Trine casts you into the role of the trio of protagonists, Zoya, Amadeus, and Pontius. They are, as fantasy entails, a thief, a wizard, and a knight respectively because the world’s saviors must always include someone whose primary profession is stealing things. These three have the unfortunate luck of living in a world dominated by a growing army of living skeletons threatening to plunge the world into darkness. More unfortunate still, the trio are seemingly trapped inside of a veritable palace of education with no company other than each other, and as the rules of road trip comedy dictate, they aren’t exactly chums. In fact, they’re trapped primarily by their own arrogance and foolishness and, as punishment, their souls end up bound together via magical pyramid shaped object and now they must go on a deadly adventure to an evil tower in order to fix their predicament. So, all in all, pretty bad Tuesday. But who knows, maybe they’ll do all that good adventurer stuff like grow and change as a person and learn to trust and befriend their comrades. Maybe they’ll even find their place in this wild and crazy world, hopefully a place that doesn’t involve being in the army of the undead. Is this just Evil Dead 3: Army of the Dark Crystal?
The presentation of Trine’s story is stronger than the story itself. The game is presented as more fairytale than narrative, complete with all-knowing narrator with a soothing voice. The Dark Crystal comparison is actually more apt in this section than in any other as the narrator in Trine sounds exactly like the one in the Dark Crystal. There’s even a giant picture book that both serves as a map of sorts to give you an idea of the traveling done between stages as well as serving to establish a sort of Tolkien/Lewis vibe. The map looks incredibly similar to the map that would be included in later releases of Lord of the Rings or Narnia. This presentation proves that our Finnish devs know and love their classic fantasy, but also makes it easier to swallow the game’s narrative shortcomings. We’re told a lot more than we’re shown in this game and if it was presented in any other format, I could see that resulting in some sort of exposition nightmare. As well, the characters are unfortunately super underdeveloped to the point of being almost non-entities in a story about them, and if it wasn’t for the format I would take huge issue with this. Considering the game is more about fun puzzle-platforming, though, I can let these shortcomings slide this time.
I feel like it’s important to at least mention the characters as, while underdeveloped due to a number of factors in the game in terms of personality, their differences are still very important to the game as a whole. First, there is Amadeus. We’re told from the start that Amadeus feels inadequate as a wizard because of his inability to do the fireball spell, a basic spell most magically inclined beings are capable of. We’re also told the reason for his lack of skill is that he’s too much of a ladies man to focus on his studies. I’d argue Amadeus has a more interesting skillset as a result of his unorthodox spells. Amadeus is a build of sorts. He starts off the game only being capable of creating a single box and using his magic to move things telekinetically. Over time he not only increases his abilities to summon boxes, inevitably able to summon a half dozen at a time depending on your equipment setup, as well as being able to summon planks to use as bridges and even floating platforms. If it hasn’t been made clear, Amadeus is your primary platforming character. You can use his abilities to traverse almost any obstacle, even some that were likely intended to be for the other character’s abilities. Unfortunately, Amadeus has next to no combat ability as, you know. Can’t throw a fireball. The best you can do is drop boxes on enemy heads and that’s far too unreliable to recommend. But overall, a lot of the puzzle and platforming sections belong to Amadeus.
Secondly, there’s Pontius. Pontius is a man with a great sense of honor and duty and nothing going on in that thick head of his. Pontius dreams of being a royal knight, so much so that he takes it upon himself to guard the Astral Academy(the previously mentioned veritable palace of learning) despite no one telling him to do so. And as you’d expect, Pontius is the opposite of Amadeus in almost every way. Pontius is your combat character. He’s the only one with any defensive capabilities, having a large shield that can be used to block incoming attacks but can also be upgraded to involve a charge attack for smashing into enemies and obstacles, as well as given a magical upgrade to become a “Gravity” shield. Apparently, Gravity means Magnet in Finnish. But this is nothing on his offensive capabilities. Pontius starts off being able to decimate enemies with his blade, unfortunately unnamed in this game, but I hope its name is ‘Pilate’, and just gets better from there on. His blade can be enchanted to become a flame sword, allowing it to light torches and enemy’s skulls, and he eventually gets a nice Warhammer that can shoot electricity to go along with it. He’s a regular old Rhydderch Hael, if Rhydderch Hael was also Thor.
