Dealing with backlog: Trine Trilogy

This last weekend I finished my latest project in dealing with my backlog; the Trine trilogy. I had never played this series before, and apart from the stunningly beautiful visuals I'm not quite sure why I chose to torment myself like this. I am fabulously miserably bad at platformers. I got Trine 1 and 2 as a bundle on Steam back in 2013, and now that I decided to play both of them I also got the third installment, just so that I could complete the whole trilogy.

The first game is my favourite tbh. It wasn't too long, and not so complicated that even a miserable noob like me could enjoy it and figure out the puzzles without too many deaths. I finished it in 6 hours on Steam. The storytelling was quite simple, but I still found it funny. What's interesting, though, is that none of the three main characters have names in the first game. But they all get names in the second installment.

Trine 2 was good. I understand why people cite this one as their favourite. But halfway through it quickly became complicated and I had to consult guides to figure out jumping puzzles etc. I quickly became a frustrated mess every time I tried to continue on in this game. But I persevered and completed the whole game + DLC. When I came out victorious it felt like I had just completed the longest game ever. It took me 13 hours. I'm a little sad that I feel this way towards Trine 2, because the story had evolved a lot, as had the characters, and the visual were even more stunning than in the first game, and this had all the makings of a great game.

I didn't actually complete Trine 3. I was wary of the change into 3D, and it was a lot harder to judge distances when you could suddenly jump into the depth and not just back and forth to the sides. I wasn't really a fan of the new "world map", or the fact that you had to collect golden triangles to unlock the next chapter. I came more than halfway through the game before I realised that to be able to complete the whole game I'd have to collect every-single-triangle in the whole game to be able to unlock it all. That's a shitty way to make a game. I just want to complete a zone and go on to the next one, I don't want to have to clear it all before I'm able to go on to the next place. Especially not in the platformer genre, where I so easily get frustrated because the characters simply won't move the way I'm telling them to :P From what I've read about Trine 3 the story wasn't even completed, it ended on a cliffhanger because the studio ran out of money for the game. So maybe not such a big loss that I decided to not go through with that one.

All in all Trine was a fun series, frustrating but fun, and it was amazingly beautiful and there were lots of little humoristic gems in there.

Also the wizard is named Amadeus, which meant that for the duration of Trine 2 and 3 I had this song on my brain: