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I write nearly every day, and for much of the last eight years, I've had to write a lot, and I've had to write fast. So when one of Steam Next Fest's breakout hits was a battle royale game about typing as fast as possible, I figured I was in with a good shot.
Final Sentence is an unsettling proposition. Placed in front of a realistic typewriter in a darkly-lit room, your job is to type out the sentences provided to you as fast as possible, with as few mistakes. If you make too many mistakes, a masked figure in a trenchcoat will play a one-sided game of Russian Roulette with you. And if you're not the first of your roomful of fellow typists to finish, he'll simply shoot you in the head.
It's a take that understands the core conceit of the battle royale genre - that this is often a brutal, pointless waste of life - better than most games. There's no fanfare, no bravado, just the feeling that a single mistake could mean a bullet in your head. Typing out a series of relatively simple sentences, usually memes or famous film references, sounds simple. But a single typo takes you back to the start of the line. Three mistakes, and your personal silent sentinel loads up a bullet, taking his sweet time to do so, and all but guaranteeing you don't come out on top at the end.
All around you, you can see other poor unfortunates risking the same fate. You can hear the clatter of their keys echoing around the room, or the 'ting' of the typewriter as they get to the end of a line. You can also hear the click of an empty chamber, or the shot ring out as someone gets unlucky. In the dank, dark, industrial room, there's no clemency - you don't even get to hear people beg for their lives as they hold up a hand in front of their killer.
All you've got to try and distract you are the words in front of you, but Final Sentence rarely lets you get swept up in the narrative. References to ancient memes like 'Can I haz cheeseburger' or 'all your base are belong to us' are immaculate placements - you might know these phrases, but you're almost certainly not used to that being how you lay out the English language, especially when you're going as fast as possible with no room for mistakes. You might know the line 'help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi', but how often do you have to type that name out perfectly?
To make matters worse, you can see the impact of every mistake you make. A progress bar above you shows off just how well - or poorly - everyone else is doing, which means that once you've made enough mistakes, the anonymous marker racing away through the final section of the challenge is a death sentence, and all you can do is pray on their downfall and hope your words-per-minute score is enough to close the gap. Which is exactly what I found myself doing several times - I might be a writer, but apparently my WPM is not quite up to snuff. I'd normally be desperately trying to claw back the deficit of even just one or two minor mistakes while watching the eventual winner getting home safe. Third or fourth in a field of a few dozen isn't bad, but it's not good enough to survive, and Final Sentence humbled me on that front many times over. It's a brutal, bizarre spin on the battle royale, and while it certainly won't be for everyone, it's captured what it's trying to be very well indeed.
Find a slightly happier experience with our list of the best battle royale games.
