Trine series are a weird beast. The original wasn’t good, but had a lot of really cool ideas. All of which got majorly improved in the sequel, which was the first genuinely enjoyable title in the series. Then Trine 3 was released in Early Access and remained unfinished, mixing lots of very bad ideas with some of the genuinely best ideas in the franchise. And then Trine 4 came along and was mostly a straight up improvement again returning to the formula of 2, but making it more fun and adding fresh ideas. First hours with Trine 5 felt like I was playing 4 again, but with some tweaks and changes. It was charming, as always, and quite fun to play. But the more I played, the less fun the game got. And almost at the end of the game I gave up fed up with horrible design.
If you’ve never played a Trine title before, it’s a thematic continuation of titles like Lost Vikings or Gobliiins, played as a side scrolling platformer mixed with light action RPG mechanics. There are 3 characters, all with distinct abilities, and in smartly using those abilities alone or in combination, you overcome the problems and puzzles the game is constantly throwing at you. Game can be played in coop, where it’s a more silly fun experience, or it can be played solo (as I usually play these), where it’s more of a straight puzzle platformer game. But silly jank solutions are still possible solo, just more limited.
Easily the worst offender of the series, that has not been fixed or changed whatsoever yet again, is the combat. Occasionally your jumping and puzzle solving is interrupted by an arena with enemies or a boss fight and they’re always just a slog to go through. None of them are ever difficult, but none of them are ever fun either and it’s something that the series never figured out. You do get a few more abilities to use in combat this time around, but they don’t really change the experience in a meaningful way.
Speaking of abilities, that’s possibly the biggest issue Trine 5 has. As it goes along it stops being just Trine 4 again by adding more unique and curious abilities, which is great. Except, somewhere by the middle of the game your arsenal of possible actions becomes confusingly broad, whereas puzzles that the game presents (in solo) are very limited in how you can solve them. So it stops being about figuring out a fun combination of tools you use all the time and becomes a very slow and tedious process of eliminating which of all the tools are definitely not going to help you there.
Which is not helped by the fact that the puzzle design in these games always bordered on almost never looking “as intended”. So when you do get to solve an issue, it looks like you’re exploiting some horrible bug in the game and not “solving a puzzle” a lot of the time. With previous games, this was often balanced out to feel relatively okay and most bizarre puzzles were relegated to optional objectives. But in Trine 5 you either get puzzles that are super clear or puzzles where “intended” solution is just indecipherable, even if they are required to progress.
Even more strangely, the game adds a lives system on most difficulty levels, which feels… utterly pointless for things that it seems to be designed for? But frustrating for things that it shouldn’t have affected. Most times I died because I was trying to see if a particular hole in the ground that looks like any other hole in the ground is a bottomless pit or it has secrets – because there’s usually no visual indication at all. Or due to my character glitching out or simply not performing the move it should’ve. Some puzzle elements in the game work “just because” with no real explanation – you just learn it at some point. Some work extremely inconsistently and change based on what the designers felt that day. Sometimes weird glowing surfaces instantly kill you, some of them don’t… The game genuinely feels like a mess as far as the level and puzzle design goes. Which is a shame, because in terms of the story and presentation and music it feels as an improvement over the previous game.
In some ways Trine 5: A Clockwork Conspiracy to me felt like the Japanese Super Mario Bros. 2 (internationally known as The Lost Levels). Where the developers took the best the series was so far – Trine 4, – and then tried to make it harder and more-er. And if they just stuck to it being Trine 4 again, it would’ve been boring. But as it is – it switches between being boring and being frustrating. Maybe it’s a less obnoxious experience in coop, but if you like playing these games solo – I’d avoid this one. Play the fourth one instead.