The Textorcist: The Village PC Review

I’ve been championing The Textorcist since I reviewed it back in 2019 – the frenzied mix of delicately shifting through streams of attacks like a bullet hell shooter alongside having to accurately type out biblical messages in order to shut down demons is unlike anything you’ve played before. I took my crappy laptop at the time into the office to show off how cool the game was (and the sick soundtrack). Since then I’ve gifted it to more people than I can remember and have made sure to always bring it up to people looking for something a little different. Naturally these recommendations always came with the caveat to basically ignore the humiliating story and awkward jokes, but the weird gameplay description usually takes their fancy. Since then, there have been a few updates. There are now items that can be equipped to help those that may have struggled with the admittedly intense difficulty. Well, intense for typers like me anyway; that chose the path of plucking keys with random fingers over learning from Mavis Beacon. These items introduce beneficial effects, such as a larger casting range, at the cost of a percentage cut of your score. There was also a special Krampus fight added for Christmas a few years back, and a hard mode that mixes up the order of words to type in addition to accelerating the now randomised patterns of the bosses. All fantastic upgrades quite frankly, both for those that need a hand to make it through and for the masochists that wanted to take things even farther.

It’s unfortunate then that this ‘The Village’ DLC didn’t manage to reach that same level of quality I had come to expect from the team. With a story set ten years in the past and of no real consequence to the main plot, outside of the similarly-embarrassing jokes about crypto currency and virgin anime figurine collectors, the dialogue is pretty skippable. With that out of the way, what we have left are the bosses – three new ones in all, coming after the original ten plus the Christmas add on. Whilst I recall what they looked like, each one being a welcome inclusion to the Textorcist’s ‘encyclopaedia of demon uggos’, I didn’t find them too distinct or particularly unique in any way in terms of their combat design. The second was certainly the best of the three, with more interesting bullet wave patterns and tricky swarms of bats, but honestly I just expected more. Especially after three years! I thought this would be a trio of fights that the devs had been pondering since the first release – something they had been brewing all this time and simply had to make a reality. I mean, I really thought they were going to go out with a huge bang but that’s not the case at all, instead ending the first entry into the franchise with a muffled pop.

In fact I ended up re-playing The Story of Ray Bibbia, the original’s subtitle, in order to get back into practice for what I thought would be thrown at me, and because I had a great time with it, of course. This was something I absolutely didn’t need to do by the way, as these new trials aren’t much of a challenge. But anyway, through the entire run I was reminiscing and worrying about upcoming sections and battles that had caused me a lot of trouble in the past (was the game made easier by the way? It seemed much easier). And what was made very clear is how memorable the enemies were, with each one introducing something new, whether it’s goo on the floor that slows one’s movement, getting your bible spin-attacked out of your hand and needing to quickly recover it, having numbers randomly thrown into your words, or the awesome ‘Ego Voco Diaboli’ mode that I won’t spoil here. On the other hand, I doubt I’ll remember much of The Village at all six months down the line, except that I may still be listening to the soundtrack. There were no big moments, or interesting twists on the action. Nothing to anchor to memory.

With the disappointing narrative being sacrificed for bad jokes instead of teaching us anything about our protagonist or informing us why he made the terrible decisions he did, a couple of hard crashes and awkward bugs when trying to play through the DLC, and mediocre boss fights that the original game would have frowned upon, I can’t really recommend the expansion. Honestly, in the short forty-five minutes it takes to get through it I’d rather just replay a couple of bosses that were already available – I still need to get through the rest of hard mode, actually! Unfortunately there’s not enough here to justify itself at all – nothing that mixes up the already wonderful gameplay, nor any story purpose, nor extra benefits/modes/items to care about. I only hope that this doesn’t dissuade the team to move on to other things because I would love more Textorcist – there isn’t anything else out there to scratch the same itch. The problem is that, with how fun those first set of big baddies were, we now expect each fight to be pumped full of creative ways to push the player, to always one up the previous encounter, and that’s just a seriously hard target to meet.