Trine 2: Complete Story
Onwards! Up and to the right!
Player 1 has Joined
The Trine series is an earnest attempt to utilise the entire palette of known colours, so none feel left out. It’s as if fifty people were playing paintball inside a movie scene explaining what it’s like to be on LSD. It’s as if someone set off a pipe-bomb full of Skittles in a Swatch convention. It is one of the prettiest things I have ever seen displayed on a television, and also there’s a game in there probably.
Trine 2 is a physics-based puzzle platformer. It takes place on a 2D plane, but is rendered in gorgeous 3D. The general point of the game is to move up and to the right, in the grand tradition of platformers everywhere. There must be something good up there.
Three characters assist you in your right-upping, and you can switch between them at any time; they are, in no particular order:
- Swordsman. Grossly overweight and armoured, swings a sword and later a big hammer. Straightforward, kills things until they are dead.
- Thief. Has a bow for distance-based killings. Also has a rope that she can swing from, generally up and to the right.
- Wizard. The high fantasy version of a nerd from an American high school film. Can levitate and spawn boxes and planks. Usually ruins everything.
The story of the first game explained that, due to a plot device, the characters were irrevocably linked together and must do some quest or something, mostly up and to the right.
There are enemies to kill, obstacles to overcome, glowing orbs to gather, implausibly large spiders to circumnavigate and general peril to escape from. There are multiple ways to approach many situations, the Thief could swing over a gap, the swordsman may be able to throw his hammer and dislodge some rocks to jump on, and the Wizard may well be able to instantly fuck everything up and start a fire. The possibilities are endless.
Player 2 has Joined
The structure of Trine lends itself perfectly to co-op. If you already have these three hot-swappable characters, why not have them playable by multiple actual humans, and so it was thus. Trine allows you to share the 3 characters with a friend or two.
Tong immediately took to the Thief, as she is a compulsive kleptomaniac and enjoys killing from a distance. She did not have too much difficulty with the controls; they’re a fairly standard side-scroller run-and-jump affair. She found the Wizard and Swordsman a bit tricky to use, so I was happy to take care of the hitting-things and fucking-it-up roles those characters embody.
If the single-player game was an exercise in blundering your way through adversity, the co-op game is the distillation of this. I swear we solved perhaps 15% of the puzzles in ways intended by the developer. We found ourselves conjuring boxes onto our heads, jumping awkwardly to cause physics glitches and catapulting ourselves to the glorious, all-embracing upper right.
I’m not sure this is actually a good thing in terms of game design. Cheating your way through a puzzle does not give the same satisfaction as knowing for sure you solved it correctly.
In addition, we often felt the game was very unclear with its tutorialising. There are some puzzles that can only be solved by figuring out some obscure mechanical interaction that the game conveniently neglects to tell you. These things are not necessarily fun to divine by trial and error.
We played Trine 2 from start to finish in maybe 10 hours. We enjoyed it throughout, but it is by no means a flawless game. The communicative failures mentioned above and the lacklustre story would likely have led me to fall off were I playing on my own. Luckily, Tong’s obsessive completionism ensured we got our money’s worth. She did not experience any motion sickness with this game.
Can you share it?
This is game I feel must be shared to get the full enjoyment it has to offer. The full-on chaotic nonsense that results from cooperative play really offsets some of the weaker aspects. I would recommend it for you and your non-gamer partners, but perhaps buy it on sale.
Trine 2: The Complete Story was developed by FrozenByte games and is available on Windows, OSX, PS3, PS4, Xbox 360, Linux and Android.
