Type:Rider (PlayStation 4) Review

Take control of two dots or a colon, as they embark on a quest through the history of typography. The game begins with rock paintings and hieroglyphics of Ancient Egypt as well as the earliest form of Cuneiform writing. Before too long, stages take a walk through the fonts of Gothic, Garamond, Didot, Clarendon, Futura, Times, Helvetica, and all the way to the pixel-based fonts of the modern era.

Each stage is designed in a clever way to encompass the visual tone and style of that era. The stages are created with a series of letters in that level's specific font. The letters can be traversed, used as platforms or obstacles, or are otherwise visually present. Each stage is a lot of fun to play through, while the two dots collect pages that detail the advent of each font type in the game. As well as collecting pieces of history, the alphabet can also be collected, with A right through to the letter Z displayed in the corresponding font of the stage. There is also a sneaky ampersand (&) that is hidden in every stage, and requires a bit of exploring and straying off the path to discover.

The stages are split into four sections, with the opening and the third sections being mainly platforming-specific stages, requiring a lot of jumps and wall-climbing, or in the case of the Clarendon stage a Wild West railway ride. The second and final phases of the stage take on a more puzzle-solving approach with a third dot, that needs to be pushed onto a pressure plate in order to open doors or complete the stage.

Clever level designs are consistent throughout the various stages, as the colons have to navigate through the annals of history. Specifically, the Times stage has a very clever printing section where the colons must make their way through a conveyor belt, as apostrophes are being "printed" onto the belt. Or the pixel-based stage where a game of Space Invaders pits the controlled colons as the Invaders needing to escape from the shooting ship, or when the colons must navigate their way through a game of Tetris without getting crushed by the falling blocks.