Trine 3: Can Early Access iron out some of the series' kinks?

[Administrator]

It is tempting to argue that Early Access should only be for certain kinds of games - ambitious games, experimental games, games with a certain degree of the unknown to them. Setting aside the fact that developers can do whatever they want, this approach makes Trine 3: The Artifacts of Power seem like a weird fit. In my memory, this is a series built of wonderfully poised platform adventures, in which elegantly rendered Sleepy Hollow tree limbs curl around a range of ingenious physics puzzles. With its wizards and warriors and its pan-piped soundtrack, it's a bit like spending an evening in Peru's favourite Tolkien theme pub. It's a known quantity, and it has a certain polish.
In reality, Trine's often been a little more complex than that. The physics, while entertaining, have always felt slightly wonky, and the puzzles, built to be completed by any of three different characters, have tended towards the murky and the fudgeable. Most of all, the developers have never been brilliant about leading a player's eye towards what's important and away what's not in this lavishly detailed world. Trine is like an evening in a Tolkien theme pub, then, but it's a lock-in, and, every now and then, the staff gets plastered. In other words, there is probably room here for the kind of tweaking and recalibration that Early Access allows for after all.
Whatever the case, the hour I spent with Trine 3 this morning delighted me. It's the same old charmer, really, beautiful sights and a zip-along narration hurrying you past things that might otherwise annoy you. The big change this time around is the shift to proper three-dimensional environments, and Trine 3 handles it all so well it pretty much feels like the levels have always worked this way. There's a noted absence of fuss: a fixed camera tracks you as you race across a rickety bridge, say, and then follows you inwards as you head over meadows and sandy beaches to the glittering rocks that mark the horizon. I actually had to load up Trine 2 to prove to myself that this stuff was actually new.
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