Sometimes relatively straightforward ideas are the best: a 2D platform game employing physics to enable the characters to jump, smash and magic their way through a fantasy world laden with puzzles, traps, skeleton warriors and a few Level Boss pretenders in their path in order to complete a cursory quest plot. And that’s about it with Frozenbyte’s Trine, which on the face of it doesn’t really explain why it is so compulsive and one of the most enjoyable games of the year. Maybe it is the gorgeous depth of field within the backgrounds: beautiful lush forests and woods, brimming with technicolour flora and fauna and shot through with rays of sunlight occasionally penetrating the leafy canopies; or perhaps it’s the hinged ramps, wooden beams, branches, rope bridges, molten lava pitfalls, pesky vampire bats and venom-spitting spiders you battle your way through, to the accompaniment of faux mediæval troubadour music on a loop as you hop, skip and self-immolate. The three protagonists (with old-school but accomplished voice-overs) are straight out of fantasy cliché, which just makes them more charming: the eccentric wizard Amadeus the Magnificent; the portly knight Pontius the Brave; and the acrobatic female bow-and-arrow-wielding thief babe Zoya.
In single-player mode, you can switch between characters with the press of a key, while co-op mode will enable a trio of gamers with the addition of gamepads to work together, enabling Amadeus to conjure and levitate a platform that Zoya can leap onto and elude the pursuing skeletons, leaving Pontius free to bash in their skulls. In single or co-op mode, there are innumerable inventive ways to solve the obstacles’ puzzles. If characters die (and they will!) you must wait until the next checkpoint or return to the last to rejuvenate them. If all three die, you return to the last checkpoint. There are checkpoints throughout levels, but fail to complete the level in a session and when you next run the game you start that level over again. Characters level up marginally as you go, but never to the extent that the game becomes a doddle. Meanwhile, depending on how adventurous and inquisitive you want to be, you can unlock out-of-the-way caskets, the artefacts within enhancing the powers of a given character.
It’s all disarmingly simple, derivative even, yet invites the unfurling of a progressive ingenuity on your part. Trine lures you into its enchanting world and you simply must return again and again until you are done. I confess that at this point, I am not done. As I write, I have yet to complete the final level: the Tower of Sarek. It is absolutely bloody infuriating. But in a fun way.
MORE REVIEWS
Bookmark this post with: