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So, if Line Rider is already free to play, what is InXile adding to the experience? Primarily, there’s a 40-level story mode that stars main line-riding man Bosh (named after the original game’s creator, Boštjan Èadež) as well as a love interest known as Bailey and a nemesis named Chaz. Each level is a puzzle of sorts. You’ll have a mostly completed course in front of you, with a mandate to fill in the gaps and get Bosh from beginning to end. The catch is that certain sections of the track are highlighted in green, and those are the only areas you can draw in. In some cases you’ll have to get creative to find the solution with only a minimal number of additions to the course. There will be collectible tokens in most levels that you can cash in later for unlockables (the nature of which hasn’t been revealed yet).

To solve these puzzles, the designers at InXile have added quite a few new kinds of lines to your repertoire. There are new line types that will cause Bosh to speed up or slow down as he travels over them. Others are breakable and will take your speed into account, whereas still others will act as a trampoline. The game will contain a “freestyle” mode that reprises the blank-slate nature of the original Flash game; you can draw whatever you want and let Bosh run the course. These new line types are naturally available for use in that mode, too, where you’ll also see contextual hints that help you figure out the interface.

The freestyle mode will let you save your course designs, and then you can share those designs online with other players using the same version of the game. This online sharing interface will get all Web 2.0 with user ratings, comments, and so on, so you can find the best designs easily. On the PC, you’ll even be able to output to an .avi file an animation of your course being run (which you could then easily upload to a video-sharing site such as YouTube), and you’ll find a font editor that will let you create your own custom typefaces and then insert those into your levels as well.

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