What Da Font: Tidy Up the Print Shop

Thieves turned over every case in the night. The master left for the Punchcutters' Fair at dawn, and you are the apprentice: alone in a 1920s print shop, lamps on, with lead type all over the floor.

This free demo opens the ground floor of the shop. Gather the scattered sorts, put your first typefaces back where they live, then set and print your first two posters on the press.

Put the shop back in order

Comb the ground floor: under the press, behind the machines, along the walls and into the corners. Every sort you pick up has a case waiting for it.

Read the lead

Nothing on a piece of type says where it lives. You read the letter itself: the serifs, the contrast between thick and thin, the slant of the axis, the shape of the g. Two faces are almost twins until you know what to look at.

Set it, ink it, pull it

A finished case gives up a key, and the key opens an iron box with a job inside. Set the text backwards and mirrored, lock the forme, print the poster, hang it on the wall. Look closely at every sheet: the master's safe will want to know what it hides.

In the demo

The ground floor of the print shop, free to explore

Two typefaces to tell apart by eye and put back in their cases

Two posters, composed letter by letter and pulled by hand on the press

Single player, first person, no timers and no fail state

In the full game

Two floors and around 5,000 sorts, ten typefaces and ten posters, a shop that slowly starts to answer, hidden tools to find and a safe whose combination your own wall spells out. Add What Da Font to your wishlist to know when the shop opens its doors, and tell us what you think of the demo in the discussions.