This is a bit of a downer for me, because I was a big fan of the series that spawned Trapt: the Deception franchise on the PS1. Despite the uber leet name change, Trapt is the fourth game in the series. Starting with the unrefined Tecmo's Deception in 1997, the series hit stride with 1998's Kagero: Deception 2, and kind of limped through 2000's Deception 3: Dark Delusion. And in 2005, we have the half-assed next-gen edition, Trapt for PS2.
Why the long break between games? The Deception team was kept very busy on a new and justifiably awesome franchise, the Fatal Frame series. Obviously, poor Trapt did not get the attention it deserved.
Execution aside (pun intended, you'll get it in a minute), it's a fabulous concept... its nearest cousin is probably the Dungeon Keeper series (1997 and 1999) for PC. You have the run of an old castle, and you set booby traps to kill the various invaders. Of course there's always some grand plotline of dubious morality and a fair amount of existential hand-wringing... but at the core, you're setting up traps in order to kill people in the most spectacular way possible.
It's a great amount of fun, particularly for voyeurs like myself who prefer not to get our hands dirty. You can talk all day about the visceral carnage of Any Given FPS 20XX, but I'll always lean towards the cerebral shadowplay of Deception. It's about building a better mousetrap and then revelling in its destructive power.
In Trapt, you are Princess Allura, who finds she has "the power of the demon" or somesuch. This is how the game explains your ability to devise and prepare booby traps. I couldn't care less what Final Fantasy script cutting is used here, because the key is in the doing, not the explaining. The power manifests itself after her father, King Olaf, is murdered. She wisely escapes to an abandoned castle, but the revolutionaries follow... and so the bloodbath begins. You'll weave in and out of several branching storylines throughout Trapt, but they all reduce to one idea: you're in the castle and people are coming after you that you must kill.
The generically medieval world means you'll have to contend with peasants and wizards and archers and soldier after soldier after soldier. This is where Trapt enjoys putting you through little morality plays, because each and every "invader" has a miniature storyline assigned to them. You'll read their motivations for coming after you (there is no voice work) and you'll read a final farewell after you've killed them. When a character's last words are "I just wanted... to hold you again... one last time..." it's meant to make you think on what you just did. It might be more dramatic if it wasn't done for every single nerd that walks in the door, however. The actual effect is that you become numbed to the invaders' individual plights, and any opportunities for introspection are drowned in monotony.
Allura's only defense is the offense of her traps. She has no knife or punch or similar baseline attack. So there is a certain stress associated to keeping the invaders away from her. Ideally, you set your traps along obvious walking paths, then position Allura as visible bait to make sure the enemies walk into the trigger zone. You have to manually trigger the traps, so a large portion of the game is watching invaders slog along and hitting the button at the appropriate time. By the game's end, you encounter smarter enemies who can evade or continually sidestep traps, or even have immunity to specific types.
There are three categories of traps: wall, floor and ceiling. Guillotines, launching floor segments, flaming arrows, you name it. Each trap has its own hotspot zone and, if applicable, a toss radius. Once you figure out how far trap X throws a body, or how close a guy has to be to be swallowed by trap Y, then you can have fun slinging people from one trap into another. Pulling off combos like this is how you score the big points.
Most rooms have built-in traps, like falling chandeliers or electric chairs, that can be set off by shoving or throwing invaders into them. Some rooms have mega major traps, called Dark Illusions, that require obscure sequences to activate... but when they do, you get a satisfyingly hilarious death animation.
Since the plotline branches according to a few very minor choice sections, your first pass through the game may seem short. Plus, you may get a stupid ending (spoiler: there's one final boss guy that you can't beat.) However, the intention is that you'll play through several times. If you start a new game after finishing one, you get to keep all your collected traps, rather than starting with a blank slate. In fact, repeated playthroughs are the only way to build up enough points to buy all the really expensive and powerful traps.
This all sounds great... until you realize that the formula hasn't changed one bit from the PS1 editions.
Seriously. Aside from the cast of characters, Trapt is exactly the same as a PS1 game. You're still limited to three traps at a time. You're still limited to carrying nine traps into each level as your working trapset. You're still limited to only two attacking invaders at a time. Folks, this is the swansong era of the PS2. It can handle a more complicated booby trap game than this.
And the graphics. Lousy. Barely up to PS2 standards, with the same kind of dull, dark, drab textures that signaled the death of the PS1. I realize we're in a castle, but come on... where's the detailing?
Character animations are preposterously lame. Slice somebody with a buzzsaw or pierce them with an arrow, they're going to "die" in the exact same way. There is precious little genuine interaction between character and trap, not even in a stylized GTA kind of way. It is laughable that this is a PS2 game from the year 2005. This is, in almost every way, a launch title.
But thanks to the undeniably fun gameplay, it would have been a great launch title. It's an over-the-top 3D goreless gorefest with the heart of a puzzle game and the skin of a first year title. It just shipped far too late to have any impact... unless you were a Deception fan and couldn't wait to fire dudes off of spring-loaded platforms and into spinning sawblades again.
