The Textorcist

The Textorcist is a bullet-hell typing game where the whole joke is also the whole challenge: you cannot pause to type. You are Ray Midewell, a foul-mouthed private exorcist, and every boss encounter demands that you physically dodge incoming projectiles with movement keys while simultaneously typing out lines of Latin prayer with the rest of your keyboard. The moment a bullet clips you, your typed text resets. That single design decision is the game's entire identity, and it is a brutal, inventive one. The combat loop works in waves tied to boss fights rather than traditional stages. Each boss has a personality, a visual style, and a typing passage that escalates in length and awkwardness as the fight goes on. Early encounters feel almost tutorial-gentle. Later bosses throw curved bullet patterns, screen-filling projectiles, and passages that demand you hit uncommon punctuation while strafing sideways. The difficulty curve is steep and deliberate. If you are a fast, accurate typist, the game rewards you with a rhythm that borders on trance. If you are not, some fights will feel like the game is actively mocking you, because in a way it is. Visually, The Textorcist leans into a gritty pixel-art aesthetic that suits its grimy Vatican-adjacent horror-comedy tone. The animation work on boss sprites is small-studio careful rather than flashy, and the soundtrack carries a lot of weight. There is a low, grinding industrial quality to the music during combat that amps the tension without overwhelming the need to concentrate on your typing. The writing in the story sequences is deliberately cheesy and self-aware, which lands more often than you might expect from a premise this absurd. Where the game struggles is in its brevity and its niche ceiling. The total runtime for most players sits somewhere between two and five hours depending on difficulty and typing skill, and the Steam review pool is small enough that the mixed rating reflects a genuinely divided audience rather than a consensus knock. Players who expected a casual typing exercise bounced hard. Players who came in knowing the punishment on offer tended to stick around and find something they genuinely liked. The onboarding does not do enough to warn newcomers about just how unforgiving the reset mechanic is, and that friction has cost the game some goodwill it probably did not deserve to lose. For the right person, this is exactly what a short, weird, handcrafted indie should be. It knows its concept, builds everything around that concept, and gets out before overstaying its welcome. It is not trying to be an RPG. It is not trying to be a story-heavy experience. It is a typing-and-dodging endurance test wrapped in a pulpy exorcism plot, and within those limits it is genuinely well-executed. If the premise makes you grin, buy it. If typing games have ever frustrated rather than motivated you, be honest with yourself before committing.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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