Coming off of the heals of Typoman: Revised, I had decided that Type:Rider by French developer Cosmografik, a platforming game based around fonts and typography seemed like the perfect follow up. I almost hate to use the comparison again to LIMBO, but that is kind of what it did remind me of, but if LIMBO took place in the pages of a book, seeing as you play as a rolling colon in stages rife with pits, hazards that chase you, and in the case of one area of a stage, someone shooting at you from off-screen.
At my age of Born During the Last Millennium, I have not played a lot of educational video games. Well, I take that back. I played a lot of Number Munchers, various iterations of The Oregon Trail, Where in the World (as well as Where in Time) is Carmen San Diego, but that was all before Y2K. And I did play Brain Age II on the DS quite a bit, maxing out at having played 365 days (not in-a-row though), and a typing game called Zty.pe, but you know what? I'm talking myself into a hole here. I apparently have been a fan of educational video games, to a certain extent, for a number of decades, tapering off as more-and-more were geared more towards younger kids. Type:Rider, on the other hand, is directed towards non-child-aged people, unless that six-year-old wants to know the history of the Helvetica font.
But there is so much more to Type:Rider than reading about how a particular font was created. It is also the history of communication and the use of communication as an art form, which is uncovered as you progress through the game, from cave paintings through the present (or at least the present as of 2013) day and trolls. For me, the information was presented in a way that felt engaging and not like I was being forced to read anything. When you acquire bits of history, described later, you are not immediately taken to the book-screen, but you are prompted to with out-of-the-way text. I would typically go to this screen, but only when I knew that I was in a safe place that would seem like a shock when I returned to the game.
Type:Rider is similar to Typoman: Revised in that it feels heavily influenced by LIMBO, but only in the feel of the game to a certain extent. Type:Rider is broken up into 10 stages including a prologue/tutorial level, each focusing on an influential font during a particular period of time while giving the history and context of that font in relation to historical events, typographers, and societal changes around that time; the Sociologist in me loves all of this. Each stage is essentially the same. You work your way through solving environmental puzzles in order to progress, all the while collecting alphabetical letters of that particular font, which act similar to bananas in Donkey Kong Country in that they point the way to go through the levels. Also scattered throughout the levels are asterisks that are usually easy to find, never requiring much if any backtracking.
It is these *'s that give you history and context to the font, and I feel like it is this mechanic in the game that elevates the game from a simple platforming game to something that could be used as an educational tool, and it could probably lose its audience if they are not attracted to reading or find reading during video games as cumbersome. After collecting an asterisk, you can go to a submenu where you read about some element of the font, the typographer who developed the font, or even someone a few generations before who influenced that typographer in the eventual development of that font. I personally had never put a whole lot of deep thought into the development of fonts and typefaces, although I am 100% serious that when I saw that the Garamond font was featured, I got audibly excited as it is one of my favorite fonts to use. I kid you not. I had no idea that the design of this font was nearly 500 years old. Sure I knew that printed type had been around for nearly 600 years, but the purposeful design of lettering I just took for granted.
Along with the 6 asterisks to collect in each stage, there is also a well-hidden ampersand (&) also in the font style for the stage. The &'s are usually take a bit of time to locate within the stage and you may never know which of the four areas of the stage it is hidden in. In [stage name] I did double back to locate the & after missing it, but for the most part, I felt that locating them was a little intuitive having spent the better part of the last 30 years playing video games.
The only negative thing I have to say is about the bonus stage which is not required to play, but it does bring fonts and typography into the modern age while going into the history of Comic Sans. The history of the font I was perfectly fine with, but the stage design played more like an aggravating level in Bit. Trip Runner where if you died, you had to start back at the beginning. What made this level sad for me, was that I was at first excited to play it since it played on a lot of early 2010s Internet culture including a glowing-eyed cat that chased your throughout most of the level, Internet Trolls, WTF culture, and what must have been an homage to Cheezburger.
Look Upon Me And Dispair!
On top of all that was a stupidly difficult stage that felt like you had to play it multiple times in order to figure out how everything worked against you, is a 180-degree shift from the rest of the game. I feel like I summed up the last level perfectly with a Tweet about it back on January 11th, that by the time I finished the level playing the game "became a difficult chore devoid of enjoyment."
I would say that with the exception of the aforementioned Comic Sans stage, I enjoyed everything that Type:Rider threw at me. At times, the platforming felt pretty inconsistent which I chalk up to the physics engine was used, combined with playing as an object that could be split (like having one period above a track and one below at the same time, sometimes to your advantage, but other times I would get caught up on pieces of the environment, unable to get enough momentum to move forward. But since Type:Rider was never set out to be a tight platformer, I feel like I can forgive them this transgression. Where Type:Rider did excel was presenting historical information about fonts, typefaces, and typographers into a video game that did not require Michael Bay levels of action to be interesting in a way that still maintained the integrity of history. There were times when I felt like I might have been reading a Wikipedia article since I am the kind of person that will deep dive into topics on Wikipedia, this was not an issue for me.
Type:Rider ended up taking me only about 3 hours, no part in thanks to the nearly XX minutes I spent in Comic Sans. I do not know if I would go back and replay the game for my own sake, but I am definitely going to try and get like-minded friends to play it because damn it, fonts are interesting!
I Almost Start To Weep
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