THE TEXTORCIST Impressions on Steam

Many years ago, when I was in elementary school, our class got introduced to the Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing series of edutainment games by Brøderbund. Back then, we slogged through computer class in the hopes that we’d get past the dreary lesson for the day and be freed to mess around with The Oregon Trail or Where in the USA is Carmen Sandiego. Mavis Beacon wasn’t the most desired game for anybody, not because it didn’t try to come up with decent ideas to hold kids’ interest (I recall a later entry featuring a game where you swam away from a hungry shark) but because there’s only so much typing on a time limit alone can offer.

I feel like The Textorcist: The Story of Ray Bibbia is a small gift to my younger self: proof that at least two video games (this and The Typing of the Dead) can make typing a central gameplay feature and still be engaging. Developer Morbidware’s strange, comic take on exorcisms and the seedy side of Rome walks a careful tightrope when blending bullet hell top-down shooter mechanics with a typing game. The combination sometimes risks falling apart but when it works it’s a fun and addicting experiment in multitasking.

Ray Bibbia is a freelance exorcist, although he lacks the compassion and demeanor one might expect from a former Roman Catholic priest. Having severed ties with the Church over unnamed disagreements, Father Bibbia travels around Rome, cleansing it of demons with his Bible and the player’s keyboard. Every level is dedicated to a single battle against an enemy, human or demonic, which spews various projectiles and hazards towards the padre. In turn, the player needs to type out long prayers that Bibbia chants in order to invoke the holy powers needed to smite the wicked.

Part of what makes The Textorcist interesting is how the player isn’t allowed to focus on dodging or typing exclusively. Enemies will occasionally give 3-5 second pauses between volleys of attacks where Ray can plant his feet and the player can hammer out as many words as possible. Most of the time, though, you’re left to control Ray’s movements with your right hand on the arrow keys and left hand slowly typing out words at the same time. It seems counterintuitive at times but also goes a long way towards keeping the experience challenging and fresh. The game really does feel unique in what it’s trying to accomplish with a gameplay concept that may collapse on itself if pushed too far and players end up too overwhelmed. Morbidware’s nerve to run with this risky design is admirable if nothing else.

The game has a clean, pixel art aesthetic that invokes a retro flair. The snappy soundtrack and arcade-y sound effects hammer that theme home further. One oddity that stands out, though, is the game’s bizarre dialogue. The writing team doesn’t seem to know whether they want the story and characters to play out semi-seriously at times or just devolve into complete farce and satire. Numerous gaming and pop culture references crop up in dialogue, along with Internet lingo like mistakenly injecting 1’s instead of exclamation points in text due to excitement. But then there’s a plot about girls being sold into human trafficking to local citizens and a satanic cult in secret, which the game seems to regard less humorously. The whiplash in Ray Bibbia’s attitudes from one line of dialogue to another is almost annoying for its inconsistency: is he a cynical but resolute ex-priest with a vendetta, or a temperamental jokester with the mind of a teenager and a super weapon in the form of a Bible?

Another curiosity is the included option to play with a gamepad. Doing this reduces the typing aspect to merely pressing the left or right shoulder button that corresponds with the next letter of Bibbia’s current word. It also makes dodging enemy attacks much easier since you can relegate a thumb to moving around while focusing on the word you need to write with both index fingers. But the game also becomes much less interesting since the tension of multitasking is greatly reduced compared to playing with a keyboard. Morbidware and publisher Headup Games probably plan to port The Textorcist to consoles alongside the PC release, but I wonder whether a typing/shooter hybrid won’t lose something essential by minimizing the typing to two buttons for the console audience.

The Textorcist remains in development for now, so these questions and speculations will have to be settled another time. The game is slated to launch some time in the first quarter of 2019 via Steam.

Check Out The Textorcist Trailer: