After surfing the categories on the Steam store for awhile, I happened across the demo for Trine. It looked pretty and I couldn’t argue with the price: free.

Trine is a side-scrolling physics puzzle game that incorporates combat and item collection. The player solves physics puzzles to advance through the level, collecting items, experience, and equipables along the way. The puzzles (at least in the demo) involved stacking blocks, seesaw manipulation, and grappling hook movement. The combat is hack and slash ala the original Prince of Persia.

The story of Trine is pretty simple – three fantasy different characters, a wizard, a rogue, and a knight, all place their hands on the same magical artifact (the Trine) at once. The artifact melds all three together into the same body and they take off on an adventure to figure out how to undo the meld. Of course, all three have separate motivations and its fun to hear them argue from inside the same body. The story is told through voiced dialogue and a voiced narrator. It all feels being like told a fairytale, which is charmingly effective.

The player is able to switch between the three characters at will, using their individual strengths to navigate the puzzles. The wizard is able to summon crates and levitate objects. The rogue is able to attack with her bow and use her grappling hook to swing from most overhead surfaces. The knight is able to attack with his sword and defend himself with his shield. Because some of the functionality seems to overlap, the puzzles can often be navigated in multiple ways, with multiple solutions. The player can choose to weight down one end of a seesaw with a crate summoned by the wizard, or pull one end down with the rogue’s grappling hook, or bash it with the knight sword to set it spinning. And so on.

Trine is lushly detailed, with beautiful graphics. Although the levels are 2D sidescrollers, the illusion of 3D is provided by 3D background graphics. Ruins, forests, and other environments look wonderful, and encourage the fairytale concept. The animations for the characters are solid and characters react well to their environment. I only saw skeleton enemies in the demo, but I hope to see more enemies in the full version.

Sound is decent and all the expected sound effects are there. But the best part of the sound, by far, is the voice acting, particularly the voice of the narrator. It gives the feeling of playing through a fairytale, which seems the exact thing the creators were trying to achieve. Of course, the pacing of the sound is broken if the player takes awhile to transverse some of the more difficult puzzles, leaving a player a bit surprised when the narration kicks back on after reaching a checkpoint.

The difficulty of the demo wasn’t that high, even on its highest setting, though I expect this to ramp up as the game goes on – that’s what good platformers do.
The difficulty, if any, was related to the controls, which took a little playing to get used to. Trine is going to be offered on both the PC and the PS3, and it’s obvious that Trine was built more for the console crowd than the PC gamer in mind. The game does offer gamepad mapping, but I didn’t try it – my gamepad is buried in the closet somewhere. As a PC gamer I expect to be able to play with my keyboard and mouse. The player uses WASD to move, the mouse buttons to trigger the two functions of each character, and the mouse pointer to aim things like the grappling hook. 1,2, and 3 switch between the three characters. Sometimes the controls are a little clunky, especially for the rogue’s grappling hook.

The best thing about Trine is figuring out interesting ways to play with the physics and navigate the puzzles in multiple ways. Trying each puzzle in a variety of ways awards the player with access to hidden areas – the knight might be able to get past one puzzle with some difficulty, but the rogue might be better suited, using the physics momentum gained to rocket up to a hidden area. Or the wizard could place a crate to brace a seesaw and the knight could run up it, ready to attack the skeletons waiting up top. Overall, the game rewards rapid character changes and playing to each characters strengths.

The joys of Trine are threefold: the graphics, the physics, and the delightful manner the story is told. The drawbacks stem from the awkward controls, at least with a standard keyboard and mouse setup, and a worry that the puzzles won’t be as interesting as they could be. Because many of the puzzles are created to be circumvented by more than one character, I’m afraid some of them might end up repetitive and watered down. Only the full version will tell.

Trine is set to launch in July on Steam, priced at $30, which could be steep or cheap depending on how long the full game is. The gameplay is fun, and as long as there is enough content to justify a full 30 bucks, I’ll be buying it on the day it’s released.