EPOMAKER × Human Fall Flat HE108 Review: A Gaming Keyboard You'll Want to Work On

Human: Fall Flat recently turned ten, and it got a rather unexpected anniversary gift. No, not another figurine, mouse pad, or set of themed stickers, but a full-fledged gaming keyboard: the EPOMAKER × Human Fall Flat HE108. And there's a lot more to it than the design. Beneath all the funny little characters, clouds, and dogs sits a proper Hall Effect keyboard with 108 keys, magnetic switches, Rapid Trigger, adjustable actuation, SOCD, DKS, an 8000 Hz polling rate, and a massive 10,000 mAh battery.

Rather than just running through the feature list, I used the HE108 as my main keyboard for work, including writing this review, and for playing Escape from Tarkov and single-player games. I also tested Rapid Trigger separately in Valorant. Somewhere along the way, I realized that the HE108's best feature had nothing to do with its looks. This thing is ridiculously satisfying to type on.

Still, let's start with the collaboration, since you can buy a regular HE108 without all the little characters. The Human: Fall Flat version is part of the FALLEN Series, released by EPOMAKER for the game's tenth anniversary. The white-and-blue color scheme is inspired by the sky and clouds, while Human: Fall Flat characters are scattered all across the keyboard.

Shift, Enter, the spacebar, Tab, Caps Lock, and several other larger keys each have their own illustrations. The Escape key is styled after the exit sign between levels, and the legends use the game's signature font. Even the box continues the theme instead of looking like generic packaging with a game logo slapped on at the last minute.

I like that the design doesn't scream, "LOOK, IT'S A GAMING KEYBOARD!" There are no aggressive angles, fake carbon fiber, or red stripes. If anything, it looks almost relaxing, which fits Human: Fall Flat perfectly.

Sure, if you've never played the game, the little characters may come across as a bit childish or overly cute. It took me only a couple of days to get used to them. More importantly, the artwork doesn't turn the keys into an unreadable mess: the main legends are perfectly clear during the day, although there is one issue with the lighting that I'll get back to later.

The included accessories cover the essentials, with a few extras thrown in. Inside the box you'll find a detachable braided USB-A to USB-C cable, two spare magnetic switches, additional keycaps, and a combination keycap/switch puller. The 2.4 GHz receiver is hidden beneath one of the flip-out feet. It's an unexpected hiding spot, but it gives the dongle a secure home when you're carrying the keyboard around.

The keyboard itself weighs around 1.2 kg, and it feels every bit of it. Despite the plastic case, the HE108 doesn't feel cheap at all. I deliberately tried twisting it and pressing hard on the center: nothing creaks, shifts around, or flexes to any meaningful degree. It stays firmly planted on the desk, too.

The HE108 uses a gasket mount, a polycarbonate plate, a flex-cut FR4 PCB, and several layers of sound-dampening material. The typing angle can be set to 6, 8, or 10.5 degrees. The flip-out feet have a second, smaller set nested inside them. It looks a little odd, but works perfectly well. I ended up using the highest setting and never felt the need for a wrist rest.

I also really appreciate the layout itself. With so many Hall Effect gaming keyboards opting for 60%, 65%, and 75% layouts, it's nice to see EPOMAKER go with a full 108-key board, complete with a numpad, arrow keys, and extra function keys. For someone who does more than just play games at their PC and spends a lot of time working with text, that's a huge advantage.

I don't use the numpad particularly often, but on a desktop PC I still prefer having one available. You also get proper arrow keys, volume controls, mute, and even a dedicated calculator button. That last one seemed like a novelty until I found myself using it all the time. Eventually, I unpinned Calculator from my Windows taskbar altogether.

What impressed me most about the HE108 wasn't playing Valorant or switching to an 8000 Hz polling rate. It was simply using it for work. The keyboard uses linear EPOMAKER Creamy Jade magnetic switches. They're factory-lubed, with a light initial force of around 30 gf that rises to roughly 55 gf at bottom-out. Total travel is around 3.3 mm.

Each keystroke feels extremely smooth, with no unwanted bumps or scratchiness. Just as importantly, the keys spring back quickly and cleanly, without feeling loose or mushy. The keycaps barely wobble, and larger keys such as the spacebar, Shift, Enter, and Backspace are well stabilized.

Honestly, I don't think I've ever enjoyed just typing on a keyboard this much. The HE108 makes you want to press keys just for the sake of it. Your fingers quickly settle into a rhythm, the keys return cleanly, and the sound keeps tempting you to type one more paragraph. I did, after all, write this entire review on it.

