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You interact with computers all the time, but often it’s no longer through a keyboard. You might be tapping on your phone’s screen or yelling at a virtual assistant or swinging your arms in VR. But even though the tried-and-true keyboard may not be as important as it once was, it’s still beloved — and there’s a new slapstick game to prove it.
Called Keyboard Sports: The Final Tribute, the game isn’t actually a sports title; instead, it’s more of an adventure game where just moving around can be a challenge. Unlike most PC games, Keyboard Sports doesn’t just use a select few keys — instead, it utilizes all of them. In order to move around, you tap the key that corresponds with where you want to go, as each level takes place in an area about the size of your keyboard. It takes a bit of getting use to, and the game uses this strange control scheme in a lot of ways. Early on you need to clear out a room full of junk, but later you’ll be avoiding traffic like Frogger and trying to keep an airplane from crashing by moving back and forth.
The entire time I played the game I was acutely aware of the keyboard in front of me — and that’s the point. “You will almost feel like a kid who has discovered the keyboard for the first time,” says director Tim Garbos, “and this is important to us because it looks like the keyboard is slowly disappearing and the next generation might grow up without one — and who wants that?”
The current version of Keyboard Sports was developed as part of you’ll need to subscribe before the 4th. However, a longer, more fleshed-out experience is coming sometime next year if you want to wait. (Subscribers will also get the full version when it does launch.) The current version is playable on Windows, Mac, and Linux — and it’s unlikely it’ll be coming to any other platforms in the future.
“The game will never be available on Playstation, Xbox, iOS, Android, or virtual reality,” the developer says.
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