quick stroke of zxc zxc zxc (which is intended to feature three characters right next to one another) requires me to go back and forth between the top and bottom rows of the keyboard, significantly slowing me down compared to the competition.
Which is not exactly ideal when a masked guard holds a revolver to your head.
Troll tasks like repeatedly typing out “I must not tell lies” over and over again with no deviation are also simply boring, and don’t fully test the typing abilities of the players. It’s fine as the occasional surprise, but I found texts like these too common, and audibly groaned whenever they came up. There also aren’t enough text strings in the game, which is inexcusable and an easy fix: in just 80 minutes of play, I have encountered multiple repeated tasks.
There’s also a real question of staying power and systemic depth. The aforementioned TypeRacer has already proven that there is a fun experience to be had here, but whether this is the right form for it to take remains to be seen. The demo promised level-ups and a progression system, and I cannot see how that can meaningfully make sense apart from pointless cosmetic upgrades.
I think a big part of TypeRacer’s enduring appeal is just how quick and snappy it all is. You immediately find opponents, and the round ends the moment you’re done typing, with no friction or hurdles if you want to immediately hop back in again. Contrast this with Final Sentence, where the queue times and the warmup animations before a round starts can take upwards of 45 seconds, with mandatory breaks in the text, and—worst of all in my opinion—an entirely pointless countdown to everyone’s execution once someone has won by finishing the text. (Most damningly, I can’t even leave the game once a winner has been crowned: even though I press the button to return to the main menu, I have to wait out the animation of all of us getting shot in the face.) It is a significant drag on an otherwise speedy and fun experience.
The game I keep going back to in my mind is Babble Royale, another indie word game sensation. This battle royale Scrabble experience was a smash hit in December 2021 but died down just a month after, never to recover. It boasted similar concurrent player counts as Final Sentence’s demo at its peak, but the devs were never able to devise a way to turn it into a dynamic, live-service experience despite hastily launched microtransaction elements. Fundamentally, it is difficult to add progression to a word puzzle game, and we haven’t seen a good solution for it yet.
I went back to the game to get some screenshots and won five rounds in a row. So clearly, this is Game of the Year material. I jest—I have real concerns about whether the full version can truly elevate this experience. But in the meantime, we can keep on punching the keys. No one can take the typewriter away from us.
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