In each level there are 26 letters of the alphabet to find (represented in each respective font), a well-hidden ampersand sign, and six or seven asterisks, which unlock informative history lesson passages that can be viewed in the main menu gallery, and which shed some light on how the world of typography has managed to shape and evolve with advancements in technology throughout the years. Perhaps the biggest draw and replayability factor of Type:Rider resides in the many collectables you’ll be tasked to find. The controls are as basic as moving left or right and jumping, and the game gives you three different touchscreen or tilt-based setups to let you really find your groove. Although the bulk of Type:Rider is more about the experience, rather than the gameplay, you’ll still be met with a few nice platforming sections and the occasional interactive puzzle or two: the latter of which are always extremely unique, and involve you getting a third white circle into a three-pronged ground slot, along with your two controllable punctuation marks. These are just a few of my many favorite moments throughout my Type:Rider adventure, and I was constantly amazed at every turn by how rich and engrossing the slight changes in scenery managed to be, and how the letters themselves were always incorporated into the platforming segments in fresh and exciting new ways. Throughout the course of your journey towards the modern day of typing, you’ll experience the whirling mind work and ideas concurrent with the Didot period you’ll ride mine carts and dodge the bullets of a Wild Western shootout in the Clarendon era you’ll traverse an industrial world of grinding gears and churning typewriters by the time you get to Times New Roman and you’ll ski down the marvelous snowy white slopes in front of a blood-red sky during the Helvetica chapter. And luckily, writing fanatic or not, Type:Rider serves to provide one of the most whimsical and artistic adventures you’re likely to ever experience on a mobile game device today.įor such a relatively short game, the sheer amount of variety in Type:Rider is simply astounding, and each level serves as a wonderful visual homage to a different era in the history of typography. So the idea of a Limbo-like mobile game that focused on the entire history of typography, and that let you play as two punctuation marks no doubt, seemed more than right up my alley. I have a long personal history with words and different types of fonts myself: after all, I read, write, and edit articles all day long here at Gamezebo, and then by night I take graduate courses about the publishing industry. They say a picture can be worth a thousand words, but as I’ve learned already this week, a mobile game can sometimes speak for centuries.

Typerider levels