Trine 4 is a game I didn’t know I wanted until it was on the screen before me. Three Trine games was more Trine than I ever thought I’d need, and given the title it seemed fitting to end the series as a trilogy, even if the last one was a bit duff. Trine 4 sounds like a Douglas Adams joke, only humour has never been Frozenbyte’s strong point.
As it turns out, Trine 4 is more like Trine 3: Trine Harder. It dispenses with the erroneous experiment in 3D platforming of its predecessor, offering a more traditional sequel that doubles down on the stuff that made Trines 1 and 2 such absorbing platformers. It presents a fairytale world so rich and indulgent it’s likely to give you gout, and offers physics-based puzzle platforming that’s edges ever closer to being a Rube Goldberg simulator.
Trine 4 sees the heroic trio of Amadeus the Wizard, Zora the Thief, and Ser Pontius the Knight reunite to track down a missing prince suffering from night terrors so vivid that they come to life. Having escaped from the wizard’s academy where he is equal parts student and lab rat, the Prince vanishes into a giant magical forest, forcing our heroes to track him down in what essentially amounts to a 12-hour long chase sequence.
