Oct 252023
Today, we’re actually going to discuss a game that I’ll probably never finish but still want to give a shout-out in this year’s spooky celebration.
The Textorcist: The Story of Ray Bibbia is a bullet hell typing game in which you play as an exorcist standing against the forces of darkness.
Your demonic foes attack with tons of projectiles that you must dodge, and your means of fighting back is to perform exorcisms – by typing out the words as they appear.
(…It just occurred to me while writing this post that the forces of hell use bullet hell attacks; that has to be intentional.)
This is a bizarre blend of genres in which you’ll frantically dodge projectiles until you get a brief window between attacks, at which point you’ll type as fast as many words as you can before you need to dodge again. Of course, you can also try typing with one hand while you dodge.
If you get hit, you drop your Bible and need to retrieve it to continue typing. If you take too long to get it back, however, you’ll need to start your current prayer over from the beginning. And if you get hit when you aren’t holding the Bible, you lose one of your precious hearts.
The Textorcist is a little creepy, pretty funny, and such a unique idea that I can’t help but love it… but it’s also brutally hard.
I’ve never been much of a bullet hell player, and dodging all those attacks while finding time to type in between pushed the limits of what I can do. Fights also take a while, as they’re all lengthy boss fights and sometimes have dialogue partway through. Lose all your hearts, and you start the fight over. The game also only saves after each battle, so if you take a break from a fight and quit the game, you’ll need to watch the preceding scenes again.
(Technically you can skip dialogue, but it seems like it won’t skip anything with animations, so you need to rewatch some parts and skip multiple times if you’re repeating a scene.)
The Textorcist is a unique game that I wish I could finish, and maybe someday I’ll return to it, but right now the frustration of attempting these boss fights over and over and over caused me to reluctantly set it aside. However, if you love typing and bullet hell games, it’s well worth a look.
Not gonna lie, I was totally sold on the premise of this game until you mentioned how impossibly hard it is. Darn it!
If Undertale taught me anything, it’s that I’m not great at bullet hell.
And Undertale is pretty friendly in terms of bullet hell games! There are way worse ones, and most of the most challenging ones in Undertale were hidden or semi-hidden bosses anyway, plus you can at least get items to some degree to help out if you get hit too often. This one sounds way too brutal for my tastes, but it’s an interesting concept (and I love the name hahaha )
Yeah, I’d say The Textorcist is significantly harder than the bullet hell aspect of Undertale. It’s a very neat concept, but definitely not for everyone.
Honestly I forgot how bullet hell like Undertale can be. I suppose going through the pacifist route or whatever makes it more difficulty that way. Unless i’m completely misremembering. I gotta get back to that game
I think the genocide route is actually harder, at least eventually.
This game seems SUPER interesting but my god I can already see myself getting frustrated with it.
Yes, it’s a very unique and fun idea, but it’s quite difficult.