I just got my first platinum trophy today for finishing every achievement in Trine.Working my way through every experience vial in the game was the part that took the longest, and I’ll admit: I had to consult a few online guides to find a few of the more cleverly hidden ones. But this is the first game I’ve ever gotten 100% completion on other than the Steam achievements in Plants vs Zombies. I’ve got some thoughts on a few of the trophies in Trine.

All Boxes and No Play
Achievements like this one are just a bitch. Creating 500 planks takes a good 20 minutes of annoying rote repetition. If I weren’t interested in having a platinum trophy, I’d never have done it. What a serious pain in the ass.

Master Ninja
I never thought this would be as hard as it was. Perhaps the game is buggy, but I swear I had the thief swinging seven times in a row and never got the trophy. This was the second to last trophy I picked up. In the end, I just swang back and forth under a bridge for ten minutes or so every so often. Usually, after 10 minutes of swinging, I found I’d gotten no trophy, so I’d just continue playing. And swear a lot. But eventually the game decided to recognize that I’d gotten five consecutive swings.

Better Than The Developers
I have a love hate relationship with the Tower of Sarek. At first, I totally hated it. But when I decided to try to get through the whole level without a single death, I steeled myself to the experience and forced myself not to get frustrated after my tenth death. Then, I started getting better at it. Soon, I could get through the majority of the level 90% of the time. I found that there were only two parts that were really hard. Firstly, a spinny platform onto which the phantom summons a box, making it spin. You can see that at 1:17 in this video. I eventually got to the point where I could shoot that box with a fire arrow before it made the platform spin, but it’s harder than it looks. The second hard part is at around 1:41 in the same video. Making a triangle platform with the wizard and getting it to be stable may be easier on the PC version of Trine than it is on the Playstation.

The fact that I actually enjoyed going through the Tower of Sarek as many times as I did is very interesting to me. Repeating a 90 second portion of a game over and over until you get good at it is such an old school concept in gaming, and it’s been many years since I’ve done it. It may not be the last time.