Please note: There is a new version incoming within the next week that will address some issues with international compatibility.
Are you obsessed with typing to a somewhat unsettling extent? Does the thought of starting on home row and boosting up your WPMs make you tingly in ways you cannot quite express? Then Icarus Proudbottom Teaches Typing, a parody arcade game made by Holy Wow Studios for SomethingAwful's "Subversive Edutainment" Game Jam, should be right up your carpel tunnel-stricken alley! Come along with Icarus and his spirit animal, Jerry the owlkin, and learn how to type like gods... gods I say!
Each screen will present you with a passage of words on the TYPESCAPE to type as accurately as possible, each mistake costing a heart from the Life Gauge. Except for the occasional exam level, the typing is not timed, but the faster you type, the faster your Soul Gauge fills. Once you activate the Soul Gauge with [~], depending on its current level, it will grant you extra hearts or bonus points. Taking the art of the keyboard to a level of oddness that Mavis Beacon, Mario, or even the House of the Dead ever managed.to bring, Icarus Proudbottom Teaches Typing is a surreal mix of high and low brow humor. The targets of the satire are all over the place, but it all somehow works, even if the more off-color bits sadly betray the otherwise pitch-perfect elementary school computer lab feel. Still, Icarus Proudbottom Teaches Typing is always entertaining in that warped Frog Fractions kind of way, and your fingers won't mind the exercise.
Play Icarus Proudbottom Teaches Typing
Thanks to Wctaiwan for sending this one in!
Don't work on non US keyboard
Does't recognise some keys which makes the game pointless!
Honestly, I liked the premise of the game a lot. I just wish it was longer.
I thought the game was pretty much the right length. It'd need to actually have some deeper mechanics to make it worthy of a full title.
Short and cute, and funny. Though I feel sorry for anyone who tries to play this and isn't a very good typist.
I loved it. I just wish it was longer.
It's a neat game. Although it keeps saying I'm making mistakes when I'm rather positive I'm not. I actually looked down and typed one really slowly in the beginning to make sure it wasn't just me and it still kept taking away hearts. Not sure what I'm missing.
If you've beaten it...
Did you find the secret levels? I'm not going to say where they are yet, but they're there.
I think my greatest achievement in life has been beating the type trial.
This is a great game! I say that mostly for the humor value, but it was also just the right difficulty for me and my particular typist skillset to provide a true challenge without becoming overly frustrating.
(Your mileage will almost certainly vary; I type 50-60 WPM, but without touchtyping, so some of the game's difficulty-enhancing curveballs that seem to have been designed specifically to trip up home-row-technique users barely slowed me down.)
Storyline-wise, IPTT somehow managed to make the most sense while it was also at its goofiest... which is an achievement of dubious distinction, but an achievement nonetheless.
For those whose typing skills are insufficient, Google tells me there are at least two different "Let's Play" videos up on YouTube. So, you can still enjoy all the wackiness, even if you can't move your fingers fast enough to beat the game yourself.
Mild, non-plot spoiler:
There is a difficulty peak, eventually, after which � for me, at least � the typing challenges were still challenging, but not as hard as some previous "levels" had been. Again YMMV.
I only played to through to the end, and didn't go back to try to challenge myself further, but I suspect there's more humor coded in for those who do.
Update