Early Hours: Trinity Fusion is a must-play Steam Deck Metroidvania

Welcome to Early Hours, our look at the first few hours of a newly released title. For this instalment, we're checking out Trinity Fusion, from Angry Mob.

If there's one thing we've learned about the Multiverse in our time reading comics and watching recent MCU movies, it's that meddling between alternate realities rarely works out well for anyone involved.

That's the case with Trinity Fusion, a Metroidvania we previewed a little while ago but that's now hit Early Access in Steam - but don't roll your eyes just yet, as Trinity Fusion takes the concept and runs with it.

It's all falling apart

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As revealed in a stylised cutscene at the outset, the Multiverse was brought into balance. One reality played host to what is ostensibly a resource farming process, while another became a factory. Another is full of science, while a world called Prime keeps everything in check.

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Naturally, Prime's influence wanes and each of the universes converges with giant beasts, robots, and synthetic beings on the run, and it's your job to clean up the mess and save the universe - funny how that always seems to be the case, isn't it?

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Thankfully, taking out the multiversal trash is a joy, with Trinity Fusion offering tight Metroidvania-style running, jumping, and gunning. It feels perfect for the Steam Deck, thanks to the machine's precise thumbsticks and comfy form factor.

Platforming is a means to an end, rarely venturing into anything other than mildly challenging, but helping facilitate plenty of locomotion that often ends in sword slashes and explosions. Each of the three playable characters can jump, mantle, and slide, helping to close the distance with interdimensional nasties that run from basic bugs to shielded robots and grotesque acid-spitting wall crawlers.

Cut 'em down

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Each protagonist has a melee and ranged ability to choose from, and using each is wonderfully animated. It takes real pizzaz to make a small Metroidvania character look balletic in combat, but it works here, and chaining dodges, slashes, and more is great fun.

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Trinity Fusion offers its own rogue-lite progression system but the real excitement comes within each of its runs. While meta progression adds its own unique set of boosts, run-to-run upgrades can include screen-filling special moves that can be used once, or the ability to send homing missiles after enemies following a kill. It's closer to Dead Cells than anything else, and it's all the better for it.

On one run, I found myself switching between a pair of lightning axes and a freeze attack, immobilising bugs, robots and bosses alike before dashing in to unleash a barrage of melee attacks. That dash can be weaponised itself, too, so that dashing between enemy attacks attaches an explosive to them.

It's great fun, and while enemy groups do tend to feel thrown together (leading to some much harder encounters than others that can disrupt the flow of a level), the "multiverse collapsing in on itself" narrative conceit certainly helps.

Trinity Fusion is a promising Metroidvania that feels perfectly poised to be a Steam Deck must-play as it grows.

• Buy Trinity Fusion