Type: Rider is a 2D platformer game where you play as the indomitable colon, making your way through the history of typography. Or, at least, levels with letters as building blocks for significant portions of them, with themes corresponding to various eras of printing, and collectible asterisks which unlock notes about the various eras of typography.
While the idea of a game about typography is vaguely interesting (and is the reason why I installed the game in the first place – with an offbeat premise like that, at least it has a hook), the game itself is actually quite bad.
The problem is really mechanical in nature; the colon is just not a very interesting thing to control. Or, more accurately, it is a somewhat interesting idea which, in practice, is really annoying to control because of the controls. The colon can jump, wall jump, can rotate around itself, and… that’s about it. The fact that it is two circles means that it can sometimes have its two halves separated by things, which is used as a sort of gimmicky thing a few times, but only a few portions of the game make use of dangling one circle below a thin platform and rolling along it.
Unfortunately, the actual mechanics are not very good. Controlling the colon is awkward due to an awkward amount of inertia, and it never felt very good to control the colon. The levels themselves are mostly very easy, with pretty generous checkpoints, with only the final two levels really posing any degree of significant challenge. However, even in the easier levels, the controls always feel clunky and unpleasant, and it is really just never a game that managed to make me say “Gee, I’m having fun.”
Even the little collectible bits of history didn’t particularly impress me; beyond not really showing off the font faces in a very interesting manner (the in-game explanatory text is actually all in the same font, rather than reflecting the various eras), it was just the sort of stuff I had already picked up off of Wikipedia.
The lone bright spot is the aesthetics; the game is very simple, but the levels actually look vaguely interesting on the whole, with some nice touches to help make the various levels look and feel a bit more “in the age” they’re supposed to be set in.
In the end, there is really not much here to recommend; the actual gameplay is clunky, the game overall is quite short (under 4 hours to 100%), and there’s just nothing particularly interesting here. An idea isn’t enough; a game actually has to be fun to play, and this game never really managed that.
.5