TRI: Of Friendship and Madness

[url=https://store.steampowered.com/curator/43083373/]Clever games curator review: 7/10[/url] This is a 3D collectathon platformer where 3 specific items are required to finish a level, and you can also collect a set of other items (around 10 per level if you want). Because you can add surfaces to walk and jump on, this game is much more of a puzzle/thinking game than reflex based. Most of the puzzles are just figuring out how to best use your surface creating ability (which later morphs into walking on walls too), but there are some actual environmental puzzles as well. Levels are fairly open mazes, with multiple paths, lots of outdoor spaces mixed with corridors and other more traditional maze aspects. Rather than trying to find the "end" the real goal is visiting all the areas so you can find the required and optional collectibles. This game starts out very strong, but around mid-game (9 hours in), the levels stop being fun. Not sure why, maybe they had to make the game longer so that it didn't seem too short. But 9 good hours is fine. I wish they hadn't padded it out just to make it longer, and in particular I wish they hadn't done that by making the puzzles obscure/punishingly difficult. Oh well. One super annoying thing, though, is that the game is not configured for gamepads . The engine they used does have full gamepad support, and you can just use the in-game settings to map each and every button manually, but geeze. That's a lot of effort for each person who wants to use a gamepad. The devs should have done it once, for all of us. The game works just fine once you go thru all the work of setting up the bindings.

I so wanted to finish the game since i really liked the story as far as i had gotten and the puzzles were absolutely nice, but the perspective gave me such severe motion sickness that I am not able to play for longer than a few minutes, so I never finished it after all.

This is one of the worst-designed puzzle games I’ve ever played. The mechanics are incredibly finicky, and the overall design feels clunky and frustrating. What should have been an engaging experience turned into a chore just to get through each level. While I can see glimpses of interesting ideas beneath the surface, the execution is extremely poor. It’s hard to enjoy a puzzle game when the core mechanics work against the player more than the puzzles themselves.

Another case in which I wish Steam reviews had a "Maybe" option. For the first 13 levels out of 16, the game is very good: the simple tools at your disposal and simple level design combine in a surprisingly elegant way to generally allow for creative solutions, and the meat of the challenge is relegated to reaching optional collectibles while simply reaching the exit is a much more straightforward affair. However, there is a tremendous drop in quality in the last three levels, each of them introducing incredibly finnicky and unfun puzzles while also making them mandatory to progress: in particular, level 15 ends with such an obscenely time-consuming and frustrating mess it alone convinced me to switch this review from "Recommend" to "Do not recommend". These new puzzles also exacerbate issues with the control system that simply weren't noticeable with simpler and more robust puzzles: placing a triangle a few degrees off isn't a big deal when it's just going to act as a platform for you to climb, but it's tremendously inconvenient when it's one out of the dozen mirrors you need to bounce a light ray across a very precise path (and don't even get me started on kamis, ♥♥♥♥ kamis). What really pisses me off is that those last levels also had some great ideas ([spoiler] teleporter cube in level 14, the super-secret puzzle limiting you to 2 triangles at a time in level 15, using triangles as fox bait in level 16 [/spoiler]), but you won't ever see any of that unless you're willing to spend LITERAL HOURS on the ♥♥♥♥ puzzles.

This is a tough game to review. I see other people complaining about it being too tedious (having to draw hundreds of triangles to progress in some areas) but I guess I'm OK with that kind of repetition. I see others complain about motion sickness, which has been a major problem with some other games, like Jazzpunk. I only felt a bit nauseous one time. Then others have said the game's puzzles are too easy since it's "just draw a bunch of triangles". That stops working pretty quickly since you can't build triangles on wood blocks, or out into space (usually). I made it to level 15 somehow, having had to look up walkthroughs about 4 or 5 times for previous levels where I had no idea how to progress. On level 15 I've got three rooms I can reach where either i have no idea how to solve the puzzle, or can't even figure out what the puzzle is in each room. In Portal, at the start of each level, there's a plaque that gives you a hint on what steps you have to take to exit the level. No such luck here. You can press H to see where the 3 foxes you must retrieve are, but that doesn't mean you just go to the location to get them, or that you can even figure out how to get to the location, since teleports may be involved. I was going to give an example of just one of the rooms and my failed attempt to solve it, but the explanation of how impossible discerning what's going on in the room let alone how to solve it would just sound like the ravings of a madman. Puzzles should have discernible solutions with subtle clues, not just a bunch of unrelated stuff in a room with no idea what to do with it, or worse, almost nothing in a room with no idea what to do. Then you have to wonder - do I need to bring something into the room from elsewhere? Where might that item be? No idea. Super frustrating. I could just look up how to solve all the spots I'm stuck on in a walkthrough, but then what's the point of playing the game?

there are triangles

One of the best games I have ever played!

I think madness is appropriate word to use in the title, because this game was HARD. It seems simple enough in the beginning, but then the puzzles get really complicated and involve a lot of trial and error. I'd say it's the "Dark Souls" of first-person puzzle platformers, and if you're looking for one of those games in that high difficulty, this is definitely it.

https://youtu.be/MaG1vhtxl-E Remarkable clever for the platform crafting mechanic combined a solid sense of humor and visual human combine to a complete package.