Nanotale – Typing Chronicles PC Review
Nanotale – Typing Chronicles is a new adventure-puzzle game that requires you to utilise your typing skills to solve puzzles or kill enemies. You play as a young archivist looking to uncover a dying world’s mysteries while cataloguing the surrounding wildlife with the help of your fox spirit companion. Over time you gain new abilities, meet new species and, of course, attempt to save the world.
The story isn’t anything special; you’re a young archivist named Rosalind who finds out there is more to the world than was originally thought. Through learning about the environment and wildlife you gain experience to level up and gain powerful new abilities. At the start, you save a fox spirit from monsters and together set off on a journey to find out what’s happening in the world. The story isn’t anything captivating and it definitely isn’t the reason you will keep playing this game but luckily, they don’t force the main story on you, instead letting you ask about the world and its people. On that note, the world building is simply great! I loved finding all the different plants and side quests to learn more about the unique world and this all complemented the relaxing tone of the game.
Players will be able to interact with the environment; for example, setting grass on fire to kill enemies or bursting plants full of water to grow long grass for stealth. You will be forced to combine different words to change the way your spells work to help you in different situations, for example, large, fire, ray. I loved the idea of the game making you think about how you’re going to tackle each encounter before rushing in, but unfortunately the game doesn’t really force this on the player. Instead, you can just run in and kill the enemies quickly and if you do anything else you feel like you’re just taking the long route. I guess if you’re slower at typing that would make taking the time to do this more reasonable, but I wish the game forced it on you more.
Aside from fighting enemies and exploring the world, the other main aspect to Nanotale is solving puzzles. Most puzzles are solved by creating a spell that hits or moves an object. Most of the puzzles are straight forward and the only time I got stuck was when I didn’t know which spell to use or because I had to come back later. I’d also argue the sections where you fight hordes of enemies are puzzles if you want them to be – once again if you’re fast enough at typing you can quite easily win without moving – however, if you find yourself being swarmed you must puzzle out your next moves. I loved this part of the game and I really wish they added more of these parts. It had everything the game promised; quick typing, quick thinking, puzzling out the situation, and combining your spells. The bosses were fun but sometimes it was a bit too obvious on what you had to do; I would have liked to have seen them add more mystery so you had to talk to the locals etc. to solve these boss fights.
Nanotale features a variety of words with different lengths and difficulty, most of the words you type will be vaguely related to the object you’re going to be interacting with. I did notice a lot of word repetition throughout the playthrough, and it would’ve been nice to see an increasing word pool as you progress into the game so that the enemies, even the little ones, get longer, more complex words above their heads. I did love the idea that the words correlate to the object so you weren’t typing random words that were added simply to expand the word count, however, as someone who types faster than average, the later level enemies just felt the same as the starter enemies.
For the most part Nanotale worked smoothly, but there were times where I got frustrated because sometimes when you solidify something using a spell the collisions are awful and force you to keep using the spell until you could walk across it freely. There were a lot of little bugs that took you away from the experience that hopefully will be fixed over time and it doesn’t take long to restart and you go back to where you left off but it does take you out of the relaxing immersion that the game aims to provide.
Nanotale – Typing Chronicles was a great experience, I’ve never played a typing game before, so this was a fresh idea to me, and it definitely won’t be my last. Fishing Cactus have released 2 games in the Typing Chronicles series, and I hope they don’t stop there; I don’t think they really pushed the boundaries of what this kind of game can achieve but that only gives me hope for the next instalment.
