Trine 5: A Clockwork Conspiracy Review

ign.com:

If you need a break from the rogues, wizards, and knights of Baldur’s Gate 3, I highly recommend switching things up with the rogues, wizards, and knights of Trine 5: A Clockwork Conspiracy, which continues the series’ long-standing puzzle platforming excellence. This quinary sequel certainly plays it safe by sticking very closely to Trine’s established co-op playbook, but it does make some key improvements by significantly ramping up the difficulty and complexity of its puzzles, expanding upon Trine 4’s progression system, and adding several unique and memorable boss fights. That said, it still hasn’t broken out of the series’ rut of bland combat sections that pad out the adventure, or conjured up a story that doesn’t pale in comparison to its superb puzzles and platforming. That’s not particularly exciting or revolutionary, but it’s more Trine – and that’s anything but a bad thing.

Trine 5 follows in the footsteps of its predecessors (aside from Trine 3, which we don’t talk about) as a 2.5D puzzle platformer where you and up to two co-op partners play as the three heroes of Trine: an anxious wizard named Amadeus, an obese knight called Pontius, and Zoya, a shady thief. The story begins when an evil queen bizarrely decides to take over the kingdom she’s already ruling using an army of robotic soldiers. The big bad is about as silly and mustache-twirlingly evil as one can get, but the absence of an interesting antagonist is forgivable because the protagonists continue to be so endearing and well written. Still, even with a lovable cast of new and returning characters, the story is extremely predictable and not particularly interesting, which is par for the course for the series.

One of the most significant improvements is