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. 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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