It's times like this that I most regret my commitment to a 20 hour deadline. You'd think it would be on those long nights when I'm stuck with a bad game and I have to summon my willpower to even look at it. But those moments are somewhat heroic. I may curse my ridiculous life goals and rue my own stubbornness, but I can't help thinking, "I set myself a challenge, and this is what that means."
No, the worst part of playing every game for exactly 20 hours is when I finish a decent game early. That's when I really start to question myself. Because to finish a game entirely is an appropriate and proper end to one's time with it. Especially if it's like Trine 3 and it only takes six and a half hours to reach 100% completion, including all of the Achievements. So what exactly am I doing, playing it all the way through a second (and, as seems likely, third) time?
Because it's not a bad game, there's none of this macho "this is an ordeal I must endure" going on. All I'm really doing is marking time. Reaching an arbitrary point on the clock for no reason other than to maintain my consistency. And while that is enough, and I expect my next couple of runs through the game will be tolerable, it just starts to feel silly.
Ah well. Trine 3 never really presents you with the sort of sadistically dangerous traps that pepper Trine 2's later levels. There's no acid-spewing pipes or lava-filled foundry to make your way past. The final (and thus, presumably, most difficult) level is a lovely redwood forest that is perhaps a bit more vertical than some of the others, but nonetheless pretty easy to navigate.
The only truly difficult part of the game is the final boss. That's where my friend and I got stymied on co-op. It is a significant and distressing spike in the overall difficulty of the game. Most levels, the deadliest thing you have to face is falling down a pit and then respawning just a little ways away. The boss summons monsters, creates deadly rings of poison, and hurls flaming boulders that you have to reflect back in order to deal damage. It is a chaotic and stressful fight after seven levels of casual platforming.
That's why I gave up in multiplayer. We tried it two or three times and I got the impression that it would be one of those things where the only way to beat it would be to get really intense and unfun about it, and I don't want to turn my hanging out time into a hyper competitive hothouse.
That being said, I think Trine 3, like the other Trine games, is noticeably easier in single-player mode. I beat the final boss on my first try, and got 100% completion roughly 20 minutes sooner than my friend and I achieved 90% completion. I'm not sure why this should be the case. Normally, you'd think that more people would make a task easier. And while some co-op games solve this by scaling up the difficulty, Trine 3 doesn't appear to do so,
I think what happens is that with multiple players, you can't half-ass your way around obstacles. Your solutions have to be stable enough to stand up to multiple uses. Also, talking your way through the problem-solving process eats up a certain amount of time. Finally, the way respawning works may be slightly more time-efficient in single player. I also can't discount the time I saved by relying on knowledge gleaned from my previous playthrough, though that was seven months ago and I didn't often notice it helping me.
Regardless, I didn't miss out on much not finishing the multiplayer. Trine 3 has the temerity to end on a cliffhanger, and I can only imagine it's because they ran out of time and/or money, because the plot isn't nearly strong enough to merit it. Basically, you learn the origin of the Trine - a pair of heroic sisters voluntarily entered these soul-capturing artifacts in order to trap an evil, immortal sorcerer in a third until such time as heroes might come along and find the sorcerer's enchanted heart and thereby slay him permanently. The Trine is one of the three artifacts, inhabited by the soul of one of the sisters. Over the course of the game, the Trine breaks and the evil sorcerer uses this opportunity to break out of his own artifact prison. The heroes have to reassemble the Trine to gain enough power to stop the villain. This involves platforming an collecting little doodads called "Trinangles." In the end, it turns out that you get about 2/3rds of the way through this process, including the large, unnumbered piece you get by defeating the final boss, and then the sorcerer breaks the third artifact, letting out the Trine spirit's sister, who appears not to be friendly, and then . . . we'll have to wait for the sequel to find out.
The practical upshot of all this is that I have literally no reason to keep playing this game. Everything I could possibly have wanted from it, I've already gotten. Yet I'm going to play it two more times, because I am a fundamentally ridiculous person.
Sigh.
No comments:
Post a Comment