Horror games demand fast reflexes. What if your keyboard kept up? Split mechanical keyboards are uniquely suited to long gaming sessions, and horror games are uniquely suited to making the hours disappear.
Dead Letter Dept.
In Dead Letter Dept. you've moved to a new city. You’re just working this job to have a job. It's the graveyard shift, but it’s no big deal. This is just for a little while, until something better works out. It can’t be that bad.
Contract work is in a single lonely room. Type up addresses and correspondences that have nowhere to go into a system, and that’s your work.
Something starts to change, though. What is it about this one isolated computer in this little room that gets to you? You walk down the long corridors that seem to yawn endlessly into space down to your job every day-ahem, night.
And the computer you type on… gets weirder. Is it communicating something? Some text is breaking the fourth wall a bit...
Dead Letter Dept. is a different breed of typing game, taking on a psychological horror aspect. (On top of this the keyboard the game gives you is a 100%... I won’t dock points. It adds to the creepiness factor.)
True to narrative, you do indeed get great practice typing letter keys (alphas) but also numbers if you’re working on strengthening that skill. Or a great time to consider the Demod LM numpad. You’ll level up your typing, and maybe recognize if your devices are haunted as an added bonus.
My pick of keyboard for this game? Go for the Quefrency LM, with a combo of the Demod LM for all those numerical strokes.
The Typing of the Dead
Half-horror, half-comedy, The Typing of the Dead has such terrible voice acting you’d think it was done on purpose. For most gamers this adds to the experience and makes the wildly hilarious encounters with enemies even better. If you’re looking for some more intensity in improving your typing skills, consider zombie motivation.
Similar to other story-driven games, you’ll progress in little episodes that connect with an overarching narrative. Words act as your weapon to move through the levels. Type out a word in enough time to save yourself and your buddies!
Sometimes single words will be all you type, and sometimes comedic phrases are your method for heroically ending the apocalypse.
This typing game is a first-person shooter with ridiculous fun. And by ridiculous fun, I mean it is a game of its time with rough voice acting and blocky graphics that makes the absurdity somehow 3 times more wacky. Good times are meant to be had in your victories over zombies.
Typing of the Dead gives great practice on your alphas, with many time-sensitive challenges to keep you on your toes, and keep the zombies back! This game keeps you switching between short bursts and full phrases under pressure—exactly the kind of varied rhythm that a columnar-stagger split like the Iris LM is designed to handle comfortably over long sessions.
Stray
While STRAY is not necessarily horror, it shares some things in the Venn diagram of horror and dystopian-future narratives. With an adorable orange tabby cat as your perspective character, you traverse the Kowloon Walled City-inspired backdrop of a robot infused landscape.
Some screens know you’re a lost cat: “follow me” the screens say, along with an image unmistakably feline. Following the arrows to their ultimate destination grants you the travel robot B-12.
Bap. You bat at the little floating robot. Just to be sure it’s fine.
B-12 is thankful for your help, and says their battery is low. Kitty backpack, it is. …Which causes you to fall over. Mhm. The people who made this game know cats.
As you journey through this strange land devoid of humans, but very populated by humanoid robots, you climb through the leveled tiers to open up the city: helping both the robots and yourself.
STRAY presents an engaging environment and story, so improving your WPM on your keyboard merely happens as a matter of course.
If you’re looking to keep your adventures with robots comfy, go for our Deep Sea Pink Island Linears in one of our LM keyboards, built for typing ease, and quick travel.
What Remains of Edith Finch
Step into the role of Edith, who returns home after several years away in What Remains of Edith Finch.
You’re asked to determine: was the unresolved family drama just that, or was it truly a curse? You, as Edith, discover everything behind all the locked doors. Even if doors are not how to get into the rooms.
What Remains of Edith Finch maintains an eerie energy. Caution is impressed upon you much in the fashion of a haunted house narrative: the absence of life where there was once a large family is an energy that’s hard to evade.
A key was left to Edith per her mother’s will, but no mention as to what the key was for. This is one of many conversations her mother Dawn avoided.
Finally making your way into the house by doggy door, almost every room is closed and sealed. (You’d be forgiven thinking the key was to the front door.) Edith mentions she grew up thinking it was normal for every house to have some sealed off rooms. Talk about normalization. New family member? New addition to the house. Because of course.
