Last updated on December 11th, 2025 at 05:40 am
Dear Reader – Puzzle Game Review
Dear Reader is a Puzzle game from Local No. 12, LLC, first launched in 19th September 2019.
It’s rated 12+ and currently has 554+ ratings on the App Store.
What Makes Dear Reader Stand Out
• Play with more than a hundred classic books
• Unlock dozens of ways to Wordplay
• Acquire new books from a rotating selection in the Bookstore
• Earn Rare Books by completing challenging Reading Goals
• Embark on Research missions to unlock special abilities
• Puzzle through increasingly difficult Daily Challenges
“If I’m not actually reading in my down time then I’m likely playing Dear Reader.” -one of our dear players
Dear Reader lets you curl up and play your favorite books, turning classic literature into clever word puzzles. Unscramble passages from famous books, unlock unique puzzles, and add new books to your library.
Dear Reader includes over 130 literary classics and dozens of different types of word puzzles, from unscrambling anagrams to swapping lines of text. Dear Reader is the first and only game where you can play with the actual written words of so many tempting books of classic literature!
As Game Developer’s Alissa McAloon wrote, Dear Reader is “a game that’s as difficult to put down as a good book.”
Best Apple Arcade Games, IGN
Top 5 Apple Arcade recommended games, Bustle Magazine
12 Best Apple Arcade games, Gamespot
10 Best Mobile Games of the Year, Paste Magazine
Official Finalist, IndieCade
Official Selection, Indie Megabooth GDC Showcase
Official Selection, Wordplay Festival
Best Gameplay Finalist, Games for Change
Best Meaningful Play, International Mobile Gaming Awards
This Puzzle game offers engaging gameplay and regular updates for mobile players.
Player Feedback
As a newer release, Dear Reader is building its player community. Early feedback suggests .
Recent Updates & Development
Latest Update: 10th September 2025
Recent improvements include:
New stories await, Dear Readers! This update brings you:
Around the World in 80 Days, by Jules Verne,
How to Grow the Peanut, by George Carver,
Millions of Cats, by Wanda Gág,
The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet, by William Shakespeare!
Also in this release: small fixed and adjustments, including an easier Sunday Daily Challenge.
Download & Availability
Dear Reader is available through the official App Store for iOS devices.
Requirements: Requires iPhone 5s / iPad Air / iPad Air (Cellular) / iPad Mini 2 (Retina) / iPad Mini 2 (Retina, Cellular) / iPhone 6 / iPhone 6 Plus / iPad Air 2 / iPad Air 2 (Cellular) / iPad Mini 3 or later.
Compatible with iPhone and iPad devices.
Player Experience Highlights
Community Insight:
Love the game, its fun and engaging, easy to pick up and burn through some chapters whenever you have a couple minutes, loads fast even when connection is spotty. We do have some complaints, however we understand these border on personal preference and while they irk us a bit, its minor enough that we dont feel it should warrant a lower rating. Chief among our complaints is the Editors Notes at the end of some chapters. The Editors/Devs seem entirely too focused on being snarky and progressive, rather than providing fun, interesting, or useful tidbits. Its egregious enough that you can just feel it coming depending on whatever youre reading. Do we really need constant reminders from Editors about feminism while im already reading a feminist work? Do we need a nudge in every piece of pre-1900s male-produced reminding us that things werent great for women or minorities in the past? Its not about the content or stance, its that Im being bludgeoned with things we already know when that time could be spent explaining specific information about a particular chapter or book. For example, in Gullivers Travels theres a note about the context of Englands global expansion. Cool, we didnt know that, thats interesting. But then in something like The Scarlet Letter the notes boil down to smh, men right? Its low effort and annoying making points that dont need to be made because theyre universally understood. Another irritation is how the daily challenges reward you for diversifying what youre reading, which has the downside of essentially punishing you for wanting to remain focused. To get the maximum amount of daily challenge points, you have to complete challenges across nine different books. Maybe its not an issue for some, but we cant keep track of nine ongoing plots, and we dont think its fair to be punished for it. Not to mention that in all likelihood, due to requirements of the challenges, itll far exceed nine books if you attempt the challenges multiple days in a row. We think we have around 20 ongoing books, of which there are three that im mainly focused on. Will we remember what ive already read in the other books by the time Im ready to make them our focus? Probably not.
What a joy to find this app. Im incredibly impressed with the layout and design. Encouraging readers to revisit the classics or pick up and read for the first time such wonderful books is to be congratulated. The diversity of book titles is amazing. Im reminded of the joy in finding and reading many of this books in our youth. Thank you for designing an app which is actually educational and interesting.
We love this game. We read a lot and we hope to get Little Women on here. We also have a suggestion. There should be an option to favorite books and chapters. Love this app.
We are thoroughly enjoying this game but we cannot fully recommend it due to one key flaw. As you play through the levels, there is no easy way to read what lies in between the excerpts. Of course you could separately acquire a copy (the app does link you to the text) but it would be a very useful feature if there was a mode you could turn on that would allow you to read whats in between in the app. Without that, it is closer to just reading an abridged summary of the works than the true books.
We thoroughly enjoy this game, and would have given it five stars; however, several times during play we have found errors that stop research progress (including titles with exactly four words not counting as a title with exactly four words, titles with all caps not counting as a title with all caps, etc.). We reached out to game support to notify them and nothing has changed. Its discouraging, as we would love to play this game more, but cant make progress with these types of errors.
We haven't tried the others, but we honestly don't like Dear Reader. We started playing it because we like Classical Literature so we thought this would be a cool way to engage in it. But while the game started out fun, it turned bad as it takes way too much ink to buy books and the later achievements to get Rare Book tokens are near impossible. It felt like ones of those micro transactions filled games without the microtransactions, as while we're thankful it's free it's still wants you to spend too much time on it. One positive note is that it reignited our interest in classical literature and helped recommend some books we've never tried or even heard of before, so that was cool.
Good News, Developers Sadly, we are typically compelled to leave reviews only for terrible apps That is not the case here! We are overjoyed to say that this is the first app that has ever reconnected us with a valuable part of our long lost self the reader in us! We always took such great joy in but not so in recent years It seems Ive just moved further and further away from the beautiful gift that reading is to our lives. Thank you to the developers for creating this! Im reading Emily Dickinson again!! Im ecstatic! Thank you! You know, that everything you see around you in life is the result of one persons Thought and then of course collaboration happens But we want to say thank you to that person who was so in love with reading they had to find a way to help others reconnect with their own deep, maybe Long lost reader self. What a treasure! Thank you.
Seriously we have not enjoyed reading this much in years. The books are old, but they are well loved classics. We would be willing to purchase newer books in order to 'play' them as well. Huge kudos to the developers who came up with the brilliant idea to bring books from many genres, times, and perspectives to today's readers in an accessible format! This is a gem! Suggestion: the currency used to purchase rare books should be able to be used to buy regular books too. We don't know how you choose which books are rare, but the ones in that category don't appeal to us nearly as much as the books in the regular catalog. That doesn't make sense- books in the rare section should be more appealing. Failing that, let us get books from the regular catalog as well.
We love reading, we love books.. And while we believe theres nothing like a REAL paper book, this game is great and we love playing it. But like everyone else we do believe it would be a great addition to add some newer books. We seen a suggestion about some Harry Potter books and we completely agreed with that statement!! Adding every single Harry Potter book to this would make it just that much better!!! Please try to do this on the next update plz and thank you.
We're not someone who normally goes for word games but this game is great! Like everyone else reviewing this game, we do wish there were some newer books, but we understand that's probably hard for copyright reasons. Even so, we think it has a good selection of books! We are not into reading classics and we didn't even know most of the books in this game but it has introduced us to many books that normally we never would have read but end up liking a lot. The puzzles are really fun and if you don't like one of them you can just turn them off.
As a big book lover we recommend this game we love it a lot because its fun but we wish there were newer books. We understand that classic books are being forgotten and they are amazing but we want Harry Potter, and please add more childrens books for younger people like us we want other options. We like the puzzles but some are a bit absurd and they sound weird we know its the books but its because theyre old like old language thats why we want newer books please. So anyways we like this game but just add newer books.
We love this game. Its peaceful, its cozy. And love reading the books.
We really love this game ( Im a big book nerd ) but something we want ( even though we love the classics) is newer books like Percy Jackson or Harry Potter for the people who really want to read the books from their childhood and want to relive that part like when you read them for the first time ( in forever!) again! We love the games but please just think about that, maybe it will attract more people to the game.
We cannot believe how much free information is just given to us in this app. The format of the app is also very nice. 10/10 very lovely.
Great game we just wish that we know what Im getting with the chapter reward when we accidentally clicked on it.
We love this game! But we really want there to be book from the later 1900s and 2000s because it would be more fun doing this to books that people read that are newer.
We greatly enjoy both the concept and execution of this game. The puzzles keep us engaged through the story, especially with being able to remove those which we do not find appealing (like the speed read). We do not even mind the focus on classical books. The old books are in danger of being forgotten which would be tragic; they have much to teach us. We take umbrage with the fact that there are no books from American Black authors. Zora Neal Hurston, Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, Mildred D. Taylor, Alice Walker, Maya Angelou, August Wilson, Claude Brown. Give us somebody please.
Our favorite game ever, but Ive gone almost to the end. At a stand-still/stand-off at the moment, but love this game and bet you folks could even recruit helpers who wish to contribute to keep it robust. Please dont let this wonderful and challenging game end with a little poof. And, thanks for hour upon hour of great play so far.
To the developers: Time to add more achievements and goals for those of us high ranking people! Please.
A lot of fun reading and piecing books together. We hope they add more books especially old classic monster novels.
We picked this up because we like word games and thought it could be cool – now we cant put it down because Im reading again. We have ADHD, so it is prohibitively hard for to read. We havent read a book in years. Ive listened to audiobooks, but mostly easy to read ones. We wanted to have read Dracula, and despite the story being fantastic, even listening to the audiobook was a slog that we had to force our way through. When we play through a book on this app, the puzzles increase the level of engagement we have with the book. We have to actively engage with each word. Focus is no longer an issue. In fact, focus has become so much of a non issue that difficult linguistic patterns in earlier books is more intuitive and intelligible than they would otherwise be. We went through college as an English major, focusing on poetry as much as we could, and reading verse through these puzzles makes it easier for us to appreciate the meter, rhyme scheme, word choices, AND understand whats going on all at the same time. The experience is a revelation. We cannot overstate how much more accessible reading is to us now than before we downloaded this. That said, the books in the app are heavily abridged. The purpose of this, it seems, is to make the game more palatable for people who are using the app as a game, but the unintended consequence is that it limits the apps effectiveness as an accessibility tool. Our greatest hope for this app is that they will realize how revolutionary this app is when used as an accessibility tool instead of as a game and choose to include more unabridged books. We tried to read Frankenstein once, and despite loving it, we couldnt get more than halfway through – Id love to read it with this app! Perhaps as more books are added, we will start to see books that are less heavily abridged, and perhaps even an entire novel length book. Fingers crossed.
We love this game. It is 100% amazing. We would recommend this to anyone who loves to read, likes reading poetry, and likes to solve thrilling challenges like: finding spelling errors, missing words, and or figuring out Shakespeares wonderful, hard, and old English writing. And we hope that they keep adding new, and wonderful books to the list. To alllllll the BIBLIOPHILES out there, youll love this game.
We teach second grade and when we have our English language arts testing one of the tests that they score very low on is where they have to pick one of three words for various sentences and a story. We think this would be great practice and perhaps could be used in schools.
Amazing game, but pleaase take off Apple Arcade, we would buy in a heartbeat, so many others too. Maybe add a few free books for new players to feel it out too. Regardless, amazing concept for a game, helped got us back into reading.
Just wish it could be purchased without an Apple Arcade subscription. If it were, we would keep playing.
So, we have the daily challenge widget on our Home Screen, yeah? It includes a phrase from the daily chapter, which goes away once you play the challenge. Its usually fine, but today is different. We open our phone today, and you know what we see in the Dear Reader widget? A phrase with the word N*gro. That isnt okay! Its racist! If that word is in the daily chapter, thats fine. But we dont want such language featured on our screen. Please fix this.
Wasnt sure how we felt when we first started, but it wasnt long before we became hooked. And now Im reading some of the full versions of books Ive started in the game. This is a great way to gently introduce yourself to lots of books that you probably wouldnt have considered reading otherwise.
Dear the person who made dear reader, it is outstanding trading to fit stuff in and grammar.
We cant stop playing this game! Its amazing.
Dear Reader is so much fun. As it begins, the levels are easy but quickly become more challenging. The puzzles are varied and several in particular are extremely difficult. We recommend this game to all, especially avid readers.
It keeps forcing us to read Pride & Prejudice. The exit button is grayed out. We cannot exit or choose something else to read.
We wish you could press and hold a word to see the definition. As a non-native speaker, we really miss this feature. Your app helps us learn English.
This game is very calming and recomended for tweens like us, teens adults, even elders its fun and has a lot of classic books The music though is for us too dramatic and makes us un calm. Im glad that we can get rid of the music Its above our average readeing level Im like increasing our smartness Thank you.
So Ive been working on this game for ages and let us just say this game was the best game ever.
We wish you could press and hold a word to see the definition. As a non-native speaker, we really miss this feature. Your app helps us learn English.
We just started this game and picked a Hard book. Though its challenging we are having a lot of fun as well. We believe it will also help us with our own writing. One challenge for us is that, especially for poetry, we find we have to read it out loud in order to complete the stanzas correctly. Playing this in public should be hilarious.
We wish the rare books can be less expensive.
