This blog post is a companion piece to my Type King Review video located here:
It’s not needed but I recommend watching the video before continuing reading.
Type King is the next title to enter the ranks of hardest video game. I don’t know where it will sit compared to the likes of Jump King, but from my experience with it I wouldn’t be surprised if it ranked higher.
PogoStuck, Getting Over It, Jump King, only up; these are a few of the many that sit within the subcategory of Precision platformers. But I’ve yet to see one like Type King that requires the precision of this category while simultaneously requiring the dexterity of a fluent typer.
To climb the tower you must type the letters visible on the cloud above you. This activates the cloud for a limited time. You have to jump from where you currently are to the cloud you've activated and then type the letters of the next cloud above. But you have so little time on the hard difficulty that you have to jump to the next platform, type the next cloud, and then jump to the next all in a continuous motion. If you pause once or mistype a single letter, the cloud your standing on will either disappear or the could you’re trying to get to will never properly form. And then all you can do is plummet back down to the bottom of the tower passing by all the transparent clouds waiting to have their letters typed.
I like to consider myself a pretty decent typer with an average wpm of about 95 and even then I don’t have the reaction time required to successfully climb the clouds of Type King.
Even in Jump King and PogoStuck, while I wasn’t fantastic at them, I had no problem working my way through its early sections and climbing at least a little higher than the bottom depths. But here, I never made it past the 3rd cloud. I never saw the bottom floor disappear from the bottom of the screen.
And while that was my experience with the hardest level, even in lower difficulties it was incredibly challenging. The easier mode where no typing was required was challenging enough as it was navigating between the normal and slippery clouds.
This is not my usual genre of games. While I enjoy 3D platformers and the occasional 2D puzzle platformer, precision platformers can be extremely difficult and require a lot of patience to learn and master.
But even so, I’ve never faced the level of challenge that Type King delivers.
When I was younger I tried the original Dark Souls game for 20 minutes. I wandered around a crypt trying to find out where I needed to go and then died to the first group of skeletons only to spawn back at the start of the game. It was at that moment I immediately knew that this was not the game for me. I wasn’t prepared to face that level of challenge. But I would much rather slog through the likes of a Dark Souls game than attempt to climb the ranks of Type Kings tower.
The last thoughts I have on this is that I want to make sure people don’t think I’m calling this a bad game. I don’t have enough knowledge of this genre to know if it is bad or not. But I do know that while I find it hard, it seems to be fair. I’m sure there's some trick to navigating upwards and many will figure them out. They will ascend the tower and clime the ranks of the Type King Masters.
What have your experiences been like with precision platformers? And if you can’t get enough of them, let us know what it is that continues to draw you to the genre!
I feel that Type King will be a very niche game. Unless it manages to go viral as the next super ultimate challenge taken on by streamers across the world. But if you’re into this genre and ready for the next level of challenging you’ve never faced before, then this is the game for you. For all the rest of the gamers out there, be warned. This game is very deceptive. It looks friendly and comforting. But behind those first impressions lays a terrifying beast of challenge and misery for those unsuspecting.
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