Trine 4: The Nightmare Prince
The Trine series returns to the magic of 2.5D with Trine 4: The Nightmare Prince! The three heroes of the best-selling adventure series are back, sent on a quest to retrieve the troubled young Prince Selius. Amadeus the Wizard, Pontius the Knight, and Zoya the Thief are joined together once again on a thrilling quest through fantastical fairytale landscapes teeming with danger. Prince Selius suffers from intensely dark dreams and, due to his magical talents, monstrous nightmares are able to slip into reality and wreak havoc on the waking world. Amadeus, Pontius, and Zoya must find the afflicted prince and resolve the desperate situation before the world is engulfed by the Nightmare Prince's shadows. Trine 4 reaches new heights in the series, bringing the most complete gameplay experience ever to fans and new players alike!
Steam User 11
Trine is back in full effect after a misstep with the third entry. This one brings back the kind of physics based gameplay the first two made famous.
It's not as free form as the first two games, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. Most of the physics puzzles in Trine 4 have a clear "correct" solution, whereas in Trine 1 & 2 I often felt like I was cobbling solutions together from whatever worked. When Trine 2 was at it's best, this free form puzzle solving was really cool, making me feel like a super genius, but more often than not I just ended up feeling like I was cheesing the system. By comparison, Trine 4 may not have given me as many moments of pure genius, but it also gave me far less wonky physics frustrations. This makes Trine 4 the most even Trine yet.
I personally like the cleaner approach Trine 4 strives towards, but I can see why some might take umbrage with this change. This isn't to say that I couldn't experiment and come up with interesting solutions to some of the puzzles, just that it's clear the game expected me to figure out what specific thing it wanted me to do.
The rest of the package is the best it's ever been: beautiful fantasy graphics, wonderful music, and a deep dive through a fairy tale world. If you liked it all before, you'll love it now. Trine's personal brand of fantasy is something I can really get behind. All too often fantasy takes it's cues from Tolkien (with good reason, Tolkien is amazing), but it's refreshing that Trine takes it's cues more from the Brothers Grimm instead.
I truly hope Frozenbite never stops making this series. I really love getting lost in their world. I'd love to see them do a much larger game set in this universe one day, but after what happened with Trine 3, I'm just happy to see them still putting out more standard Trine.
Edit: Figured I'd update a bit now that I finished the DLC. I loved the DLC more than the main game! The DLC is like the master's course. It takes everything you learned from the game and puts it together in new, interesting, and more challenging way! Plus, it's really cool to get to spend time with the students of the Astral Academy. Check it out if you like the main game.
Steam User 12
I would dare to say this is the best of the series.
It did right to all the wrongs that the third one did. Gameplay, story, mechanics, design, and everithing else is a great improvement.
Controls are solid, and when you get a grasp of them, you can become really good.
The only things I didn't like that much are the lack of enemy variety, and the "arenas" where you fight them (the concept of it being a nightmare, and changing the layout is cool, but they are rally repetitive.
Puzzles are complex enough to make you think and try a few things, but not so much that you end up rage quitting. they also make use of every ability they give you as you gain access to it, and is not a "unlock, use it, and forget it".
Another good thing about abilities, is that the ones you absolutely need, are unlocked by story progress.
Steam User 8
Great game. Puzzles and game mechanics are a lot more organized now : game pushes elements together to help you put everything in place.
This makes the first 3-5 levels too easy, but later on you will see that challenge isn't reduced by this change.
Zoya and Pontius got massive upgrades in their skills.
Amadeus got nerfed : he can now only summon above his head and it's very annoying in fights.
Bonus : experience points are no longer locked behind having a certain skill. When game requires you to have a certain skill, then you will get that one for free. I have never had to leave experience points behind to return for them later as I did in previous installments.
Steam User 14
A great successor to Trine 2 I hope there will be a sequel where the confrontation will focus on the battle of the people.
Steam User 12
not as good as trine 2
Steam User 5
Pretty fun game. Just a lot of puzzles and some silly dialogue while nothing is taken seriously.
It would be even more fun if there was more dialogue and if the characters were more interesting. Right now, they feel pretty boring, like some out of place fairy tale characters with no real human emotions, all of them appear incredibly dumb, as in their dialogue makes them not only appear goofy but downright stupid and not in a funny way.
I guess it's overdone like that exactly to give the impression of naive fairy tale heroes for kids, but they take it a bit too far. If their small banter was funnier and a little bit more realistic, this would be a much greater game, but it turns out that story writing was the absolute last thing on the developers' minds as you have to regularly suspend your disbelief over their mindset.
However, the art is pretty nice, i like the mood and the puzzles are pretty fun even if they do get old towards the 50% point. Adding more abilities that hardly even changes how you solve the puzzles and some new contraptions isn't enough to keep it fresh, but the length of this game is just short enough to make it bearable even towards the end.
The music could have more variation.
The best part of this game are the mechanics/physics that make it pretty fun to play and that you have to switch between three characters help out making it less monotone. The abilities are introduced at a pretty good pace so you have time to learn the previous one before going to the next one and they make sure each one adds something of value and that you get to test it right away, which is good game design.
I can see that the multiplayer part is a big, big selling point. online multiplayer seems like it could be more fun than local singleplayer, but local multiplayer would surely be very fun, especially now when there are so few games allowing for that.
So, definitely a recommended game. I wouldn't want to play several of this series in a row though, for now i've had enough of these types of puzzles for a good while. Oh, and I played this using APTK on a macbook pro m3, it worked flawlessly all the way through.
Steam User 5
I play this with my husband, and sometimes he really pisses me off when he randomly tries to get me killed by throwing blocks in my path or taking the Archer right before I switch to her so I can swing across the map, but the game is a lot fun, even when he frustrates me. I wouldn't play it any other way though. I think if you were to play it alone it might be a bit boring, it's definitely a game made to play with other people in my opinion. Also the graphics are beautiful.