Trine
developed by Frozenbyte (Helsinki, Finland)
self-published July 2, 2009 for Windows, $29.99
[trailer 1, trailer 2, trailer 3, trailer 4]
[website]
~800 MB

Played to completion in 8.5 hrs, 2/9/15–2/11/15.

[video of a complete 5-hour playthrough (once again, disregard the captions!)]

The first of four-or-so “Humble Frozenbyte Bundle” games, as included in the “Humble Frozen Synapse Bundle” that I bought on September 30, 2011. (Finnish developers “Frozenbyte” and the game Frozen Synapse by UK developers “Mode 7” happen to have the word “frozen” in common. Is that why they were bundled together? Who knows. There is no other connection.)

From the trailers one sees clearly that in the eyes of the developers, the selling points are the physics and the freedom of approach. But those were exactly what I didn’t care about. “Physics” in games is going to be looked back on as an awkward techno-fad, like FMV was for years: it sounds cool in theory but in practice it just means that instead of interacting confidently with things that respond reliably, you’re struggling awkwardly with things that respond approximately. Great. And the freedom to choose your “play style” from among three different characters with different powers is meaningless to me. Like I’ve said, if I wanted freedom I wouldn’t be playing a video game! It might be interesting to watch different people play the same area different ways, but how is it interesting to be just one person and play the area just one arbitrary way among many? It’s not.

“Replay value” pssh. A book doesn’t have re-read value just because you can turn the pages from the top OR from the bottom; the value depends solely on the content. In a platforming game, you may think that the value can’t possibly be in the content because it’s so self-similar (another platform! more skeletons!) but nonetheless it is, at least to me. This is why I like platforming games, in fact: because they retain the simple imaginative core of their original 80s forebears, in that very slightly different arrangements of environmental elements are to be experienced as genuinely meaningful, emotionally distinct spaces. The fact that the world you traverse is so self-similar is in fact its essential mystique.

(Wouldn’t it only increase the weirdness if this kid passed the same stuff twice? This piece of animation is a proto-platformer, except of course for the denouement where he returns from whence he came, something that no platform game has yet been spiritually ready to attempt. Yeah, Braid made some gestures in that direction, but they were basically about oh-so-clever abuse of convention; I’m talking about a game that fully embraces that after one goes right for miles, one might well find oneself going back left. In these 30-some years of gamery, has there ever been any such game? Some “There and Back Again” adaptation of The Hobbit?)

Anyway, I didn’t care about the gameplay, nor did I care about the half-assed characters or dialogue (just as the developers clearly didn’t). It’s always the other stuff that makes a game: floaty time in a spacy nowhereland Lord of the Rings/Keebler elves world, lush with skeletons and candles and sunset haze. The vagueness of the stupid story is the story, to the player: this nowhere is where I am. Why and who and what are all cozily, expansively imprecise, lit with daydreamy sensuality. I’ll tell you where you are: the castle and the mine and the forest and the ruins and the lava. The standard catalog, the taster’s menu. (No desert and no ice on this particular outing, but there’s always Trine 2.)

Music is exactly in keeping. When Howard Shore squandered those movies on this kind of crypto-Celtic cotton candy, it was a damned shame, but now that it has come to be the foundation for a whole school of bullshit secondhand make-believe, there’s actually something almost sweet about it — so insincere you can get truly lost in it again, like all the hypnotically terrible Saturday morning cartoons of my youth. Don’t you feel drawn toward some deeper, calmer spiritual level of existence by the irredeemable disinterestedness of, say, this clip? Doesn’t it actually leave a wider gap through which to experience the mysterious under-surface of image and sound and imagination, the mystic truth, beyond the petty, meddling reach of human intention? I am 100% not joking.

(I seriously am finding that clip incredibly soothing because it defies my ability to attend. That wouldn’t have been true a year ago! I have struggled mightily to return to this point, heading to the left this time! Try to remember everything you passed, but when you go back, make the first thing the last! Behind your face, there is a place, and so forth. Hence my return to the Snorks.)

Anyway, Trine did sort of that kind of thing too. It was too stupid to see as stupid, so I saw it not at all and simply experienced the dreamlife of computer games. It helped that the whole game looks and sounds like it might take place under the covers with a flashlight. Who really cares what goes on? You jump and jump and jump, and draw a bunch of planks and boxes and shoot arrows and kill hundreds of identical Harryhausen skeletons. And keep shooting some kind of grappling rope thing and it doesn’t hook quite where you want and you fall. For 8 hours, under the most gratuitously luscious lights, through completely extravagant intricate 3D backgrounds of no functional significance whatever.

The 3D-for-2D thing was very familiar to me, from having already played Donkey Kong Country Returns and Giana Sisters: Twisted Dreams, both of which post-date this game (and at least the latter of which was pretty obviously influenced by its look). I think if nothing else, Trine was significant for really cementing the idea that even 2D games should invest heavily in flamboyant 3D settings.

And I have to agree: one way or another, looking around and feeling you’re really there in nowhereland is the point of these traveling games, so you can’t go wrong giving the player a ton of stuff to look at, no matter how silly and irrelevant.

This might sound like it goes against what I said back in Half-Life 2, that I don’t want to be in an tinsel look-but-don’t-touch reality. But it doesn’t! The important difference is that unlike in Half-Life 2, in Trine (et al.) there’s no chance of missing the forest for the trees because the trees are quite literally out of reach. You can’t get lost in the useless scenery behind it because you can’t stray even an inch toward it; that axis of movement is unknown to you. Even when there is very explicitly a rope bridge heading from your location off a cliff toward a platform in the far distance… sorry, you simply can’t go there! I dare you to try!

It is the extreme narrowness of your freedom that allows the surplus decor to be meaningful, and not confusing and discouraging. Narrowness of freedom is good in games.

Last July the developer re-released the game in a new, ahem, Enchanted Edition, free for anyone who already owned the game, which has even fancier, even mistier lighting, and seems to have had all the levels cleaned up graphically and otherwise. (Side-by-side comparison video.) When I first started it up, that’s the version I was playing. But I felt funny about that, like I feel funny about all after-the-fact Special Editions and Director’s Cuts and so forth. I want to play the thing that people loved so much in the first place, not the revised and repackaged thing made to cash in on that love. In most cases, contrary to the marketing, the revised thing is almost certain to be inferior. “Han shot first,” and all that. (It really bothers me that you can’t watch Yellow Submarine without “Hey Bulldog” anymore.)

So, even though it may well be that the Enchanted Edition is in fact superior, I played the original, non-enchanted edition of Trine.

Ah, but who cares? You’ve got me there.

A bunch of Finns made this.

Jukka Kokkonen: producer, programmer
Lauri Hyvärinen: design director
Kim Juntunen: gameplay/level designer
Joel Kinnunen: writer
Santtu Huotilainen: art director
Juha Hiekkamäki, Oskari Nyman: programmers
Ari “AriTunes” Pulkkinen: composer, sound designer

Plus maybe 10 more people, and four voice actors.