We really love this game. Okay, yeah, for the most part you are just proofreading books. It is much more than that though. The books are abridged, which is fine for this game and works very well. We do find ourselves addictively playing because we want to know what happens in the next chapter. We found Dorian Gray much more interesting in Dear Reader because Lord Henrys pedantic diatribes were succinct, short, and to the point. Ive done a few of the harder books and still found ourselves enjoying learning about things we didnt think we would find interesting. Im getting exposed to books Ive always wanted to read but havent gotten around to, and we are learning new things. Fantastic! If you love reading, word games, writing, or anything else to do with words, you will probably enjoy this game. We really like that you can select your favorite types of Wordplay so you see them more often. We also like that you can drop down a speed/earning level for a more relaxing game or step it up for a super fast-paced game. The mid-level is challenging but not overwhelming. Developers: Please switch to a QWERTY layout instead of the silly A to Z format that you use, it takes too long to find a letter you know you need and you are penalized for not knowing where it is. We ALL text, most type, QWERTY would be an awesome improvement. Thank you for making this game.
Old dusty boring books, deleted.
The first time we downloaded the game, there was no tutorial so we thought it was just a book reading app. This time we tried it, the tutorial was okI wasnt thrilled with having a book chosen for us, but ok. Then today we decided to try the daily challenge. We guess the developers assume that everyone is a speed reader. We hadnt even gotten to the portion of the excerpt where the missing word belonged when the game took the word out and had us guess which one belongs there. We guessed correctly and had the same thing happen again. At that point we quit the game. Im donethis game is supposed to be about reading and comprehension, not seeing how fast you can get through a paragraph or guessing which words belong in the sentence.
When we get up at night and can not go back to sleep this is our game of choice the problem if the screen is always white.
Ive been really enjoying this game when we want to work our brain/get a quick read in. We would absolutely LOVE to see one made for children with books like Corduroy, the Hatchet, and others. It really makes you slow down and understand what youre reading. Having worked in childrens schools for almost 5 years Ivan tell you they NEED these skills SO badly.
Dear Developers, we greatly enjoy your game (it's our favorite in the Arcade, and we've spent many hours on it), except for this issue: Because you offer the Surprise Book Package for 10,000 Ink, we thought that this included the Rare Books, so we bought all of the regular bookstore books, planning to then use the Surprise Book Package to buy the Rare Books at 10,000 Ink each. It was an unpleasant surprise, then, to find that the Surprise Book Package only included the regular bookstore books (since there was no fine print that said so.) we know this is irrelevant to most of the players here, but we wanted to mention it here both to warn others who were planning the same buying strategy and to ask that you add fine print to the Surprise Book Package so that others aren't similarly misled and disappointed. Also, please consider reducing the Rare Book prices. Since most of them are greatly abridged, the current prices seem unreasonably high for the amount of content. Thanks for reading and considering our suggestions. :) PS: Other than the above, we have no complaints – we love the variety and abundance of puzzles, literature, and goals in this game, and it's almost worth the Arcade fee on its own.
It wont let us load a new book. It keeps loading P&P.
Doesnt save, sounds are annoying, music is annoying and the menu is unusable.
We dont really understand the choice to have a rotating shelf of books to buy with ink or why they are all so expensive. It feels somehow like a freemium game without the micro purchases. Something trying to overly encourage you to spend all your time at it. And theres really a long way to go to get any new books, especially if youre like us and playing timed mode makes it too stressful to enjoy so you get ink even slower. Im just sort of confused. It seems needlessly unrewarding and sort of discouraging how much ink everything is. We find ourselves playing less due to that discouraged feeling.
Considering that this is a game offered in the Apple Arcade, they really need to do a better job of having titles from people other than old dead white people freely available.
Of all the games on Apple Arcade this is the one we keep returning to. Charming. Challenging. Fun. Thanks.
As someone who struggles with ADHD, and therefore actually sitting down to read a book for long periods of time, Dear Reader creates the perfect balance between user engagement and reading material. Its been about a week since we started playing, and Ive already blasted through about five books; granted, most of the books you can purchase are abridged to make playing less tedious, but Ive never found ourselves wondering where the plot went or missing out important information. It makes reading a lot easier to just sit down and do, and the puzzles force your brain to slow down, process the words, and further understand syntax and paragraph structure. Along with encouraging reading the classics, Dear Reader also provides you with links to the public domain Gutenberg Project, which allows anyone to read the full versions of these books for completely free and online. Though, we will say, our hunger for a certain book is usually completely satiated by the time we finish all the chapters and volumes. As the cherry on top, Dear Reader has a delightful soundtrack, satisfying sound effects, and very clean and eye-catching interface that sticks with you even after you close the app.
This game is awesome, period. No complaints about this game.
User feedback from Apple App Store
App Details
- Version: 3.10.0
- Size: 369.29 MB
- iOS: 13.0 or later
- Languages: EN
- Content Advisory: Infrequent/Mild Profanity or Crude Humor, Infrequent/Mild Mature/Suggestive Themes, Infrequent/Mild Alcohol, Tobacco, or Drug Use or References, Infrequent/Mild Horror/Fear Themes
- Developer: Local No. 12, LLC
Last updated: 10th September 2025 | Genre: Puzzle | Developer: Local No. 12, LLC