Trine Review

Indie games have become rapidly popular thanks to their low price, simple game mechanics and easy access through a little something called Steam. Trine (2009) is the third release in this genre by a Finnish gaming company called Frozenbyte. Their first game Shadowgrounds (2005) and its sequel Shadowgrounds Survivor (2007) received a fairly good reception despite their difficulty and repetitive nature. Let’s see how Trine fairs, hmm?

You’re a wizard, Harry! And a thief…and also a knight. Trine is a puzzling platforming game where you control three characters. These three heroes happened to touch a magical doohickey called Trine at the same time which caused all souls to be bound to it. Trine is a nasty lil’ thing and will only let one of the characters out to play while trapping the other two inside.

The full cast of the game.

The game is set in an old ruined kingdom far far away that fell to shit after its king died. Lacking a proper ruler, the kingdom’s local magic started slowly turning to the dark side and began bringing the dead back to life driving the land’s inhabitants away from the realm. You must fix this! To do this, you must avoid many gaps and spikes, kill even more skeletons and solve a few less puzzles than you had to kill skeletons.

The controls are pretty simple. You have your basic AWSD for moving your characters around as well as a skill on both of the mouse buttons. Numbers 1-3 switch your characters around. The thief, Zoya, can shoot her arrows and use a grappling hook on wooden surfaces. The knight, Pontius, can swing a sword, a mallet and block with his shield aaand the wizard, Amadeus, can make cute little boxes, triangles and planks as well as levitate various objects in the game. All the characters handle great and are easy to use for their designated tasks.

The scenery in the game is just beautiful. The outdoor levels are filled with many green, purple and red shiny things along with mushrooms and trees and other classical fantasy elements. There are also dungeon and castle levels, which are mostly filled with rocks, spikes and lava. Very appropriate. The gameplay between the level types stays pretty much the same throughout the game, though some of the enemies and obstacles vary.

Skeletons will fuck you up, even in mushroom kingdom.

The music ties the atmosphere together. Lovely, calming and slightly mystical music makes you wish you were in a magic mushroom forest fighting skeletons and struggling to get by with three separate bodies at your disposal. While that image may not be the healthiest one out there, it goes along nicely with the game.

One of downsides to the game, in my opinion is its repetitiveness. While the level scenery does vary, you can’t help but think you’re doing the same things over and over again. The enemies have very little variety besides how many hits they take throughout the game, excluding a few boss-like monsters.

I also wish there was a bit more to the plot. The narrator had a nice Gandalfy swag going for him during the cutscenes and loading screens, but still, most of what he said didn’t really grab my attention. Then again, this is a platforming game. There’s only so much of a plot you can include to your quest to make it up and to the right.

His breath must smell wonderful.

While I think it’s great that so many of the levels could be passed with almost any character you wanted, it kinda made the characters less equal. Why would you build a tower of boxes when you can just grapple your way up? Why would you want to risk getting hit at close range when you can just shoot the enemy from a safe distance? Yeah, you got it. The thief is simply the best character to use in the game while the wizard is close to being useless. I found myself using the wizard only for making a triangle for the thief to grapple to. The warrior was only used when the thief was close to death or dead and I had to break some bones of my enemies.

All things considered, Trine is a short but fun game. It took me about six hours to beat on the hard difficulty - on my first playthrough, so don’t expect a Donkey Kong Country kind of experience in platforming. I didn’t notice any difference between hard and very hard difficulty levels either. STILL, I’d say this is a nice casual game for anyone who likes the genre. It looks, sounds and plays amazing and it’s a cheap and great choice for speedrunning, should you be into that sorta thing.