I really like the Trine games, and I had high hopes for Trine 3: The Artifacts of Power when developer Frozenbyte announced that it would go fully 3D. It didn't work out quite as expect, though, to the point that for awhile the future of the studio seemed to be in doubt.
Frozenbyte managed to pull through and earlier this year announced Trine 4: The Nightmare Prince as a return to the series' original side-scrolling style. Today publisher Modus Games revealed some of the process that led up to that with a "making of" video that looks at the history of the series and shows off some early Trine 4 gameplay.
Unsurprisingly, Trine 3 only appears briefly in the video, although the developers do take time to acknowledge that it bombed. "With Trine 3 we maybe got a little ambitious and we went full 3D. We underestimated the challenge that that would bring," vice president Joel Kinnunen says in the video. We ended up in some difficulties both in the game itself and also as a company, with the financial situation. That was a pretty hard toll on us."
Trine 4 promises "significantly more gameplay" than the first two games in the series, including new environments, puzzles, skill trees, and a "completely revamped combat system" with "more epic boss fights than ever before." It will also feature a new four-player co-op mode, and to be honest I'm really not sure how that works in a game with three characters. Maybe someone gets to be the narrator? That doesn't seem likely: Like Peter Falk in The Princess Bride, he's integral to the experience but very much on the sidelines of the action.
Trine 4: The Nightmare Prince is listed on Steam, and expected to be out in the fall.
