Dabbling with… TRI

The first episode of a short series on games I discovered at EGX Rezzed 2015.

TRI (Rat King Entertainment, 2014) is a puzzle platformer I hadn’t heard of before; I thought it must have been an early access game but no, it’s actually gone full release.

In TRI, you get the power to make triangles wherever you want – within certain constraints – and use these triangles to get around, reach places you otherwise couldn’t.

After a rather long tutorial session in which you do a lot of jumping and mantling, I was ready to give up on the game, thinking there was nothing exciting to see here. But wait, there is! Somehow the puzzling in TRI is really kind of nice. The game doesn’t seem to offer one true solution to each level, so you’re always cobbling together something that seems *approximately* right, but you’re not quite sure.

There are hidden collectibles everywhere which offer more concrete challenge in the earlier levels I played and finding some of those are quite fun. The cutscenes and vocals are not really anything to write home about, and those bridging scenes linger too much for my liking. There is a slight element of “looking for the portalable whitespace” particularly in the collectibles.

May well return to this one at home.

For more information, check out the TRI site or go to the Steam page.

All Episodes

• TRI – a first-person puzzler
• The Marvellous Miss Take – polished 2D heist/stealth game
• DEEP – deep breathing meditation in VR
• Her Story – explore video footage of police interviews to solve a mystery
• CAVE! CAVE! DEUS VIDET – art-fi visual novel in which I understood nothing that was going on
• One One One Two Three – minimalist card game that plays out in minutes
• Aerobat – incredible 2D shooter, I can’t rate it highly enough
• Screencheat – wonderful local multiplayer FPS
• Planet of the Eyes – a puzzle platformer that didn’t hold my hand