Move over indie darling…
Trine (2009, PC / PS3) doesn’t quite hang together in the end. It’s taken me the best part of a year of play attempts to realise this.
It’s full of good puzzles that encourage emergent play – you can switch character between your wizard for spells, your thief for arrow combat, and your knight for brawling. There’s lots of clever physics, jaw-droppingly beautiful 3D scenery, lovely music, a decent little levelling system, lots of hidden collectables.
But the actual act of playing is flawed. The business of continually switching about, of stopping and starting, of constantly having to stop and think, absolutely kills the experience. A wizard to build a block for a thief to jump on and swing onto a ledge to switch to a knight to bash a few skeletons, just to advance a few paces further – it’s too much work for too little reward.
The game lacks flow. That feeling of genuine elegance where your inputs on the gamepad naturally transfer into something on the screen. Perhaps it’s the level design – you just can’t move for five seconds without reaching a puzzle or an enemy to dispatch. The business of getting anywhere geographically feels like a struggle.
It’s also desperately mired in stock fantasy cliches. It wallows in them – your female thief chats with your snobby wizard. The story is wafer thin, and would insult a 3-year-old’s picture book. It’s filler. A game system that doesn’t quite work, telling a story that has no real purpose. It’s actually in a way more insulting than the blockbuster videogame that blows a high concept.
Trine has no concept other than to build a game that might sell to the indie crowd, the illusion of elements that look like they might have worked together. Like blending your favourite ingredients into a sickly paste.
