23
Jul
Trine tells its story – that of an undead uprising, a time of generic, difficult struggles in a typical, fairytale/unimaginative kingdom, and one of companionship from unlikely but-always-come-together-character-types-in-RPG-games. As I played through the game last night, the story seemed to become more and more irrelevant as I progressed through samey-feeling dungeon-y type places. Although the game gave me a series of wonderfully painted-looking story panels (think: the first Fable), there didn’t really seem to be much innovation or cleverness here. The characters themselves weren’t quite RPG tropes. Well, at least the wizard wasn’t – he’s a womanizing playboy, and the game finds him knocked out after ingesting a potion he thought would allow him to cast a fireball.
But not a real fireball – a fireball that wasn’t quite real, but was nonetheless real enough to impress the ladies and the nobles. Which is a lot like what Trine turned out to be – a potion for a fireball, but not really a fireball. Something to impress the vapid, face-value nobles of gaming, and not the crabby critics of the dungeons. And that’s a shame, as Trine feels like it’s often not quite living up to the promise of a physics-based puzzle game.
The shame about the fighter guy was that I found him to be largely useless. Unless surrounded and overwhelmed, I found the thief’s bow to be a vastly more reliable weapon. Due to his requirement of proximity, I found myself getting beat up a lot. I blame the engine more than anything else for this – although control of the environment and puzzle elements often was intuitive and fun, combat felt .. off. As if Trine’s combat were being filtered through a browser game or something. At best, the combat felt distracting and rarely challenging, and at worse .. it was incredibly distracting and irritating. Note that combat is easily an aspect of the game that got worse as I became trashed, although the puzzles also began to take longer and longer. This wasn’t because they were harder, so to speak, but rather that I was drunker, and leaping from one ledge to another became exercises in something approximating hilarity.
This may, of course, have been an intentional design decision to limit the importance of combat over clever puzzles – but that doesn’t mean that the combat had to be more or less static and dull from the onset to conclusion (of the 40, anyway).
Really? What sort of video game – that actually includes a character meant for fighting – gives you a boss-monster and then expects you to have no problem just avoiding him? I’ll tell you: a cocktease of a videogame.
While Trine was initially incredibly magical-feeling and engaging, this feeling wore off over time. It wasn’t the the magical sensibilities of developer Frozenbyte dissipated, but rather that the environments grew somewhat stale. The first area, something like an underground castle, was beautiful – dark and lush red carpets filled the hallways, great lion statues perched, and the sense of depth created around the 2d-platformer was really quite impressive. And then .. the party moves into a cave. And then another cave, and then a dungeon of an actual castle – but the locale feels pretty much the same as it did when you first began playing the game. I guess the color choices for the “magical” game setting must not be a very large palette. Unfortunately, the same goes for the music – while initially captivating, the music becomes so similar that it begins to blend together and really fails to indicate whether or not I’m doing something different in a different place than I was ten minutes ago. The sad result of all of this is that I felt, after playing for six hours, that I was still on the first level and had just been running about in circles.
The meat of the game is delicious and tasty, however, although you won’t find the taste palatable if you don’t like drawing blocks and lines and swinging about on ropes. Although occasionally the thug guy with a sword has to be used to solve things, I found the most elegant solutions often revolved around the wizard. While you can create objects with the conjurer and interact with them with the other characters, like building a ledge high enough so that you could use the thief’s grappling hook, I never really found it necessary. I imagine I stuck with the wizard the most because of the animations – he looks positively /magical/ when casting. I really imagine that Rincewind would have looked just like him as a younger man, and would have moved similarly. You’ll find no elaborate fireball incantations here, no, but rather a wizard pulling at the strings working the guts of the world do enact his will. It’s great stuff.
Really, I can’t give high enough praise to how great the wizard-beardy-sort looked while casting. Fantastic.
Many of the puzzles appear to be solveable in a couple of different ways, if only because the objects that the wizard can draw – a plank and a box, when I stopped playing in a stupor, although there was an as-yet unfilled skillslot – are going to end up arranged in a different way. When working through the puzzles presented, I got the impression that I was solving puzzles in a fashion not-quite-meant by the developers, almost like I was cheating and abusing mechanics to get through the game. I find that this feeling often accompanies puzzle games, but I always leave with a sense that I’m not quite getting all out of a situation that I could be. That said, I’m reasonably sure I wasn’t quite cheating. Intentionally, anyway.
Most, if not all, of these puzzles revolve around Trine’s physics engine. This is, unfortunately, a little bit disappointing, as the physics don’t always quite make sense. I realize that this is a video game, and that processing power doesn’t exist on most PC’s to simulate true physics – but it still felt like physics-lite. For example, when picking up an object with the wizard’s magic, you can’t actually throw it – when the item is released, it simply falls to the ground. This deprives the wizard of a potentially fun weapon – hurling planks at monsters. This was possibly a design decision to bar him from being an offensive force – but if this were the case, then why can I drop boxes and planks onto baddies, killing them? The only time momentum seems to be modeled is when one object is directly connected to another – like a giant, weighted fist chained to the ceiling, or the thief with her grappling hook. Oversight, or design choice? I dunno.
My fixation on the momentum modeling was almost certainly a result of having spent the better part of last week with the excellent-but-not-quite-there-yet indie game Mount & Blade, in which you live or die by the momentum of your weapon. The shift between Mount & Blade – a game with absolutely no magic or mysticism, even including the lack of potions and in-combat healing – and Trine was palpable, and I think that it amplified the magical-ness of Trine all the more. As an aside, it’s kind of weird making a physics platforming game centered around magic – systems as opposed to each other as positive and negative magnetic fields – but it generally works out. Okay so, moving along:
As in almost every other puzzle game, one must sometimes push objects around to get them where you want them. This includes things like beams blocking your way and crates, of course. The physics does weird things with this sometimes – there are multiple ((screenshot for this …)) large objects that rotate in a fashion that makes little to no sense. For example, once in awhile the player encounters a large, cross-shaped and rotatable platform. It basically looks like a large + symbol, with a smaller, perpendicular beam at each end that the player can stand on. When standing on the lower-most ledge and facing the lower branch of the cross, you can actually push towards it, rotating the entire mechanism – while this feels mostly natural in-game, it’s so incredibly jarring to see that it’s difficult to sidestep the unreality of Trine.
Before I forget to mention it: Trine, on my system, alt-tabs /brilliantly/, with almost no delay in the changeover.
Trine was more or less an enjoyable game, and the experience was certainly a valid one when accompanied by a large bottle of shitty beer. The problems that I had with it are mostly technical and minor – things, perhaps, I’d have personally like to see, although I could never quite escape the feeling that each component of the game was a lightweight version of something that could be found elsewhere.
So, the penultimate question: will I return to Trine tomorrow, sober, and unarmed with beer? Probably not.
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