Dear Reader is a delightful game of wordplay

We do not write this way anymore, I think, and that is why Dear Reader works as well as it does. This is a game of “literary wordplay”, according to the title screen, and the game takes that idea extremely literally. You scroll through classic texts, scanning sentences and trying to fill the gaps from the selection of words you hold at the bottom of the screen. Or maybe the sentences are mixed up and you tap them to swap their places. Maybe it’s just words that are mixed up. Maybe there are single letters missing. Onwards and onwards.

Dear Reader makes such a simple idea work because it is always adding new ideas, new ways to meddle with the text laid out before you. But it also works because each writer has their own voice, which amounts to a texture that you learn to understand as you pick through their writing.

There’s more. It works because there’s a lovely range of things to do, including – a favourite of mine – a daily challenge. I did one of these a few minutes’ back, swapping and tapping through a piece of prose and then, at the end, as a sort of smug bonus, trying to guess which of three books it came from.