I haven't played a typing game since I was in the first year of high school and was forced to complete courses in Dance Mat Typing. I didn't do a great job back then, and after all these years of honing my own Frankenstein's monster version of touch typing, it turns out I haven't gotten much better.
The goal in Typing Stars is just to type 60 words as quickly as possible and climb your way to the number one rank. There's nothing else to it. But even still, I found myself dedicating way too much time to trying to beat my new arch enemy, who has been sitting at the top of the leaderboards since I started this game. That enemy’s name is Mollie Taylor, PC Gamer's features producer.
Somehow, Mollie managed to score 58.2 seconds, which is ridiculously fast and too good for me to compete with. So far my best is a measly 68.2 seconds, and that's after repeated attempts. I feel like I hit my peak at around the fourth try because after that, my hands somehow managed to forget how to type completely. I think the pressure got to me.
I'll admit that typing 60 words as quickly as possible isn't exactly the hardest thing you'll ever do, but getting a word wrong is so jarring that it can completely throw you off your game. At almost all times, there's a peaceful piano playing as background music, but if you make a mistake while typing a word, the piano gets cut off with a sharp and loud buzzer. I feel like I'm unknowingly part of some kind of negative reinforcement training, because I am so scared of that buzzer sound that I've cut my mistakes in half. Although that does come at a cost, as I'm also a lot slower now.
Other than trying to climb the leaderboard, there's not much else to Typing Stars. Set on an empty spaceship; you're apparently compelled to sit down and type the words that appear on the screen in front of you, according to the Steam description.
The story is incredibly straightforward, but Typing Stars is only a demo right now, so it's possible more of a narrative will be added once the full game is released. If the story does develop later on, then it's also possible it could turn into something really creepy.
There's some bizarre eldritch text that's infested half of the game's description, which I honestly don't know is intentional or just a random mistake, but I'm hoping for the former. After a few attempts at the game, I started to hear some strange noises as I tried to race through the words. At one point, when I typed ‘help’, I heard a small, soft voice repeat the word back to me. Some of the words also occasionally match up—whether that be "ship flame" or "need water"—as if the computer is trying to communicate a warning through the vocabular noise. But then there are also strings like "prize bread zebra," so maybe I've just been trying to beat Mollie's score for too long. Even so, I just can't shake the feeling that something seems off about this spaceship. And it’s not just that it makes me feel 11 years old again.
