In Trine, the player takes on the role of three fantasy stereotypes who have become trapped in an ancient artifact called the Trine. Presented with 2-dimensional platformer challenges, one must choose which character to pull from the Trine at each moment, each one with a different way of dealing with situations (sort of like a modern “Vikings”). It differs from past clones of Vikings by incorporating role-playing elements. The knight, thief, and wizard each get their own life, mana, skill tree, and equipment. The only stat they all share is experience, which they use to go up in level, and improve their abilities.
The knight gets a sword and shield as his starting equipment, and later earns a great hammer with an earthquake attack. He is the most straightforward of the characters, solving every problem with brute force. This is the character you’ll do most of the fighting with, especially in the ealy stages. His skills become less useful as the game goes on, but he never stops being good at smashing stuff.
The wizard is more about getting around the levels, and solving the puzzles (which mostly consist of figuring out how to get from one part of the level to another without falling in acid or something). His power all comes from the summoning of constructs, which is done by drawing their shapes on the screen. He can summon boxes, planks, and hovering platforms of varying sizes. He can also manipulate objects on the screen, including his own constructs. This is also done with the mouse: simply click and drag to move items around. Strangely, he can’t grab magic potions, so one has to find other ways to get at them when they are sitting out of the way. He doesn’t have any weapons, but he’s not useless in a fight. The enemies can be crushed by flying objects under the wizard’s control, and will be killed if caught under falling debris. If enemies are behaving predictably, the wizard can wave a spiky ball around among them, and deal massive damage. This character was the most fun for me. I spent most of the game with the wizard selected, and tried to do most things using his abilities, only switching to the others when needed. One of the most fun moments in the game was spotting several enemies standing in a row, who were unaware of me, and drawing a huge plank over their heads to crush them with. I literally hooted with delight every time I was able to pull that off.
The thief is the most versatile of the three characters. Her grappling hook lets her get around the levels easier, as long as the ceiling is made of wood, and her bow makes a good weapon in some circumstances. As the game progresses, her bow gets faster and more powerful to the point that by about the twelfth area, I was using her to do most of my fighting, and only switching to the fighter when I saw a good opportunity to use his earthquake attack.
Each of the characters can die independently of the rest, but they can be brought back at any respawn point, of which the game has plenty. The game tracks the character’s experience and inventory separate of the area they are in, so one can always go back and replay previous levels after getting new abilities, and sometimes this can lead to locating new secrets, and more experience (although there is a set amount of experience in each level).
Each character has separate stats and equipment.
Pursuit
A neat story ties the levels together, as the characters not only figure out how to escape the Trine, but also solve the mystery of what has happened to the kingdom, and where everyone has gone. Unfortunately, the last level breaks the momentum of the game a bit, as it exponentially ups the difficulty curve, and changes the game from a fun puzzle-adventure game to a Mega Man-esque “memorize the correct sequence of moves” game. I suppose from the developer’s point-of-view this was a good way to incorporate a greater challenge in the last level, but not only is it much more difficult that the previous level, but it changes the mechanics that the game has been carefully teaching the player over the course of the other fourteen levels (see our article about “gaming frustration points“). Other than that last level, the game had perfect learning and difficulty curves, and none of the puzzles were so difficult as to be frustrating. One of the game’s big features was that each area can be solved in multiple ways, and I found it to be completely true. No one skill was ever completely necessary for any part of the game.
The wizard uses his plank construct to reach a potion.
Panorama
The art in Trine is fantastic. I felt like I was interacting with a highly-detailed oil canvas. The levels are all drawn out like big paintings, with no repetition in the backgrounds. At some points the artwork made it a little tough to see where the next platform was (can I step on this giant gear, or is it part of the background?), but it only happened to me twice, and never at a critical time. The game supports the resolution and visual effects levels to really show off the art, as well. I had all the options turned up all the way, and my mid-level system handled it just fine, but it scales way down for those with low-end systems, or who are on laptops.
The thief shoots at some skeletons in front of one of the game's well-illustrated areas
Noise
The soundtrack was merely okay. Lots of fantasy style music on loops. Occasionally, it got a bit repetitive, but only when I was stuck on a puzzle, and was sitting in the same place for a few minutes. The voice acting was great. Each of the characters was given depth and humor through skillful acting, and the narrator of the story was particularly good, giving the story a neat, fire-side feel.
Reins
Overall the game controlled the way you would expect for this style: move with the keyboard and aim with the mouse. Character and weapon switching and a few other commands needed to play were mappable, and easily all fit on my gaming mouse. The exception was the knight’s special ‘charge’ attack. Oddly, it was the only command that could not be remapped, and it was in an inconvenient place for me, so I just never used it. Occasionally, I wished that there was a way to unsummon some of the wizard’s constructs to get them out of the way, as it was, the only way to get rid of them was to move them somewhere out of the way, or summon enough more that you exceed your limit. This didn’t really even become an issue until the later levels when the limit was as high as six for some of my constructs.
The Knight uses his earthquake attack on some skeletons.
Encoding
There were a couple of things the looked like bugs or oversights. The game didn’t remember controller preferences from one session to another, the respawn point on the last level didn’t actually respawn the characters (not sure if that was on purpose or not, but it certainly was surprising when it happened), and that one non-mappable key. In general the game ran well on all of its settings and even with things running in the background and occasional task switching.
Last Word
Trine is a well designed game with lots of interesting mechanics, and great moments of accomplishment. The combination of styles and genres works well, and for most of the game, the difficulty and learning curve is exactly where it needs to be. The story is cool, and the characters are fun. Finally, being available on Steam makes it easy to find and get into. I heartily recommend Trine to gamers of all ages, skill levels and preferred genres.
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