Outer Brains Studios has thought out of the box with ‘Blood Typers’, a survival horror, retro-styled adventure game but with a twist. The only way to complete the game is to type, so you have to learn to type quickly. This game was lots of fun from start to finish, with some small scattered puzzles that you need to figure out or collect before you can escape. 

Once you are past the menu, you can select from a variety of characters to play. Each one has a  number of different attributes that can define how you play the game. I loved the fact that you had a small inventory, so you really needed to think about what you were carrying around to finish the chapters.

Blood Typers is split into four different chapters, each offering a fresh setting to keep the experience from feeling too repetitive. Completing all four chapters will take just a little over an hour to finish the entire game, making it quite a small title to kill some time. The chapters are titled ‘Corpus Studios’, ‘Super of the Dead’, ‘The Slap Put’ and ‘The Chronic Zone’, each bringing its own unique atmosphere and design.

It can be played solo or with friends in online co-op, which supports up to four people. Whilst the single-player gameplay is fun, I feel like having friends there would add another layer of chaos and would make the game that little bit more enjoyable. 

Blood Typers is the first game I’ve ever played that has completely abandoned the standard W, A, S and D movement we are all used to on PC gaming and created a completely new idea that relies on your typing. You needed to type words to navigate around the abandoned studio, but it was not always real words; sometimes, you had a random jumble of letters, which made things interesting. You could rotate the character using the Left Shift or Right Shift, which forced me to juggle multiple inputs on the keyboard. 

I liked how the combat system made me press TAB before being able to type out multiple lines of words, sometimes more than once to eliminate an enemy, which kept me on my toes. I would have loved to see the developer add in random words with one word wrong, as you’re brain would read out the correct word, which in turn would get you hit. If you have dyslexia or aren’t familiar with a keyboard layout, you would find this game interesting as it’s a fun level of chaos. 

The audio in this game was a little hit-and-miss, with a very simplistic overall design and sound effects like breaking down doorways or attacking enemies. It was pretty cool but became repetitive quite quickly. There was something about the old-school blood-smooshing effect that added a nice nostalgic factor to the game. I would have loved to see the audio cues distract me from gameplay, like attacking enemies to add another factor of difficulty to the game. The highlight for the audio would need to be with the retro-style music kicked in giving you that small bit of adrenaline you want to kick some ass. 

The visuals in this title brought back some great memories of some retro titles with a unique balance between cartoonish grunge and gothic horror, with bold lines and deep colours that captivated you while playing. These themes were laced throughout the environment, and the darkness combined with the light from your torch illuminated the environment perfectly. The enemies’ character models were the perfect mixture of old-school DOOM but with modern enhancements, which brought out an exaggerated style in the models.

There were a couple of things in the visuals that lowered the score with the first being the blood splatters would sometimes paste themselves to an invisible wall in the middle of the room so you would have a floating splatter of blood and the red force field around the map sometimes would have a texture that looked like a doorway which would spark my interest as a hidden room or something to find out it’s nothing but a break in the textures. 

Blood Typers is a fun little title that pays homage to classic arcade horrors and delivers a nostalgic and action-packed experience with some great puzzles presented. You can pick up the game for $14.50 on Steam, and for that price, you can’t complain about getting just under two hours of chaos for yourself or with some friends. Whether you are diving in solo or teaming up for co-op carnage, it’s a short but entertaining game that captures old-school arcade horrors.

Written by: Hayden Nelson