Trine 2: Complete Story

There’s a specific kind of game that ages strangely: not badly, just unevenly. Trine 2: Complete Story is the textbook case. Frozenbyte — the small Finnish studio that has spent its entire existence orbiting this one idea — packaged the original campaign, the Goblin Menace expansion, and the unlockable Dwarven Caverns stage into a single bundle. That package has now been in circulation long enough to outlive several console generations, and it remains an easy recommendation for someone who claims they don’t like platformers.

The positioning is unusual. This isn’t a precision platformer in the Celeste mold, where the challenge is your thumbs. It isn’t a lock-and-key puzzle game either, where the designer hides one solution and you perform it back to them. Trine 2 sits in the narrow gap between: a fully simulated physics playground wrapped in a fairytale skin, where the wizard’s conjured box is a bridge, a counterweight, a projectile shield, or a stepstool depending entirely on what you decided it was.

Three heroes, bound by the artifact called the Trine, swapped freely at any moment. Amadeus the Wizard conjures boxes and planks and drags objects around with telekinesis. Zoya the Thief shoots arrows and fires a grappling rope that bites into any wooden surface. Pontius the Knight hits things and blocks fire with a shield. That’s the whole toolkit. Frozenbyte’s confidence is in refusing to expand it — the levels don’t hand you new verbs, they hand you new situations, and trust that three tools plus a competent physics solver will generate more design space than a dozen bespoke gadgets.

The reception backs the approach: a Metacritic score of 84 for a game this old is no small thing. The market has effectively priced it as a permanent budget staple. It deserves better framing than that.

• Three-hero swap with zero friction: Instant character switching mid-air, mid-fall, mid-puzzle. No cooldown, no menu, no animation tax. The swap is the core mechanic, not a feature bolted onto one.
• A real physics sandbox: Fire, water, gravity, steam, and magic all interact under simulation rather than script. Freeze water to make a platform, boil it to drive steam, float a conjured box on it. Most obstacles accept several unrelated solutions, and the game rarely notices which one you used.
• Three bundled campaigns: The base Trine 2 campaign, the combat-heavier Goblin Menace expansion, and the unlockable Dwarven Caverns level, unified into one progression.
• Three-player local and online co-op: Each player takes a hero. Puzzle-solving degrades — gloriously — into improvisation, arguing, and knocking each other into lava.
• Shared upgrade economy: Experience vials scattered through levels feed a skill tree spanning all three characters, so exploration pays into build variety rather than a numbers ladder.
• The quality-of-life layer: Save-anywhere checkpointing, Unlimited Character Mode, a Game+ replay mode, a large achievement set, and broad voice-and-subtitle localization.

The Gameplay Loop

The loop is simple in outline: traverse right, hit an obstacle, interrogate your three-verb toolkit, improvise. What makes it hold up is that the obstacle almost never has an author’s answer waiting behind it.

Take a standard gap with a wooden platform hanging above it. You can grapple it with Zoya and swing. You can conjure a plank underneath and walk. You can levitate the platform down with Amadeus and ride it. You can stack two boxes and jump. The game accepts all four with equal indifference — and that indifference is the entire design thesis. Frozenbyte built a system, not a sequence of tricks, and systems reward players for being clever in ways the designer never anticipated. Very few puzzle-platformers, then or now, are willing to give up that much control.

The cost of that generosity is legibility. When every solution is valid, no solution feels earned in the way a well-constructed lock-and-key puzzle does. You rarely get the snap of insight that a Portal or a Baba Is You delivers. You get something looser and warmer — the satisfaction of having jury-rigged your way past a problem rather than having solved it. That’s a real pleasure, but it’s a different pleasure, and players expecting rigor will find this floaty in more ways than one.

Where It Breaks

Two things drag it down, and both are structural.

The combat is filler. Pontius swings a sword, Zoya fires arrows, goblins arrive in waves and die. The upgrade tree deepens this only marginally. In the base campaign it’s an occasional interruption between the good stuff. In Goblin Menace, Frozenbyte leaned into it — more encounters, more waves — and the expansion is noticeably weaker for it. There’s a lesson buried there about studios misreading their own strengths: the audience came for the sandbox and got handed a beat-‘em-up.

