Trine 2

I played Trine 1 a year ago. Now, after one year, I have much clearer opinion about Trine. This game has a very nice concept, except that when I compare it to Portal 1 and 2, Limbo and Inside I can't help it but see some flaws in its design. I dropped when I began chapter 7.

The idea of physics based puzzles which take advantage of PhysX is cool and there were other games to do the same, such as Switchball. The Wizard can lift objects and rotate them in mid air. Very cool. Except that the controls to move the object and rotate are super sensitive. It's very hard to place them in the exact position and spot that you want. It's something about friction and mass that feels unnatural or maybe too realistic. There are some instances where I think that this game is defying Newton's Laws and this adds to the confusion.

In Trine you can freely swap between characters and each one has its own skill tree. The concept is cool. However, to design puzzles and levels becomes incredibly complex because of this. Often times you can bypass challenges by abusing some tricks, such as the wizard placing boxes and platforms anywhere. Compared to Limbo, Inside and Portal I think Trine fails in presenting a logical progression. Sometimes you are tricked and not because the game has sudden traps, but because the previous challenge made you think that the solution is much more complicated than it should have really been. One example: sometimes you want to reach that XP potion which is in a unreachable place. You try multiple things, until you finally realize that you can use the wizard and boxes to knock off the potions. Very often this game presents puzzles in a counter-intuitive way that misleads you.

Combat wise it's cool to use traps to kill the enemies. However, I think that Prince of Persia Sands of Time trilogy does a better mix of combat, platforming and traps. Watch the gameplay of Trine 2 in youtube. Whoever is playing dies, falls, is killed, very often and the same happened to me.

I have no idea why the art direction abused colored lighting and bloom. Read the negative reviews. It's the only game that I know that makes the background much much brighter than the foreground. The art direction in this game is almost as if it was made by children or focused on children.