Three ordinary adventurers.
One legendary team.
Trine is a side-scrolling platformer where you use the abilities of three simple-looking characters, which are brought together by destiny, to overcome several types of obstacles, enemies and puzzles. Starting with Zoya, a treasure hu
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| I ended up spending more time admiring the scenery than solving puzzles. |
After accidentally waking up an ancient and powerful artifact, these three find themselves linked through their souls and stuck together with it. From here on, they must discover how to solve their new-found problem, while dealing with an already existing one: the dead that have recently started to rise from their graves and ravaging their kingdom.
From here on, the game plays out like a fantasy book, as you lead the trio through danger, defeat enemies, solve puzzles, but also through beautiful landscapes.
You control one character at a time, and online/local multiplayer makes it so all three can be used at once. This, however, makes the game somewhat more complicated and also more fun, as you discuss with your friends the best ways to get through specific obstacles and defeat stronger enemies together. When playing with friends, you can use classic mode, which each player controlling an element of the trio, or unlimited mode, where you can have 3 copies of the same character.
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| The inventory system in the first game allows for some neat tweaks. |
Now that you have the basics, it’s time for my bullet points. Below are several aspects of the game that I thought necessary to point out, critique or compliment as I played the game:
— Characters are fleshed out in a very light way. You get a quick background on their reasons to do whatever they are/want to do and that’s it. While this could be a negative point, you don’t really need to know more than what is told to you, and from then on the plot develops over the course of the game and through their dialogue, which is pretty nice. You get just the right amount of information to be able to enjoy the characters and their misadventures.
— Characters are rather overpowered in the first game, thanks to the inventory system, allowing you to equip up to 9 artefacts to each character, improving stats or giving them health boosts (or outright giving them a second life). There is also the fact that each character has 3 ranks on their spells, and Amadeus in particular can summon more than twice the number of objects in the first game when compared to the second, including floating platforms which make it easy to bypass obstacles or reach difficult places. In the second game you have to use several skills from the three characters in combination to achieve the same results, making it more enjoyable.
— Oh my god, the visuals. Every plant, leaf, statue, EVERYTHING looks absolutely wonderful. And don’t even get me started on some of the bosses or goblins in the second game. I don’t think I ever took as many screenshots per minute as I did in the Trine games. Back when these games came out in 2009 and 2011 respectively, playing on Extreme settings with a good framerate required a pretty solid rig. But seeing as my four year old GTX670 can keep it capped pretty much all of the time, it’s not a stretch anymore.
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| You rang? |
— Occasional oddity in character physics, game has its quirks.
— Amadeus is kind of useless in boss fights. He's a wizard that can summon boxes and move objects, meaning his offensive skills are non-existent.
— Having to make movements with the cursor to summon different objects can be a headache and make the game unnecessarily hard on higher difficulties. It would have been easier to just press a specific button for each object (there are only 3 different objects anyways, 2 in the second game). Making said movements with a controller using the analog stick takes even longer than with a mouse and might get annoying after a while. In addition, the speed at which you can levitate certain objects (due to their weight) is painfully slow.
— Everything is intuitive and makes sense, puzzles are relatively easy to solve by using simple logic or by just paying attention to your surroundings. Obviously, you'll have to solve them faster on harder difficulties if you don’t want to get killed. It certainly wouldn't have hurt to have harder puzzles, though that would probably have made certain achievements close to impossible, such as completing levels using only one single character.
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| Great scenery adds greatly to the game's atmosphere. |
— Voice acting is wonderful, for some reason I can’t put my finger on. Characters seem genuinely friendly and trustful towards each other, except for the first couple of levels in the first game. Characters (especially Amadeus) have a lot of emotion behind them so it’s easy for the player to empathize with them, and all dialogue sounds natural and flows well. The narrator is nice too.
— Music is very fitting and relaxing. Goes with the beautiful art and keeps you calm and focused.
Conclusion: relaxing and fun gameplay, nice music, friendly characters and astounding visuals. If you want a nice co-op experience, go for it. If you want a good single-player experience, go for it too. Especially if you like platformers, puzzles, fantasy games and beautiful scenery.
Final Gameplay Stats:
Trine: 11 Hours played, 33 / 33 Achievements (100%)
Trine 2: 55 Hours played, 97 / 97 Achievements (100%)
Trine is developed by Frozenbyte. Other works by Frozenbyte include Shadowgrounds and Shadowgrounds: Survivor. The Trine series is available on Windows, Linux, MacOS, PS3, PS4 and WiiU.