Last but not least, there’s Zoya. Zoya is shrouded in mystery, as any good thief should be. We don’t get to know much about her backstory, but we do learn that she’s very good at what she does. Though that might just be her being exceptionally opportunistic, as she’s apparently the only person in this kingdom who saw the undead apocalypse and decided to make bank off it. Zoya arguably has the most arc of the three, starting out caring for nothing but herself and at first not even talking to her comrades, but inevitably comes out of her shell and starts fighting more for what’s right than what’s shiny. Zoya is probably my favorite. She is the ranged character, first and foremost. In combat, she wields her bow to snipe skeletons from a safe distance, and this bow can be upgraded to fire multiple arrows at once, and will inevitably be enchanted to fire flame arrows. Meaning that Amadeus is the only character to not have fire powers because this game is committed to the joke. But her platforming abilities are where she really shines. Zoya has a grappling hook which, as you’d expect, is primarily used to swing from objects. What you aren’t told, is that Zoya can use this grappling hook to recover from almost any bad jump. If you memorize what the grappling hook can cling on to and what you can get away with when you have proper swing momentum, Zoya can practically break levels. Not to mention that her swinging mechanic is just generally fun to use, even if the momentum can end up a little on the wonky side sometimes.
The level design in this game is exquisite. Not only does it manage to utilize all of the various skills that your trio has at any given time to give you a lot of varied and in-depth puzzles and platforming challenges, but each level is packed with secrets to find and hidden experience to collect. And the best part of it is that while there is a correct way to do each puzzle that utilizes only the basic puzzle mechanics, if you’ve gone through the trouble of gaining a lot of EXP, you can often just cheese puzzles out and beat levels way quicker than they intended. Usually, this manifests in the wizard being able to summon a ridiculous amount of boxes that you can just opt to stack upon each other to get where you need to be. But regardless, it is a nice reward for exploration that incentivizes you to thoroughly explore and replay levels and discover creative solutions to puzzles, especially if you’re having issues with the game’s mechanics.
I avoided mentioning this when discussing Pontius, as I didn’t want it to seem like what he was designed to do was lesser than Amadeus or Zoya, but the combat in this game is really bad. Satisfying and fun combat is very difficult to do in a side-scrolling format, of course, so I feel like it’s unfair to judge this in the same way I’d judge, like, Bayonetta’s combat. But still, Trine’s combat is repetitive, under-designed and just not very fun. There are a grand total of four and a half normal enemy types in this game, melee skeletons, range skeletons, fire-breathing skeletons, and spiders, with armored variants for each of the skeletons and a shielded and armored shielded variety for the melee. The issue is that all these enemy types behave in the exact same way regardless of stage, variant or otherwise. Skeletons will just blindly charge at you with no consideration for what’s in their path, often times leading them to their death and netting you free experience. As well, the skeletons single-minded AI severely overpowers Zoya, who can just very easily sit up somewhere high and snipe skeletons whose AI is too stupid to tell them to take cover, especially once you gain the wizard’s floating platform skill and are able to take cover literally anywhere. And not to mention the game’s two boss varieties, the giant skeleton lord and the rock troll, who can very easily fall into the same pit traps and Zoya’s bizarrely overpowered nature.
The checkpoints in this game are also far too frequent for their own good. Death in this game is something that only happens to a single character at a time rather than a whole party thing, so if you end up dying with one character you can still keep on chugging on with the stage. The issue becomes that each character is restored with half health the next time they reach a checkpoint. Any checkpoint. So you can very easily restore your fallen comrades with no actual penalty for your mistakes. This mechanic alone seems far too generous for the kind of game Trine is, where it’s seemingly all about player creativity. I could go ahead and try to play around with Pontius’ magic shield, yes. Or I could just backtrack a couple platforms, get Amadeus back and stack boxes and make stairs to my heart’s content. A simple matter of making checkpoints limited use could so easily fix this, but as it stands, it’s easy to exploit the game’s system to breeze your way through levels.
Despite my issues with it, I had a ton of fun with Trine. I am a sucker for clever design and letting the player think outside the box, so it was right up my alley. I’m glad I finally got around to playing it after so many years and I’m stoked for the inevitability of playing Trine 2 for next year’s 52. If you want some of the smartest level design in a puzzle-platformer and won’t be turned off by combat more akin to Zelda 2 than anything, I highly recommend you pick up Trine. You won’t regret it. I hope you enjoyed our look at it, and we’ll be back next time with Punch-Out!! Featuring Mr. Dream. I don’t have an NES. See ya then.
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