There’s a lot of parenting in Tren. This is surprising in some ways, because Tren is ostensibly a virtual train set that comes with a suite of ingenious puzzles and race challenges attached to it. But pull back a little and it starts to make more sense. With Tren, John Beech, the game’s design lead, and Media Molecule’s newly minted creative director, asked himself if he could make a “triple-A” game inside Dreams, on his own, while simultaneously renovating a house and becoming a parent. The answer, in true Media Molecule style, is that he achieved all of that except for the “on his own” bit, but we’ll get to that. For now, welcome to Tren. There’s a lot of parenting in it.
And it crops up in a lot of places. Tren drops you into a world of toys and living room floors, and the main attraction is a simple toddler’s train set. It’s the kind with carved wooden track and chunky vehicles to ride on it, vehicles which all clip together with magnets on the buffers. Even to say these words is to feel the particular weight of these objects in your hands, their pleasant triviality, their painted, planed away smoothness. All great, and Tren delivers on this as you might expect. But my absolute favourite thing about Tren, I reckon, is the moment at which you can attach additional cargo trucks to your train. You maneuver it under a set of plastic cranes, and the arms of the cranes grab the cargo, and then? Then they sort of hover, anxiously, raising and lowering the cargo as they wait for you to get safely into position.
I tell myself: I know this particular anxiety. It’s the anxiety, with much attendant arm flippering, that used to erupt whenever my daughter was in pre-school and in the playground attempting something new. I’d hover, not wanting to intrude, but I also couldn’t help myself. Yes, it’s a lovely slide, but think about safety! I still feel this anxiety now in the odd moment around the house, too, when she asks to try out a fountain pen, say, or asks if she can carry the scissors, very carefully, between rooms. I should let go, and I try to let go – and yet! And yet you get those hovering cargo crane arms, that parental hesitancy, twitching, juddering, urging Tren into the right position, hoping that the whole thing goes well and doesn’t become a bad memory.
Source – eurogamer.net
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