The Game That Requires Your Entire Keyboard to Play

Become one with the keyboard.

By Chloi Rad

Most games confine their inputs to just a few keys at a time — trusty old WASD (though some swear by ESDF), the reliable left shift, left control, Q, E, T, F, maybe a few number keys, and almost always the beloved spacebar. Throw some scattered hotkeys into the mix and even the arrow keys, and you’ve reached the extent of keyboard inputs for most PC games.

But Keyboard Sports isn’t most PC games. Keyboard Sports wants you to embrace the parts of the keyboard that don’t get much love — all those little nooks and corners between and around the Cool, Popular Keys. In Keyboard Sports, every key is important. And it’s a surprising amount of fun.

Through a series of silly minigames, Keyboard Sports slowly introduces you to the idea of using the entire keyboard as a controller. Each button press prompts your little character to scurry over to the corresponding area of the screen. A grid of a keyboard overlaid on the game space makes this easier to understand, but it’s still hard to get accustomed to at first. I felt strange wandering away from the home keys and the familiar comfort of WASD. Keyboard Sports forced me to unlearn my instinctual reliance on that side of the device, and once I did, it was liberating.

When Master QWERTY asked my character to clean up his trophy room, I gleefully slid my hand across the function keys, watching the player character follow my inputs across the arena, chucking little trophies out of his path along the way. When Master QWERTY asked me to fetch tea from the market across the road, I used keys on the far left and far right of the keyboard to weave between oncoming traffic; same thing when I was asked to shove excess cargo off an imbalanced plane or ski between falling debris back on land.

Surprisingly fun and charming.

After I’d learned how to master the art of the entire keyboard, things got more complicated. In one sequence, I had to trace a precise path across a room, following a spotlight like an ice skater in the rink. Another asked me to ground myself by holding down one key and then hitting another to fire off an arrow in that direction as waves of monsters closed in from every corner — and then keep it up as some keys began dropping into pools of lava, creating a simultaneous platforming challenge that made it even more frantic.

So far, Keyboard Sports has done a good job taking its core idea and running with it to a surprisingly fun and charming degree. I look forward to seeing what kinds of creative challenges its creators cooks up for the full game, which is set to launch this year.

Chloi Rad is an Associate Editor for IGN. Follow her on Twitter at @_chloi.

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