Trine: Did you really just kill the thief again?

As it turns out, PC gaming can bring something new to the table after all these years, local multiplayer.  It made sense on paper, consoles have local multiplayer, PC hardware tends to better than consoles, PCs should be able to handle local multiplayer.  Well there was a bit of a hurdle since plugging in two keyboards does... odd things.  And mice just fight each other, I wouldn't recommend it.  But with the advent of more and more gamers having controllers, devs are putting in local multiplayer and I love that they are.

Trine is a physics platformer, puzzle adventure game, as indie games tend to be, I guess it's a safer bet than trying to debug a Skyrim clone with two testers.  But, spoiler, it turned out to be pretty good, if a bit broken.

First things first, it's really beautiful.  The levels are gorgeous.  There's generous doses of color and varied objects, traps and enemies.

The levels are completely linear but that's okay, it's a platformer and it keeps things simple, especially if you're playing with more than one person.  The mechanics revolve around three heros that have their fates intertwined by a magical artifact called the "Trine", the important bit is that they are able to trade places with each other at will which, to the player, means you need to use the correct character with their specific and unique move set to move past traps, puzzles and enemies. 

So seeing as this is a multiplayer focus game, I enlisted the help of my girlfriend who apparently wasn't completely scared off from our time playing co-op Portal 2, turned out to be an okay idea.

I wouldn't recommend playing it with three people though, the game doesn't seem properly balenced for not being able to switch between characters.  There may be a mechanic for switching when you have three people, but since I don't have a second controller/any friends, we didn't try out the three player mode.

The main problem here is the water bits.  The wizard and the thief, who I could not stop calling the "rogue" to save my fucking life, can both swim.  The knight sinks like a rock to the bottom of whatever water he falls into and 90% of the time drowns before anyone else can swim down low enough to actually see him on screen.  There is an item that allows you to breathe underwater, but I'm assuming it's a random drop from the chests so it can not be counted on.

What my girlfriend and I also figured out is that aside from beating the shit out of enemies, the knight is completely useless.  Both the thief and the wizard have some ability to solve puzzles and bridge gaps, the knight has no such abilities.  And even more than that, the thief is essentially able to handle everything in the game.  The wizard's main use was supporting the thief, then once the thief got across, switch characters so the other player can use the thief to get over the same gap.

But honestly, we had a blast playing it.  Not the most balanced, not the most challenging but certainly fun as a multiplayer game, even if we did fight a bit over how many times she killed of the thief and then we needed her 20 feet down the road and the final level that we had to retry no less than 30 times, but she is now bugging me to download the sequel so we can play it some more and she doesn't like many of my games.

Please don't kill the thief...

Minecarts look like so much fun