REVIEW: Type:Rider
Type:Rider is a beautiful game about the history of typography. It is obvious that much love and care was put into its visual aesthetic. Each level is a collage-like smattering of gigantic letters, mixed in with the imagery and visual artistry that we associate with that era in history. For instance, the Clarendon level explores the evolution of slab serifs in the 19th century, throwing you into the Wild West among mine carts, wanted posters, and a bounty hunter's roving crosshair, out to end you. The Futura level explores the "function over form" design of the Bauhaus School and the experimental typography of many modernist movements, littering the level with the colorful deconstructivist shapes of Malevich and Arp. The music and sounds of each level are also lovingly composed on top of that. There's a great deal of visual and auditory pleasures to enjoy while playing this game; it's just too bad that playing it for the gameplay is an experience that starts with disappointment and ends with frustration.
In keeping with the theme of type, your player character is a colon (:) that rolls and bounces about each level to collect the 26 letters of each font's alphabet and asterisks which unlock different facts in that level's book. It’s a creative idea and the colon was probably the best choice of punctuation mark around which to design.
Despite the strength of the idea, the bottom falls out of the entire execution very quickly. Sometimes you will just not roll fast enough, weighed down by being awkwardly long and flat. Jumping can be a nightmare as the colon's physics can seem random and capricious, causing you to restart certain sections over and over again because it decided to bounce this way instead of that way or jumped from the wrong end, sending you backwards into a hazard.
The levels seem to have been designed and tested with a placeholder player character instead of this unwieldy one. Sometimes you are expected to land flat on the dot of a giant "i," but the square is simply not long enough to hold you, dropping you to your death over and over until you land it just right. Some of the more challenging sections in the game involve passing moving hazards in a rhythm – certainly possible for a character that takes up a square hitbox, but infuriatingly difficult with the character you have. Neat level design such as rogue pixels in the Pixel section or the smashing pistons of the Times section are regrettably remembered as design flaws because of this shortcoming. The game consistently presents you with a nice amount of "game" for what is basically an edutainment title, only to immediately give you too much "game" and ruining the flow of something that should have been enjoyable and relaxing.
It's also disappointingly evident that the game half and the educational half were worked on by two different teams. I've already mentioned the easily recognized love and care in the visual design. However, the facts you pick up about each historical era of typography read, at best, as lazy rehashes of a Wikipedia article. The worst are the entries that just throw a bunch of names and dates at you without truly looking at the importance and influence of those people and events. There's a distinct lack of discussion about the design benefits of each font. Typos are almost ubiquitous and most are glaringly obvious. Did no one proofread this?
Type:Rider is such a beautiful game to look at and listen to; it's a shame that I can't honestly recommend it since all that looking and listening would have to happen while attempting to play it. The game design is not lacking in interesting ideas, but they could have been less lazy in testing them. The first line you see in the credits sequence tells you that the game was created by Cosmografik, with their company name kerned incorrectly. Surely there was room to try harder.