The sound deserves some attention of its own because magnetic keyboards don't always sound particularly good. They may be fast, but some of them sound like a box full of springs. The HE108 is a different story. It sounds deep and muted, much closer to the "thock" keyboard enthusiasts chase than a high-pitched, plasticky "clack." There's barely any hollow case resonance, and I couldn't hear any metallic spring ping either. Even the spacebar sounds well damped, so hitting it doesn't feel like the acoustic equivalent of slamming a pot lid.

You can hear a difference between the smaller and larger keys, of course, but they all share the same overall sound. And that's exactly what separates a well-tuned keyboard from one where the letter keys sound great, while every press of Enter suddenly sounds like a gunshot and wakes up the neighbors.

The keycaps are made from PBT and use the Cherry profile. They have a pleasant, lightly textured finish that keeps my fingers from slipping. Over the test period, the plastic picked up very little of that familiar greasy shine. None of the themed artwork showed any visible wear either.

There is one odd thing about the lighting, though. The LEDs are south-facing and do a great job illuminating the space between the keys, but the Human: Fall Flat legends themselves barely shine through. If you type while constantly looking at the keyboard, that can be annoying at night. I've been touch-typing for years, so I noticed it more as a technical quirk than a real drawback.

Now we get to the reason this keyboard has "HE" in its name in the first place. With a conventional mechanical switch, the actuation point is defined by the switch itself. Hall Effect works differently: a magnetic sensor tracks the position of the stem, so the keyboard effectively knows exactly how far down each key has been pressed.

On the HE108, actuation can be adjusted from 0.1 to 3.3 mm, individually for each key, in increments as small as 0.005 mm. That number sounds impressive, but I wouldn't buy this keyboard for that 0.005 mm figure alone. Installing the software doesn't suddenly give your fingers that kind of precision. What's far more useful is being able to radically change how the keyboard behaves.

For gaming, you can make WASD extremely sensitive while setting the other keys to actuate farther down. For work, you can do the opposite and move the actuation point to around 2–3 mm so a light brush of a key doesn't leave you with an unwanted letter. The difference between 0.1 mm and several millimeters is enormous. At the minimum setting, I regularly triggered keys by accident while typing.

Rapid Trigger is even more important. Instead of relying on a single fixed reset point, the key deactivates almost as soon as your finger starts moving back up and can trigger again on the next downward movement. I could feel the difference in Valorant.

When rapidly switching between A and D, my character felt quicker to respond, with more immediate changes of direction. I didn't suddenly start shooting better or winning every duel. It would be ridiculous to promise something like that from a keyboard. But movement really does feel more responsive, and after a few matches, going back to a regular mechanical board feels slightly more sluggish.

In Escape from Tarkov, the effect is much less dramatic. There, I care far more about predictable input during long sessions and avoiding an accidental movement at the worst possible moment. In single-player games, I rarely felt any need for Rapid Trigger at all.

Beyond Rapid Trigger, there's also Snap Key or SOCD, DKS, and Mod Tap. The first lets you define which input gets priority when two opposing directions are pressed at the same time. DKS can assign up to four actions to a single key depending on how deeply you press it and how the key is moving, while Mod Tap lets you assign different actions to a tap and a hold.

I kept Rapid Trigger enabled. Adjustable actuation proved useful too. DKS and Mod Tap, on the other hand, are nice features to have, but I suspect most owners will configure them once out of curiosity and then forget about them.

You also need to be careful with SOCD because the rules depend on the game. Valve, for example, prohibits this kind of hardware-assisted automation in Counter-Strike 2, so simply having the feature doesn't mean you should blindly enable it in every competitive shooter.

EPOMAKER advertises polling rates of up to 8000 Hz over both USB and the included 2.4 GHz receiver. Bluetooth is limited to 125 Hz. According to the company, latency is 0.2 ms over USB, 0.4 ms over 2.4 GHz, and 8 ms over Bluetooth.

Whether I used USB or 2.4 GHz, inputs felt instant. I didn't notice any latency or missed inputs during testing, so I ended up gaming wirelessly almost all the time. As for 8000 Hz, it's nice to have that extra headroom, but far from the strongest reason to buy the HE108. On a regular monitor and outside competitive gaming, the difference compared to a good 1000 Hz keyboard is much harder to notice than switching to Rapid Trigger or changing the actuation point.

