To Type a Tale is a game about typing your way through a choose-your-own-adventure story. Typing text is the main method of progressing the story, interacting with menus, choosing story branches, resolving challenges, and even dismissing in-game notifications. All text on-screen is typeable and all of it counts toward progression in the story.

The text of the story dynamically changes based on how much you have typed and which choices you have made, from the genre-expected changes in overall pages generated, to the much subtler single-word changes. Unlike traditional choose-your-own-adventure stories, choices you made several pages ago can affect the current text and available choices.