Typoman Revised (Switch) Review

ypoman Revised comes to the Nintendo Switch bringing it’s word puzzles and platforming action to a new audience.

Looking like a bastard child of Limbo and Scrabble, Typoman has you take control of a sentient cluster of letters, desperately traversing a series of trickier puzzles and environments. Mixing platforming action with light word puzzles is a unique twist and offers up some unique challenges and mechanics to deal with.

As you move through the world you will come across small jumbles of letters. Pushing or carrying these numbers to the right location, then forming a relevant word, will help solve a puzzle and allow progression in the level. For example pushing O and N together to spell ON will cause a lift to start moving. Or pushing letter together and hitting Y to organise them in to the word GASP will form a small protective bubble around Typoman that will allow him to move through an area full of poisoned gas.

The game looks and moves pretty well, using silhouette and line drawings to make the world look bleak and menacing. The twisted creatures that are hewn from the discarded letters around the level can be pretty creepy too. Level design does it’s best to offer subtly different areas but mostly the game is fairly onenote.

Aspects of Typoman Revised’s approach to puzzling are very clever and offer several methods to solve them. This flexibility in approach is to applauded despite the occasional frustrations it can cause. In fact frustration is a good word to use when describing interaction with Typoman’s world as often you’re left completely stumped by a situation that seems totally impossible.

An early example of this is the aforementioned area filled with toxic gases. You will try everything under the sun until it dawns on you to use letters from an area just shortly before… carrying them over and forming GASP will let you move through that area. Unfortunately this isn’t as straightforward as it should be and despite doing everything you think it correct you’ll make a break for the ladder to climb out of the gas field only to fie repeatedly. I think it was maybe the fifteenth time of doing this that I managed to just jump above the cloud and scrape through.

With games of this ilk these “aha!” moments are usually smugness inducing and let you feel like the struggle was all worth it. Unfortunately in Typoman they feel more like a “oh thank crap for that!” moment quickly followed by “what now!?”. It actively pushes you away from what is otherwise a serviceable platform puzzle game.

Final Thoughts

Typoman Revised has moments of satisfaction and puzzle genius. These are unfortunately wrapped up with some slightly sloppy controlling platforming and vague level / puzzle designs. Frustration quickly forms, not at your own inability, but as the game’s inability to tell you what it wants and how you can use the toolset it offers.

It’s a good distraction and offers a reasonable challenge whilst being a very unique product. It’s certainly something I could just about recommend to people looking for a short play title with a cerebral edge. It’s just a shame there are these massive difficulty/frustration spikes keeping the game from being as enjoyable as it could’ve been.