Pull a distorted letterform back onto its true outline by dragging Bézier handles, spending a strict budget of nodes you're permitted to move.
A grey ghost shows the target letter; your gold curve is warped off it. Drag the round handles to restore the letter, but you can only touch a limited number of nodes, so each move counts. Every puzzle is one of six letters: C, S, U, J, O or G.
Take the C on Normal. It is drawn as three curve segments joined end to end: four anchors that sit on the outline and six handles that steer the curve between them, ten points in all. Normal lets you touch seven, so at least three points have to stay where the warp left them.
Spend on anchors first. An anchor in the middle of the letter shapes the curve on both sides of it, while a handle bends only one segment. Drag the two middle anchors home, then the two ends, and the C is mostly back. That leaves three nodes for the handles that are visibly furthest out. Once a node is touched you can keep adjusting it for free, so fine-tune those before reaching for a new one.
If the curve turns green with two nodes still unspent, those two are worth 80 points, more than the 30 or so you would gain by nudging the match from 88% to 91%.
Reshape teaches how Bézier curves and control handles define a letterform, the core of digital type and vector art.
Restoring a warped letter toward a target outline while touching only a limited number of nodes is type design under the constraint real type designers work under.
The curves came from the car industry. In 1959 Paul de Casteljau, working at Citroën, developed a method for computing them; Citroën patented it in France, but it was not published until the 1980s. The French engineer Pierre Bézier found the same curves independently and publicised them in the 1960s while designing car bodies at Renault, which is why they carry his name: Bézier curves.
Letters followed. Adobe introduced its PostScript fonts in 1984, describing every glyph with cubic Bézier curves, the same kind Reshape uses: two anchors and two handles per segment. Apple's TrueType later chose simpler quadratic curves, which are faster to process but need more points for most shapes.
Fewer points make a better curve, which is counter-intuitive until you have drawn one. Every additional node is a place the outline can kink, so professional typefaces use remarkably few. Type-design tools teach the same discipline: the Glyphs font editor's guide to good paths tells designers to delete superfluous points and to put nodes at the curve's extremes, its highest, lowest, leftmost and rightmost spots.
Reshape is an original, free browser game made for PlayPendium: six letters, two ways to break them, and a daily puzzle that is the same for every player.