Have you ever played a bullet-hell game and thought, “You know what this is missing…typing words to do damage!”, then The Textorcist: The Story of Ray Bibbia is the game for you. You play as Ray Bibbia, a harden exorcist that you could be seen played by Bruce Willis if this was a movie. He’s seen a lot, and is just trying to do his job.
The style of the game is episodic, a bit of banter, lore bits to the overarching story, using some old and clunky technology to figure out where to go, more witty banter, a bullet-hell typing challenge, and capped off with more lore. This formula repeats for each chapter, but the writing is very well done. The characters are dynamic and interesting, and the story is engaging to make you want to explore more.
For the gameplay…it’s a challenge. You need to balance between dodging between bullets and typing words for the exorcism (some in English, some in Latin). Do you focus on dodging and then type when there is a short break in the action or do you dodge while typing with one hand? These are the challenges presented in The Textorcist. Thankfully, the bosses have the same patterns, so you can learn how to approach the bosses, but that doesn’t make them easier.
The soundtrack for the game is great, each boss fight has a different music track associated to it, and they are well put together. The game appears to be inspired by the 16-bit era for both the graphics and music, and they are done very well.There is an ‘easy mode’ with controller support, however I found it difficult it it’s own way. You are given two letter options above Ray, LB for one RB for the other. But, the text pack that is used can make it challenging to tell what letters they are. This goes for typing them as well, but having the context clue of the word you are typing, it’s easier to know if it is a ‘y’ or ‘p’ in the word.
Overall, this is two styles of games that I never figured I would put together and that it would work…but it does. The game is fun, challenging, and the writing really pulls it all together. I wish flow of the game was varied over the course of the game, but if that’s my only real complaint, I think MorbidWare has put together a really quality game.
