Nanotale is an RPG in which you kill enemies by typing, out later this year

The developers of typing game/RPG hybrid Epistory have announced that the sequel, called Nanotale, will be out on PC in the second half of this year.

You'll take control of a novice archivist called Rosalind, who's collecting plant samples and cataloging mysterious goings-on to try and saving a dying planet. Everything is controlled via your keyboard, and most of the puzzles and combat will require you to type words as fast as you can: each on-screen enemy has a word assigned to them, and you have to type it to deal damage, for example.

Epistory, which came out in 2016, was very well-received, and has "overwhelmingly positive" user reviews on Steam, so I have high hopes for Nanotale. I'm a fan of the art style—those pink trees are beautiful—and it sounds like most of the mechanics that served the first game so well will return. Hopefully that includes an adaptive difficulty level that responds to your typing speed, which should avoid it becoming frustrating.

Alongside the release window, the development team at Fishing Cactus put out the first gameplay video for Nanotale, which you can see at the top of this post.

Samuel is a freelance journalist and editor who first wrote for PC Gamer nearly a decade ago. Since then he's had stints as a VR specialist, mouse reviewer, and previewer of promising indie games, and is now regularly writing about Fortnite. What he loves most is longer form, interview-led reporting, whether that's Ken Levine on the one phone call that saved his studio, Tim Schafer on a milkman joke that inspired Psychonauts' best level, or historians on what Anno 1800 gets wrong about colonialism. He's based in London.