It's a game that stays true to a very simple and effective form of play, yet constantly refreshes it with new twists. There's no need to collect every letter in every stage in order to continue, but it's not hard to do. From the Gregorian chants and illuminated monasteries of Gothic through Garamond and Didot to Clarendon's Western frontier gentrified by the arrival of the telegram wire, and into the 20th Century with Futura, Times and Helvetica, the font dictates the landscape, which in turn describes the gameplay. From there, each world is themed around a specific typeface and the real-world cultural changes it reflects. There are 10 stages, the first of which is a tutorial level which takes us from prehistory up to the development of written language. Both are intertwined at a deep level, indivisible. Just as Type:Rider is more than a game slapped on top of information, the information has not been crudely pasted on top of a game. Crucially, you could strip out all the visual style and the typographical theme and still have a wonderfully addictive game.īut you can't take the typography away, because the ingenuity flows both ways. There's a tactile quality to it - that essential yet ephemeral element that means every swoop, climb and leap tugs at your fingers from inside the screen. The physics and feel of the game are spot on, with a variety of touchscreen input options that never leave you feeling out of control.
The obvious stylistic movements are covered, along with more obscure influences. Yet one of Type:Rider's greatest surprises is that it's a fundamentally great game, regardless of its educational intent.
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Type:Rider was created on behalf of French cultural TV channel Arte and is accompanied by a touring exhibition, so you'd be forgiven for expecting something rather dry and academic, with gameplay tacked on as a last-minute sweetener. Rather than a motorbike, you're controlling a colon, turned on its side, and instead of barrels and ramps you're carefully navigating the curls and serifs of real-world typefaces on an interactive journey that begins with cave paintings and hieroglyphics and takes you all the way to the dawn of the digital age, via the Gutenberg press, Letraset and movable type. So, Type:Rider borrows the stylish silhouette aesthetic of Limbo but pairs it with the physics-battling traversal challenges of Trials. It always smacks of laziness to introduce a game by declaring it a meeting between two well-known titles, but when the result is "Limbo meets Trials" and its aim is to educate the player in the history of typography, it's hard not to bask in the sheer left-field genius of the combination.
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