Trine

My new strategy moving forward as the blog titles get longer is to play games with shorter titles. OK, so the real reason that today's game is Trine is because I've never played a single game in this series despite it being entirely within my wheelhouse: Fantasy RPG trappings? Sure, I'm into that. Puzzle-platformer with an emphasis on physics? I do play a lot of those. Shades of The Lost Vikings with its trio of protagonists of various specialties? Sign me up. Once I picked up the third game from this well-regarded series in a recent bundle, I knew - similar to last year's neophyte experience with S.T.A.L.K.E.R. - that I should stop beating around the bush and start taking strides to get caught up.

Trine is a 2D platformer with some absolutely gorgeous (if bloom-y) art direction and a story that sees a thief, a wizard and a knight accidentally merge their souls via the eponymous artifact and use their shared talents to locate a way to emancipate themselves from this spell, as well as maybe save a kingdom that has long since descended into undead chaos. There's a lot of emphasis on environmental puzzles, and one of the characters - the wizard - has a skillset built almost entirely around manipulating the environment with his box creation, levitation and telekinesis spells. Much of the game for me so far has been figuring out how to bring down green potions from their various hidey-holes: these potions, when a certain amount have been collected, unlock new skills for the heroes. The thief is your more traversal-friendly character with a grappling hook that helps considerably with platforming sequences and a bow and arrow for when you want to stay away from many undead enemies the game throws at you. When they do get too close, you have your Olaf-esque knight character to absorb blows with his shield and dish out damage with his sword combos. I've also been on the look out for chests: these are better hidden than the green potions and give you permanent stat boost equipment items that can be passed to whichever hero needs it most. The RPG elements are admittedly light so far, but maybe that's for the best: I like that a lot of the game's progress demands ingenuity in solving the puzzles rather than leveling up and overpowering the frankly uninteresting fights with skeletons and the rest of the undead hordes.

The game also has a fairly generous system for deaths, though it can occasionally be a little inconvenient too. When a character dies, and they will often with the amount of traps around, they remain out of commission until the player finds a checkpoint. Once there, any dead characters are restored with half their life bar. The intent behind the design here, I believe, is to balance punishing the player for messing up too often without necessarily penalizing them too harshly if they've been trying to solve a tricky sequence to reach an optional cache and have fallen into the spike trap below one too many times. It's trying to find a balance between not giving the player a free pass and eliminating any challenge with the traditional combat and platforming aspects, but not giving them too much grief when their attempts to get the game's physics engine to play nice blows up in their face one too many times. Another aspect I appreciate is that you can revisit levels with your experience and upgrades intact, in case you happened to miss a couple of green bottles or a treasure chest and want another crack at it for the completion achievement. Some of the skills you acquire by playing the game normally and not fussing too much over 100% completion can make going back to hunt for items you've missed a lot easier, especially with the wizard's ability to have more of his conjured boxes on the screen simultaneously.

I have to admit that I haven't managed to get too far into the game yet. Fridays are always a free time hog with the amount of Giant Bomb content that goes up at the end of the week, so I've yet to even scratch the surface. I'm definitely liking what I've played so far however, and hope to bring you all a more detailed report tomorrow on this game that came out seven whole years ago. Ideally, I can tick this game off my list and have the two sequels ready to go the next time I take on a backlog-clearing project like this. In other words, I'm going to keep Trine to beat this one. Yeah, I said it.

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