The sad fact of playing computer games while inebriated is that you’re bound to miss things. Several things, sometimes, and reading back through my initial post on it – and having watched my room mate play it for a few hours – I realized that I missed many of these, and felt the need to address them:

1. You can light torches!

2. There are a bunch of magical items!

Most of them are typical RPG items – new armors, potions, trinkets and charms – nothing you haven’t seen before. However, achieving these items is a bit interesting, and each of them – there are two per level – are listed as “Secrets” in the level select screen so, even if you don’t care about making your characters marginally more badass, there’s a weird compulsion to discover those things so arrogantly labeled as SECRETS. Speaking of easily-missed things,

3. Sometimes monsters bug out and it’s weird!

The cocktease monster I mentioned in the first article ((link!!)), it turns out, wasn’t an intentional cocktease, but an accidental one. Inexplicably, both of the two that I encountered bugged out the first time I played the game. Instead of standing like an NES bad guy and repeating a singular swinging animation and standing still, the crystalline thing was SUPPOSED to run back and forth repeating the same animation. This, as it turns out, lets you kill him. Also:

4. The wizard is in the “Number 1” slot!

This is a weird choice! Almost every other RPG-kinda game I’ve ever played placed the melee/warrior/fighter/whatever character in the “Number 1” slot – keyboard 1/etc – but not Trine. Instead, the wizard is here, and the thief is in “Number 2,” and the fightery sort holds up the van. As noted in my original comments, I found the wizard to be the most often useful (although I spent most of my time as the thief), so from a game mechanics perspective it makes sense. But I wonder: was there some further, non-game-design-based idea at work here? A sly method of Frozenbyte from suggesting the superiority of the wizard over the fighter? I can’t help but think it is, as the fightery guy is somehow even more stupid than the stereotype of fightery-sorts displays. But the wizard isn’t always an option …

5. Sometimes Trine likes to arbitrarily prevent you from doing stuff!

There was an entire section of a level where, for some reason, I could not use the wizard’s conjuration spells. Hugely disappointing, but not because I couldn’t figure out what to do or whom else to do it with, but because it removed from me my favorite aspect of Trine – the capacity to maneuver through the game solving puzzles in an individualistic way that was the most fun for me. Think of it this way; it would be like half of a level in Deus Ex removing all guns/weapons/actions from Denton, and then expecting him to push crates on top of bad guys to kill them. It isn’t that it wouldn’t be fun. It isn’t that it isn’t something I might try and do anyway. It’s that it takes away from me, the player, the choice of playing how I damn well like!

All of that said, it’s entirely possible that this was another bug – see number 3.

I’m sure that there’s other stuff that I missed but, for as much as I was entertained by aspects of Trine, I just haven’t found myself enjoying it when playing it since the initial night. So it goes, yeah?