I don’t have a penchant for typing-games and often actively avoid them. When most of your nine-to-five is spent typing, the idea of competitively typing isn’t the most appealing of pastimes. Though, neither is playing Valorant, yet I still did that for years on end. So, when my friend sent over the Final Sentence demo with the caption “this is a bit of you”, I didn’t know what to expect (other than something mildly horrifying, as is usually the case).
My expectations of something disturbing were more than met, and my distaste for typing games were soon quelled.
Final Sentence is a simple, competitive typing game with a twist; there’s a guard holding an empty gun to your head at all times. Empty? That’s fine! Except it isn’t. For every three errors you make while typing, a bullet is loaded into the chamber and you’re thrust into a game of russian roulette. If you make it past your first brutal mistake alive, that bullet remains in the gun, with an additional bullet being added for each additional three errors you make.
The solution is simple, right? Just don’t make any errors when typing and you’ll quickly win, destining all other players to a gory ending. Should be no problem for a typist such as myself! Right? Well, I installed Final Sentence thinking it would be a ten-minute romp with my friend. I’d beat him – as I’ve done before in other typing games we’ve very briefly tried our hands at – and we’d then continue with our evenings, but that didn’t quite happen.
For a start, my friend beat me and immediately put my ego to rest, which obviously made me all the more determined to type as perfectly as I could and bag myself a win. Secondly, typing perfectly is harder than it looks: I’m no good at typing at the best of times despite my prior claims, but with additional pressure from my friend veering past me on the scoreboard? And with a loaded gun being pointed at me?
Additionally, there’s multiplayer voice chat between lobbies which, as amusing as it can be, is incredibly off-putting (especially so if you can hear another player’s keyboard through their microphone…), but you’ll also hear the gunshots being fired at fallen typists. This quickly reminds you of what your own fate could be if you mess up. You can be on such a roll, locked in on the task at hand, but one mistake turns into three before you know it, and sure enough a gun is then being pointed directly at your head.
Between trying not to make errors and being fast enough to beat your opponents to the end of the text you’re typing, it’s hellish. Let’s not forget the fact that the passages you end up typing are just ridiculous, ranging from memes, to movie quotes, to recipes, to straight-up having to type out binary code which is much harder than it looks. There’s also some sort of story lurking beneath the surface in Final Sentence that is definitely being told through the passages assigned to players… I’m curious to know more.
Final Sentence, at demo stage, admittedly has a long way to go. Though it hooked me more than other typing games I’ve experienced – thanks to its looming threats, dark environment, and highly-competitive nature – it could benefit from some additional features. A proper spectator mode would make a great start, so you can apply additional pressure to friends after one of you dies, as well as private lobbies and expanded matches; perhaps deceased players could even take on the role of guards eventually.
As it stands, each game only lasts a few minutes and consists of a few rounds, and it would be great to see additional stages for the most accurate of players to progress onto. Otherwise, as fun as Final Sentence can be, it’s another multiplayer game that’ll see players drop off almost as quickly as they joined in, and you could argue that’s the real horror here.