The physics can lie. A simulation this open is a simulation built to slip. Conjured boxes can stick where they shouldn’t. Levitated objects can wobble out of a grip. The grapple can refuse a wooden surface that visually reads as grappleable. Most of the time this means a two-second annoyance and a retry from a generous checkpoint — the save-anywhere system is doing quiet work there. But it can also kill a carefully engineered solution, and the game gives no signal about whether the player was wrong or the engine was. That ambiguity is corrosive to puzzle design.

The story deserves a shorter paragraph than it gets in the marketing. A narrator intones fairytale platitudes over levels that were clearly designed first and justified second. It’s inoffensive wallpaper. Skip the cutscenes and lose nothing.

Co-op Changes the Genre It’s In

Played alone, this is a solid puzzle-platformer with gorgeous art. Played with three people, it becomes something else entirely.

Because each player is locked to one hero, the solo player’s fluid swap-swap-swap rhythm is replaced by negotiation. The wizard has to conjure a box where the thief wants it. The knight has to hold a shield while someone else moves. The physics sandbox stops being a private thinking space and becomes a shared, contested, hilariously unreliable one. Puzzles solved in moments solo stretch out and produce actual laughter.

This is where the design’s looseness pays off hardest. In a game with one correct solution, three players would just wait for the smart one to figure it out. Here, three simultaneous half-solutions collide and something works. Unlimited Character Mode — letting multiple players run the same hero — pushes this further into chaos, and the game is better for the chaos than it is for the order.

The infrastructure isn’t flawless. Online co-op draws periodic reports of connection trouble, and matchmaking feels like a release-era system because it is one. Local play is the reliable path.

This is the part that hasn’t aged a day. Frozenbyte’s hand-painted backdrops, volumetric lighting, and layered depth-of-field produce a look closer to illustration than to rendering — bioluminescent caverns, sun through canopy, firelight on wet stone. The lighting model remains the game’s visual high point, and the reason is that it was never chasing photorealism, so it had nothing to lose to time.

Ari Pulkkinen’s orchestral score matches it. Restrained, thematic, never bullying anyone toward an emotion.

Technically it’s a fossil in the best sense: a 2D game of this scope is light on hardware, and modern machines treat it accordingly. The UI is functional and slightly dated — menus designed to release-era conventions, an upgrade tree that’s clear but visually plain. Controller handling shows its age most: deadzone behavior and remapping options are thinner than a modern port would ship with, and the telekinesis controls in particular want a mouse.

Steam is the definitive version. Mouse-and-keyboard makes Amadeus’s telekinesis precise — you’re pointing at exactly the pixel you want, and the wizard is the character most punished by analog imprecision. It’s also where online co-op lives, where the achievement set and Game+ replay have the most support, and where regular discounts keep the entry cost low. If you have a PC, buy it here.

Nintendo Switch is the better social version and the worse precision one. Handheld play compresses that painterly art onto a small panel, which costs some of the depth and lighting detail that makes the game special — dock it if you can. Analog telekinesis is workable but never crisp. What Switch buys is the thing this game most wants: three people, one couch, detached controllers, no setup friction. That’s a real trade, not a downgrade. One caveat before buying: treat the Switch release as a local-co-op machine and verify online support against the current store listing rather than assuming parity with Steam.

More than a decade on, Trine 2: Complete Story is still doing something the industry mostly abandoned: trusting a physics simulation and a player’s imagination more than a designer’s scripted answer. That trust produces a game that’s occasionally janky and never precise, but consistently generous — it lets you be clever, and it doesn’t punish you for being clever in the wrong direction.

The flaws are real and they’re the same flaws named at launch. Combat that should have been cut. An expansion that doubles down on the weakest element. Physics that can eat a good plan. A story nobody needed. None of that has improved, and nothing suggests a patch is coming.

But the core is intact and the asking price is modest. Three campaigns, a soundtrack worth listening to on its own, and an art style that has outlasted the entire graphical arms race it declined to enter. We recommend it on Steam for solo play, on Switch for the couch — and to anyone who can round up two other people, don’t play it alone if you can help it.