Platform: PC, PS3
Release: June
Pub: Ascaron
Dev: Frozenbyte

There can't be many class-based puzzle platformers. Trine, though, is unusual. It's a crisply rendered side-scroller that revolves around transforming your protagonist, at will, between three characters: a thief, a wizard and a knight. Since its vibrant levels are punctuated with chasms, riddled with puzzles and peopled by the living dead, the trio's respective agility, telekinesis and large, sharp sword have clear uses.

It's controlled either with the keyboard for movement and mouse to aim (we have played the PC version), or a thumbstick for each for the PS3 one. In the thief's case, the aiming is for your grappling hook: you can thwunk it into any wooden surface, dangle elastically and fling yourself around the level. Typically for Trine, the obvious function is not the only one: your grapple can also be used to apply your weight to wooden objects above, whether to topple them down to you or manipulate whatever contraption they're attached to.

In wizard form, your interface with the world is even more flexible: click on any object in the world and drag your cursor to move it. The force he can impel with his mind is modest, but since it can be applied to anything on-screen not nailed down, he's useful in almost every puzzle. If there's nothing loose to toy with, he can create simple blocks by drawing a square or line in empty space. The extent of his self-sufficiency only really becomes apparent when you solve a puzzle by creating a box, standing on it, then levitating yourself to your goal.

The knight is functionally the least complex, but tangibly the most satisfying to play. He's a hefty destructive force, both among enemies and fragile elements of the environment. It's normal to resort to him in fights, but he has other problem-solving applications: he can lift heavy objects and hurl them violently in any direction, which is sometimes applicable where the wizard's gentle levitation is not.

The degree of freedom and versatility in your three characters' actions derives from a sturdy physics engine. As well as simulating the pleasantly intuitive puzzles, it's remarkably good at modelling the way enemies respond to the assortment of collisions you can inflict on them. It's not up to GTAIV's tipsy Euphoria, but they crush gratifyingly when you swing into them fast enough as the thief, drop something heavy enough on them as the wizard, or land on them from a great enough height as the knight.

While the characters have very specific functions, not every puzzle is an obvious prompt to employ one of their abilities. Some have an apparent solution and a less apparent bypass possible with a different character, while others are solvable with varying degrees of difficulty by any of the three. One seemingly elaborate pulley-and-chain puzzle can be reduced into the knight simply picking up the counter-weight and walking off with it.

It wasn't available in the version we played, but Trine's planned drop-in-and-out threeplayer co-operative mode will inevitably permit more emergent solutions. In fact, the trailer shows as much. The risk is that with such a liberal toolset, the interesting approaches might seldom be necessary. There's little, in a platform game, that can't be solved by magicking up a platform and flying it wherever you please. Hopefully developer Frozenbyte has found and fashioned a game from it.

Even with that concern, Trine is an uncommonly appealing prospect. It's attractive, inventive, winsome and immediately fun to play.