Trinity Fusion by Angry Mob Games is an action rogue-lite platformer with three playable characters who all play differently, with the twist being that they’re all the same person. Sort of. It’s complicated. In Trinity fusion, there is a multiverse of different worlds, one populated by machines, one by transhumanist cyborgs, one by all sorts of strange living creatures, and a prime world that sits above the other worlds, because it artificially created the multiverse and the other worlds. However, things have gone wrong with this multiverse. It threatens to collapse into itself even as the cyborgs and robots make a move to conquer the prime world. It is up to a handful of scientists including Maya and three of her multiversal alternate selves to fight the various factions and find devices called lenses to rescue the multiverse as they all know it, or to explore the mysterious in-between and discover an entirely new solution to their problems.
Trinity Fusion has a fairly simple gameplay loop: you pick one of the three characters, Kara, Naira, and Altara, and you proceed to their start point on their home world. Each time you play, the game procedurally generates a path filled with power ups, treasure chests, enemies, upgrade stations, and exits. Your job is to make it alive to the exit while switching out your melee weapon and secondary abilities for more powerful ones. As you go further you encounter stronger enemies, powerful bosses, gain temporary and permanent power boosts and generally keep going until you die and respawn back at the hub, ready to buy permanent upgrades to make you just a little deadlier and a little more survivable for your foray into the multiverse.
In this universe what allows your characters to come back from the dead over and over and over is something called the Trinity Process where Maya can use the fact that she’s in psychic contact with her other three selves to pull them back to safety and health right at the moment of death. This also allows each character to fuse with the others, to create an amalgam character with a new visual design and access to the various weapons and special abilities of both.
Naira, from the cybernetic reality, has the ability to double jump and wall jump. Her secondary abilities are primarily guns, with her energy representing ammo for her guns, most of which can be aimed in any direction by holding the fire button and aiming with the joystick. She’s the most informed about the situation but is also very angry and rude to everyone she interacts with. Kera comes from the robotic foundry world as an overseer. She is interesting in that she doesn’t start with a movement enhancement and that both her regular weapons and her secondary ones are melee, but they seem to have a higher chance than the other two characters of coming with secondary elemental and chance effects. Her first movement upgrade is a grappling hook she can use to grab enemies and blue energy motes not just in her reality but all across the multiverse. Altara hails from the organically rich world used for farming and other organic resources. Her secondary abilities are some of the most diverse, creating temporary defensive barriers, ricocheting projectiles, freezing enemies solid, and more. She starts with a double jump as well.
All three characters also start with a dash and air dash. As they go along they will get access to new primary and secondary weapons – you can only hold one of each at a time until you fuse and then you can hold a second type of secondary weapon – one use consumables like healing items, screen clearing explosives, barriers, speed boosts, abilities that can be used multiple times but with a cooldown after each use. You can also find amplifiers, which are special abilities that last until you die and which provide all sorts of gameplay altering options like multiplying damage when hitting an enemy from behind or in the air (these stack) or healing you for a percentage of every critical hit and so on. There are over 100 amplifiers. Plus, if you get three of a single category of amp in a run you get a bonus amp of that color.
All three characters also share access to the same permanent upgrades in the hub. During the course of a run you can pick up three types of currency. One of these – coins – is only of use during a run to open chests, buy items and to spend of character fusion, though there are a few amplifiers that interact with them. The other two are kept on death. The blue currency is used to buy permanent character upgrades as well as conveniences that will help at points during game runs, like the ability to dismantle weapons for coins, the ability to spend coins to reroll the three amplifiers you can choose from when you find an Amp station. The yellow currency, chips, are the rarest and are used to unlock new even more powerful permanent upgrades for purchase.
Trinity Fusion is very anti-tedium. In addition to the three starting characters with their own standard paths, you can also try and find the in-between or cross into another characters world to tackle their challenges, if you can find an alternate exit in a map. The game also has failsafes in place to prevent long detours for no reward, and makes sure to always have a reward at the end of a dead-end, even if it’s just a small pile of currency or a healing item.
The actual movement and gameplay is very satisfying. While there’s often a lot going on, your character is visually distinct enough to never get truly lost in the mix, enemy attacks are all easy to track if not always easy to dodge, and while Trinity Fusion can get brutally difficult, it’s done so in a way that feels fair. The game even helps with little tool tips, like visual indicators to let you know if your weapons are at, above, or below the current power curve so you can be on the lookout to upgrade. The controls are also heavily customizable so you can do things like map your dash to a shoulder button ASAP like I did. In a lot of ways it reminds me of Dead Cells, just futuristic rather than fantasy gothic.
Lastly, I want to talk about upgrades and patches. In the short time I’ve had to play Trinity Fusion they have pushed out two patches to address several rare but frustrating bugs, and are planning on adding even more content like playable modes and an alternate start to come in the first quarter of 2024. If you like action platformer rogue-lites, Trinity Fusion is absolutely spending your money on.
Tim played Trinity Fusion on PC with a review code.
