Typing Of The Dead released in arcades 25 years ago remains a masterpiece - funny, absurd, tense, and novel. I am keen on any game that aims to follow in its footsteps, and there are a few. The latest is Blood Typers, a horror game where you tippity-tap on your keyboard to fight montsters in a spooky mansion, but this isn't a rail shooter, so you'll be typing to explore and navigate, too.
It's now got a release of February 2025, and there's a demo you can play now. If Typing Of The Dead was a riff on House Of The Dead - almost a mod of it, really - then Blood Typers is most obviously riffing on the original Resident Evil. You're moving around a spooky space, collecting bullets and other resources, managing your inventory, and finding keys to unlock new areas.
Three-letter words appear on the ground that when typed cause your character to move to that spot. If there's an interactive element - an item to pick up, ladder to climb, jump to make - you can perform the action by typing a command with a preceding slash, like in text adventures of old. '/climb up' to scale a ladder, for example.
You'll also need to use your left and right shift keys to rotate your character, to cast a flashlight into all the dark corners of each room. Might I prefer if this was a rail shooter, with movement not your concern? Maybe, but it's undeniably tense knowing that enemies can come from all sides. There are advantages to the more expansive framework, too: aside from different characters with thei.
