Unlike the creator of Balatro, I haven’t 100% completed Balatro, but I’m still kinda done playing Balatro for the time being—at least until the creator of Balatro delivers Balatro 1.1, which will infuse Balatro with more Balatro.
In the meantime, I’m on the hunt for some new roguelikes to wile away my life with—as long as those roguelikes have a heavy dose of Balatro in them, of course.
There have been a bunch already: Balatro but it’s Mahjong, Balatro but it’s plinko, Balatro but it’s stock trading, and even Balatro but it’s breakfast, just to name a handful. And today I dutifully tried Balatro but it’s typing, and even though I’m a pretty sloppy typist, I’m still kinda into it.
It’s called TypInc., a “roguelike deckbuilding typing game” where you hammer away at your keyboard as fast and accurately as possible to reproduce the paragraphs you’re presented with. The goal is to survive for 30 days, with each day bringing you a handful of new passages, some short, some long, some easy, some littered with words or phrases that’ll trip you up like “conscientiously” or “debased Romanesque” or “black-moustachio’d face.”
(If those last two sound familiar, most of the passages you’re typing are taken from works like 1984 and The Yellow Wallpaper, I suspect because they’re in the public domain.)
You’re against the clock as you type. Each day you survive earns you cash you can spend on perks that give you bonuses and multipliers. Mavis Beacon Teaches Balatro, in other words. It’s some tense typing action: you can see the clock (a green meter that slowly fills) out of the corner of your eye, you can hear the pings and dings of your multipliers and streak bonuses firing off, and then there’s all that frantic backspace-hammering to delete the angry red letters that pop up when you’ve mistyped something.
The perk cards you can buy between rounds are very Balatro-like, but aimed toward typing. One gives you extra mult for each word under five letters you type. Another gains +3 mult whenever you come across a period in the print. One gains a percentage of your last typo-free streak and adds it to the multiplier at the end of the round.
And some cards just buff different keyboard keys, so you can make your vowels and consonants more valuable to press. As you can imagine, soon George Orwell’s prose is tallying up beaucoup bonuses. Ah, literature, but gamified!
Not only is it fun, I think TypInc. could genuinely improve a player’s typing skills. It even gives you live feedback on your accuracy and your speed. The major downside is I can’t see this translating all that well to the Steam Deck, which is mostly where I play Balatro—there is an onscreen keyboard in TypInc. but I can’t really see myself typing 60 words per minute by jabbing my fingers at that little screen.
TypInc. launches on June 30, but there’s a demo on Steam you can try for free now.
