Review: Trine 2
Like this? (4 votes)Despite being a stunningly pretty game from beginning to end, and a whole-package aesthetic marvel of alarming robustness, there remains one moment towards the end of Trine 2 where, above and beyond what has come before, all the ones and zeroes of code that are mingling beneath the hood conspire together; they pool everything they have, and the molten result is an assault on the eyes and ears, catching them off-guard with a slice of beauty so grand that some players might forget to breathe.
Welcome to Hyperbole 101. Welcome, also, to the moment in Trine 2 where the Thief, Wizard and Knight find themselves bounding along a beach that has been kissed by peach-tinted rays of warming light so implausibly welcoming it seems the fruit itself somehow mastered the art of breathing fire, and slyly stole the sun’s place in the sky when nobody was looking. There have been no records of gamers dying from suffocation at this moment, although such a fate is a much more realistic one for the fictional cast should the temptation to admire the murky blue underwater effects linger for just a moment too long. It is, to simplify a bloated sentence, breathtaking.
Backed to the sound of female vocals as gentle and enchanting as silver sand sprinkled on a coral reef, it’s a moment of genuine peace – an isolated pocket of gaming where threads of story, theme and emotion weave themselves with reckless abandon in the player’s mind; threads that eventually come crashing to Earth and burrow towards its toasty core once it eventually becomes apparent that this game, really, is just more Trine.
Spoiler! This game has magic and stuff
This is not a sin in and of itself. Trine was a great little physics platformer and, by extension, so is its sequel. This is a game that knows exactly what it is and that – on a mechanical level, at least – cannot be faulted for its clarity of vision. But it creates a problem for itself because its artists were a mite too good at their jobs.
It seems unfair to judge Trine 2 by the merits of its story, but fairness is a thing that reviews can only ever pretend at. A simple tale told with limited ambition though it may be, the plotting hardly appears to be an integral part of the game and, when so many contemporaries have taken an identical stance, it seems an unreasonable double-standard to single out Frozenbyte for using their narrative as little more than tape with which to stick one level to the next.
Unlike its contemporaries, however, Trine 2 frequently teases its players with a fantastical musical score, a narrator with a voice that fairytales were written to be read by, and a world of such visual imagination and splendour that it’s almost impossible not to want to reach out and touch it. By the time the three heroes reach the aforementioned sandy shores, it all feels downright unfair – Trine 2 is one of the prettiest games in existence but, for all this wondrous visual splendour, the looseness of the threading has robbed of its full impacting potential; time and again, the aesthetic accomplishment is reduced to mere window dressing. Occasionally a giant octopus may move platforms around in its heavy, rubber-like tentacles, but even then it feels like a lavish background – a particularly awesome painting sprayed upon the backdrop to a Ferris Wheel. Instead of building a world to learn about and discover, Trine 2 traps itself behind glass.
Comedy forsaken to point out that this is running on a 2-year-old laptop!
Trine’s is the sort of world that you wish you could run into an explore, a thee-dimensional wonderland that feels unfairly restrained by the 2D puzzle-platforming mechanics that make the gameplay tick. If an open-world RPG were ever to exercise such wilfully reckless imagination, and back it with a comparable lust for colour, it would border on revolutionary.
In spite of some character leveling, however, Trine 2 isn’t an RPG; its world isn’t even open to be explored beyond poking in crevices for collectable items. Frozenbyte has displayed an almost frightfully deft gift for creating a land rife for adventuring, and then gone on to deny players of the illusion that their trek is anything more than a series of jumping and physics puzzles peppered with occasional, simplistic combat.
The reality is that the narrative really does do little more than stitch the levels together; sometimes barely even that. A lot of the words employed are nonsense written for the sole purpose of making the narrator earn his pay-cheque during loading screens, and the visual design feels (often artificially) held back from spinning a yarn of its own. The word ‘adventure’ is thrown around recklessly, as if it never occurred to crew at Frozenbyte that they’re baiting their audience with unrewarded possibility. Even just a splash of Cave Story would have helped this second Trine outing to become more than just a sum of its parts.
Ah, the Thief. She really does have fantastic boots.
But it’s not. In fact, Trine 2 feels like it could be singled out as a quintessential example of a work that truly is a sum of its parts. And to be fair, these parts are, in most cases, magnificent. The internal rules that govern the play logic – the nature of the physics; magic water that makes plants and platforms grow abnormally large – are consistent and hugely functional. All three characters have their uses, and for players who want to solve puzzles on their terms, then the design could be said to thump Portal into the ground. Even just a single run through of any one stage reveals multiple ways that progress could be made and, despite the beta’s best efforts to suggest otherwise, there are numerous obstructions to progress that would be far more interestingly overcome with the aid of human allies online.
Character upgrades build upon this design; player decisions about whom them want to boost the most offer up alternate methods to how puzzles can be cleared.
In fact, Trine 2 is mechanically exceptional. It features some of the best physics-platforming in show. It sounds superb and, on the PC at least, is a graphical tour-de-force of the highest calibre. Hell, it’s also wonderfully optimised, and will happily run on high settings on a respectable system from two or three years ago.
Flaming sword a by-product of cooking classes. No, really.
By the standards by which games are typically judged, there is next to nothing wrong with it. The only noteworthy complaints are found in what it doesn’t do, never in what it does; fundamentally, to hold this against it is unfair.
But it is, also, how it is. Fairness doesn’t change a thing. The polish of the production value on display here, to say nothing of its storybook approach to world creation and basic narrative premise – an approach that the rote, cheerfully bankrupt worlds envisioned by most developers who work within fantasy fiction, simple or complex, could do well to borrow from –, makes it hard not to want it to be something more.
It’s all a bit like watching a kid jump over a mountain and failing to be impressed, not because it’s not amazing that this kid just jumped over a freaking mountain, but because, mid-flight, it became apparent he was holding back, resting on laurels long since mastered.
Trine’s that kid, and he’s really good at jumping over mountains. But it’s kind of hard to get past the fact that he should be leaping for the stars.
8
