'Trine' pure physics-based fun

• By JOSHUA WASCOM
• Special to 2theadvocate.com
• Published: Jul 14, 2009

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The premise has been done before: Mysterious evil threatens peaceful kingdom, a handful of heroes are the land’s only hope, and so forth and so on. “Trine” is a 2-D platformer that won’t win any acclaim for the originality of its plot, but the sheer creative depth of its basic gameplay makes up for the failings of the story.

You control one of three characters at any time. You can even switch between them at will. Each has very different abilities -- the thief is armed with a bow and an incredibly useful grappling hook, the wizard can levitate objects and conjure platforms from thin air, and the knight has a sharp sword and a strong shield.

Coming up with different ways to use these skills, individually and together, is the core of the game. A simple, but comprehensive physics system ensures there will be plenty of interesting interactions. There are a seemingly infinite number of ways to cross every single chasm and to play through every combat situation. When faced with a wall to climb over and only a single, wobbling platform to help you, you might use the wizard’s conjuring abilities to create a box and wedge it under the platform to steady it, or keep hitting the platform with the thief’s arrows until it’s rotating at just the right speed, then leap on and have it fling you over.

Further enjoyable complexity comes from the strangely neutral nature of environmental dangers. Normally spikes, lava and the like are simply and purely bad things. But in “Trine,” every bad thing has at least one good use. Hit an enemy with an arrow while he’s leaping across a lava pit and thermodynamics will take care of the rest. Wedge a box onto some spikes on the wall and you’ve got a platform to help with a hard jump. The game is full of many, many tiny interactions that are both a joy to discover and a strong ward against the onset of boredom.

“Trine” is also full of many tiny problems beyond its lackluster story. The game is short -- possibly too short -- to support its $30 price tag. While the variety offered by the basic mechanics is enormous, there really isn’t a lot of replay value, since the levels are static and you’ll tend to solve the same puzzle in the same way. Similarly, the basic level design begins to feel less creative as the game goes on, with later situations feeling like earlier ones but with a higher ledge or a longer gap.

The knight is almost an entire problem to himself, as he has few abilities that can’t be replicated more interestingly by the thief’s bow and the wizard’s levitation.

Still, “Trine” is incredibly fun while it lasts. It allows for a sort of discovery that is very rare in many of today’s games. If the price seems too high or you don’t like the idea of using a keyboard and mouse on a platformer, cheaper Playstation Network and Xbox Live Arcade versions are forthcoming.