The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

Alternate Title: Trine, Trine Trine.

Trine is a game that has garnered a lot of critical praise, at least among the podcasts I listen to, and it was completely deserved. Granted, the PS3 release is apparently a buggy mess, so maybe you shouldn’t play that one. But the PC version? Amazing, and completely worth your time.

At first, it seems like Trine is trying to be a modern Lost Vikings. You have a puzzle-y platformer with three characters with different abilities. The Wizard levitates things and creates physics objects. The Thief has a bow for distance attacks and a grappling hook to swing about. The Warrior can pick up heavy objects and has a wide variety of ways to fight enemies. Seems very similar to that Blizzard classic. In reality, though, it doesn’t play very much like that at all. It’s still very much a puzzle platformer, but since you don’t have to maneuver and keep track of three different people at once, simply poofing into other forms whenever you need their abilities, it goes much simpler, and that’s a good thing.

The controls on the PC were something I was really worried about. How could I play such a serious platformer with a mouse and keyboard? However, I don’t claim to know how they did it, but it controls perfectly that way. I was doing some very intense and complex swing/jump things with the Thief near the end of the game without any problem. It just controls in a very solid fashion. Never do you feel like it’s the controls making you fail. That’s really important.

The gameplay itself is, well, puzzle platforming. You have to figure out how to hit various buttons or get past various obstacles in order to get to the end of the level. Throughout each stage are scattered bottles of experience, which can provide extra challenge, if you want to get them. However, you also get experience from killing monsters, which you do have to do from time to time. Therefore, it’s not important that you grab all of these. I only maybe got half on my run through the game. In the same way, there are sometimes hidden chests, which contain equippable items for your heroes. These are very useful things, like letting the Wizard have more boxes summoned at the same time, or giving you a life potion that refills a hurt hero’s life whenever they get low. Once again, though, these are useful to pick up, but they aren’t game-breaking if you don’t have them: The only ones you need to pick up, ones that give the heroes brand new powers, are situated so you can’t miss them.
Everything about the game seems really hardcore, but it is actually very forgiving. Checkpoints are spread about liberally, so when you die, you never lose much progress at all, especially since the world-state doesn’t reset when you have to restart at a checkpoint. If you’ve already flipped a switch, it’s still flipped, and so on. When you pass a checkpoint, it also revives dead characters and heals everyone to 50% health. If you’re having trouble with a combat, you can just keep running over a checkpoint multiple times to heal up. Therefore, it’s really just about figuring out how to navigate around the challenges, which I very much enjoyed. If you can’t pull it off, you can try as many times as you need with no penalty. At the same time, it does take skill and sometimes some thinking to get past some challenges, and there isn’t always just one solution. It’s really rewarding to push forward most of the time.
There’s a story, and it’s cute, serviceable, and in no way a hindrance to the game, but it isn’t really important. The gameplay is just so great, it will carry you through till the very end. The end level is stupid difficult, though. I played the whole game through on “Medium” until the last level, where I had to change to “Easy.” It’s amazing to me that they apparently patched that level to make it easier before I played the game. Gods, how could it be any harder? They basically remove the liberal checkpoints you’ve gotten used to using, and make you go through one of the hardest platforming sequences in the game all in one go. It’s pretty mean of them. Still, once I switched it to Easy, it wasn’t too hard, and it certainly didn’t ruin the game as a whole.

Trine is an excellent game. With really well-done gameplay and controls and graphics that will kind of blow you away as being from an indie studio, Trine is certainly one of the best indie games of the year. It’s good, good stuff. Unless you simply can’t stand platforming, you’d do well to pick this game up on Steam sometime. It was worth every penny I paid for it.