She wanders into the one room with an open door—great uncle Walter’s room. A book, seemingly random in the space, sits in a recessed section of wall. Upon approaching the book, a lock is visible.
The key works.
What Remains of Edith Finch is a laid-back typing experience: you’ll use less of your keyboard, but you’ll get good practice on the keys you do use. It’s a great moment to alter inputs in VIA or QMK on your new keyboard. Because this game is more calm energy user-input-wise, this can be an opportunity to test jumping between layers while you play. Layer-jumping is one of the advantages of a programmable mechanical split keyboard.
This can be a great game to get used to an entirely new form factor keyboard, since you’ll have limited pressure on your timing and not much negative consequence for needing to ease into things. A great pick to play this game is the Nyquist LM, a keyboard that respects your hands' biomechanical design.
Bioshock
Combine art deco steampunk, underwater ruins, and superhuman abilities to get Bioshock. But that’s only the surface level of its astounding depths.
A classic from 2007, Bioshock features a dystopian world that has been falling apart for some time. You are Jack, the lone survivor of a plane crash in the mid-Atlantic. But the only way forward is downward, into the deep. The bowels of the underwater city of Rapture.
Art deco-inspired in its alluring design combined with destruction, Rapture will have you fight people who have morphed into husks of their former selves.
At first, you only have access to a wrench. Exploring the ruined city, you gain more options. Options like guns and plasmids. Plasmids alter your genes and will keep your fingers moving quickly on your keyboard. Trust me: a lot of great strategies involve using both, which means switching between them as fast as possible.
Your enemies were once human. Splicers follow Ryan’s orders—dancing to his rhythm thanks to their dependence on a substance he has supplied them. Some ghosts that loiter in the space give hints as to how their lives were upturned.
Whether you’ve never played this game or have played it a million times, the narrative and twists are engaging from a number of angles. The game can be as simple as following the directives. Or go for broke, hack robots to serve you, find every audio diary, every tonic… Or just check out the meticulous spreadsheet someone shared over here on Reddit for all the Collectibles.
Bioshock is a heart-pounding dystopian horror FPS game with a mind for getting you unsettled in your environment. With moments guaranteed to have you hitting your keys as hard as possible (don’t worry if you need a new switch—hotswaps on a mechanical keyboard makes replacing switches a cinch!) and fight beasties that will keep you on the edge of your seat (and your keyboard halves). The halves I’d specifically recommend for this game are from the upcoming Sinc LM, have everything you need in low-profile to quickly raze down the monsters this game throws at you.
Honorable Mention: DREDGE
Discover the dark creatures of the deep that mirror the secrets you once knew but forced yourself to forget. The game loop of DREDGE has a simple beauty to it that grows with progression: you catch fish, sell them, and upgrade your boat. The more upgrades you have, the more… curious creatures you can catch.
For being a game noted as a cozy game by many reviewers, there is a good depth (pun intended) to both the narrative, as well as the amount of things to discover. With your Encyclopedia, you keep a log of every creature you find, similar to the Pokédex in Pokémon.
I definitely got the same warning from the Mayor every gamer gets to “be back before sundown.” Guess who spent too much time exploring? Hm, there’s this… eyeball that looks around under the clock once the sun goes down…
The blue eye communicates spooks are going to start happening. It’s part of your sanity meter, per this Steam user. I haven’t played that many games featuring Eldritch/Lovecraftian horrors, but from that thread, it seems that a form of sanity meter is a relatively common thing: as you see more crazy things, your sanity begins to slip.
The large, scary beasties like this one will show up to harass you, but if that's SUPER not your thing, you can engage in the game in “passive mode.”
But you have to be careful. If you’re not catching trouble, trouble might just catch you. With that kind of sinister energy, you’ll want to wrangle it with the Iris SE: an MX deep press that will make long fishing sessions easier on your wrists.
Next time, I'll cover some mountain climbing games that are perfect for settling into your split keyboard for a gaming session. It's resource management of a different caliber when you're on the side of a mountain...
Disclaimer: Even though it'd be super cool for Keebio to be affiliated with these game creators, we are not. Please choose your learning tools at your own discretion.
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