Choo choo choos your own adventure.
There’s a lot of parenting in Tren.
But pull back a little and it starts to make more sense.
For now, welcome to Tren.
There’s a lot of parenting in it.
And it crops up in a lot of places.
All great, and Tren delivers on this as you might expect.
I tell myself: I know this particular anxiety.
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 should let go, and I attempt to let go - and yet!
Of course, I am ahead of myself here, lost in details.
But Tren is all details.
You get such richness, such strata.
Is that a blob of Blu Tack fixing some of the scenery in place as Tren whistles along?
100 hundred percent yes.
You betzler it is.
Tren is full of this stuff.
Over time, I came to realise that Tren reveals itself in arcs.
It’s like moving outwards through planetary rings, bobbling along with the friendly chunks of ice.
So let’s go.
What’s at the centre?
This is where most of the game takes place, I think.
Then there are pressure switches to run Tren over which might open a barrier somewhere else on the track.
Some of them are dazzlingly complex.
An early level is done in seconds.
But by the end - honestly, one of the later levels reminded me of Trials.
Tren becomes a kind of endless shifting weight calculation.
Do I have enough speed to send me up this loop?
Can I flip backwards and end up on a separate piece of track?
Should I use the boost at this switchback or will that lead to a derailment?
As a sort of puzzle racer, it’s filled with ideas and perfect for speedrunning.
Move back, though, and you start to get the wider charm of the thing.
Here’s where the layering of narrative, of themes and preoccupations begins, I think.
Early levels have old toys: tin airplanes, wooden trees.
Move forward and you get stickers, building blocks, craft sets.
It’s the strata of childhood, and as such it blends the intensely recognisable with the slightly strange.
It’s not just an exercise in nostalgia.
He nods to himself.
Everyone put as much of themselves in there."
PC monitors hosting attract screens for adventure games (Robinson Clouseau: A Murder Mystery All at Sea).
The more I played the more I spotted what felt like another layer to things.
Early on, it really is all parenting.
In truth, Beech tells me later, there are dozens of personal stories folded into Tren.
As he encouraged his team to fold in their favourite toys, they also folded in their stories.
We weren’t imprinting exactly our story.
Was that difficult for him?
Because there is that underlying sincerity."
I am old now.
This was Beech, it turns out.
And he’s now creative director.
And that’s the final layer of Tren for me today.
And now, a new creative director.
So how has that been?
And can people look at Tren as a sign of what’s to come?
A sign of what Beech finds valuable and core to the team?
It’s a point he returns to later.
People come and people go, but the core is the people that exist in this place.
Tren for me is just an extension of that.
Siobhan Reddy, the studio director, agrees.
“We’re eighteen in January,” she says, looking slightly alarmed at the realisation.
“Things have gone through lots of changes in that time.
We’ve had LittleBigPlanet, Tearaway, Dreams.
“Culture’s not static,” she continues.
And creating something where people can see a bit of themselves.”
Now she nods to herself.
It means we’re comfortable really talking about things and bringing people from different parts of the studio.
How we can collaborate and make something.
And it’s definitely influencing how we makeotherthings."
