I’ve been typing for most of my life—flogging flax so I could afford a dragon longsword in RuneScape, roleplaying in World of Warcraft, and at present, writing multiple articles a day for the good site PC Gamer. I average about 130 words per minute, which isn’t competitive or anything, but I’m pretty nippy compared to the average pecker (it’s a typing term, stop giggling).
I’ve long believed I would never be able to translate these skills to gaming. I mean, sure, you’ve got games like Typing of the Dead, but I don’t do anything if it doesn’t have bragging rights. I’m told that’s ‘mean-spirited’ and ‘narcissistic’ and ‘unhealthily competitive’, but those people were all losers anyway.
Final Sentence, a battle royale typing game, shows me there’s a potential royale out there which could fix this hole in my life, but it’s not this one, at least not yet.
When it comes to the good, there are a lot of interesting ideas going on here. The game takes place in a nightmarish Orwellian warehouse filled with rows of typewriters and masked overseers with guns.
Your job is to type faster than everyone else in the lobby. Make a mistake, and you get a strike. Make three strikes, and you get to play Russian roulette—adding a bullet each time your vigilant overseer gives their revolver a spin.
Unfortunately, there are a couple of problems with the format that sap the potential from the whole thing. Lobbies are mostly filled with bots, which I won’t resent Final Sentence for, given it’s a small-scale indie battle royale and those are generally hard to get bodies for.
However, the moment someone hits first place, everybody else dies—which renders the fact you’ve got an overall timer kinda pointless. Anyone who’s a touch-typist like yours truly is going to be done well before anybody’s personal timer runs down.
Thirdly, if you do make mistakes, it’s hard to catch up. Each ’round’, usually consisting of a few sentences, has a mandatory wait timer in between bouts of click-claking. This, I assume, is to give your tired little fingies a break—but it also means the winner will have their lead maintained artificially. The Russian roulette animation is also slow as hell, and while I get that it’s part of the punishment, it puts you so far behind that you might as well alt+F4 and go next if you bump into it.
There’s also the matter of the text itself. It’s super early-days, but from what I’ve played, you can count the amount of unique scripts you’re tasked to write on two hands. While I did have a chuckle writing out “the cow says moo” or “can I haz cheezeburger” or, in one instance, an incredibly horny script that made me filthy typing it (still won, though), I probably shouldn’t be seeing repeats in my first half-hour. Some of them have typos, too, which is just mean.
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I think Final Sentence would be better served by a round-by-round elimination system, Fall Guys style, where the slowest few typists are eliminated—and everyone else is given a reset. Even when someone was matching my WPM, it rarely felt competitive, because they’d forgotten to put a hyphen in the right place one too many times and had to watch discount V slowly spin a revolver at them, giving me an insurmountable—and kinda boring—lead.
Still, it’s early days, and developer Button Mash has every chance of turning it into something better. You can give Final Sentence a try yourself right now on Steam.