All of the main features are configured through EPOMAKER Driver. You can remap keys, create macros, adjust lighting, actuation points and dead zones, and enable Rapid Trigger, DKS, Mod Tap, and Snap Key. Settings are stored in onboard memory, so there's no need to keep the software running all the time.

EPOMAKER also has a browser-based Hub that, in theory, lets you configure devices without installing separate software. It didn't work with my HE108, though. It detected the keyboard but reported that the model wasn't supported yet, so I had to use EPOMAKER Driver to access all the settings.

The software can be a little intimidating at first, with its sheer number of settings and labels like DKS, MT, SOCD, and Dead Zone. Once you understand what each feature does, though, configuring them is fairly straightforward. The keyboard lets you obsess over microscopic actuation values and build some ridiculous DKS setup if you want to, but it never forces you to.

The HE108 can connect in three ways: USB-C, the 2.4 GHz receiver, or Bluetooth 5.0. Between those connection modes, it supports up to five devices.

Switching is quick. In my experience, it reconnected almost immediately over both Bluetooth and 2.4 GHz, although I ended up using the receiver almost exclusively for gaming. Bluetooth is perfectly fine for a work laptop or tablet. For competitive gaming, I'd still choose 2.4 GHz or a cable, if only because those modes support the maximum polling rate.

RGB lighting isn't limited to the individual keys either. There are additional light strips along the sides of the case. You get plenty of effects, brightness and speed controls, static colors, and the option to turn the lighting off completely. I usually disable RGB on peripherals fairly quickly, but I left it enabled here.

The Human: Fall Flat Edition looks nice without RGB, but the soft glow between the white and blue keys is what really ties the whole design together. I especially liked the effect where a wave of color spreads outward from whichever key you press. Combined with the sound of the Creamy Jade switches, it feels oddly like splashing through colored water with your fingertips. Unfortunately, all that eye candy comes at a cost in battery life. Inside is a massive 10,000 mAh battery. EPOMAKER claims up to 32 hours with the lighting enabled, up to 500 hours without RGB, and around 1000 hours of standby time.

I obviously didn't spend 500 hours testing that claim. Otherwise, this review would've had to wait until the next Human: Fall Flat anniversary. But after a week of using it as I normally would, the battery level had barely dropped. Automatic sleep helps a lot: the software lets you choose how long the keyboard waits before going to sleep in wireless mode. Get up from the PC and the keyboard goes to sleep. Come back, hit Space, and it's ready to go again.

The battery percentage is visible in the software, and there's also a dedicated low-battery indicator next to Escape. It's a small thing, but I much prefer that to trying to guess how much charge is left based on some blinking RGB pattern.

When I first took the EPOMAKER × Human Fall Flat HE108 out of the box, I thought I knew what to expect: a regular HE108 with some nice game-themed keycaps. Human: Fall Flat fans would be happy, and everyone else would look at the pictures and move on. As it turns out, the appeal goes well beyond fans of the game.

The themed design really is excellent, but it isn't the reason the keyboard stayed on my desk. The HE108 is well built, sounds fantastic, feels fantastic to type on, and has just about every feature you'd expect from a modern magnetic gaming keyboard.

Rapid Trigger makes a noticeable difference in fast-paced shooters, while adjustable actuation makes it easy to set up different profiles for gaming and work. Features such as 8000 Hz polling, DKS, Mod Tap, and SOCD are more enthusiast-oriented. The average player will probably never need half of them.

What matters more is that for roughly $100, you're not getting a collector's trinket with a USB cable bolted on as an afterthought. You're getting a proper 108-key Hall Effect keyboard with reliable wireless connectivity, a huge battery, and one of the nicest typing experiences I've had on any keyboard.

There are drawbacks. The minimum 0.1 mm actuation setting is almost useless for ordinary typing, the legends on the themed keycaps are hard to see at night, the full-size case takes up plenty of desk space, and most of the advanced Hall Effect features are aimed at a fairly niche audience.

By the end of testing, though, my verdict was clear. The EPOMAKER × Human Fall Flat HE108 is a very good keyboard first and a nice gift for Human: Fall Flat fans second. And honestly, that's probably the best outcome a collaboration like this could have had.

Flawless Build. Despite its plastic case, the HE108 feels exceptionally solid. Nothing creaks or flexes noticeably, the keyboard stays firmly planted on the desk, and even the larger keys are well stabilized.

Eye Candy. The Human: Fall Flat edition does much more than simply add themed keycaps. The white-and-blue color scheme, character artwork, and RGB lighting all work together to give the keyboard a distinctive look without making it feel overly flashy.