The bones of the story might not be as groundbreaking but what makes it unique is the part where she needs to survive its pursuers with the help of the traps, there are some developments here and there but for the most part, the plot is pretty bland. Although sometimes the game will make you doubt if the characters are good or bad, so in a sense it also has some mystery element to it, butThe bones of the story might not be as groundbreaking but what makes it unique is the part where she needs to survive its pursuers with the help of the traps, there are some developments here and there but for the most part, the plot is pretty bland. Although sometimes the game will make you doubt if the characters are good or bad, so in a sense it also has some mystery element to it, but nothing that will make you burst with anticipation or to be surprised with many of its outcomes as most of the twists can be foreseen from kilometers away, still it is fun to see how the story unfolds and how its players will react with each event.
The characters aren’t the most unique, they represent some kind of trope but for the most part, they are likable and fun to be around with, although they tend to have two sides to them, they all are one-dimensional but serviceable.
The game is separated into chapters and from the very first chapter you can choose to do a side story before it, these side stories are linked to the chapter (not necessarily in a narrative way) so if you miss one you’ll have to wait for another playthrough to do it. They add a little more depth to the main narrative but nothing too meaty, you can also read enemies descriptions of the current chapter before you start your mission, they tend to add more insight on how they feel towards Alicia, but most importantly they are like micro-stories on their own, as they told you about the character and how they might be linked to a future or past enemy, these descriptions remind me a lot of FromSoftware’s item descriptions and they also have a Yoko Taro dark twist to them, many times I was most invested in these micro-stories than the main narrative so make sure to give them a read before you start a chapter.
As much as intriguing the plot can be, the most interesting part by far is the gameplay. Each chapter has the same objective: to kill or scare away your pursuers with your traps, think of Home Alone but with deadly and inventive traps. You can equip three traps into three types: wall traps, floor traps, and ceiling traps, they have different cooldowns and they also tend to have some delay between the moment you hit the button and the time you activate them, so you need to consider timing to activate them. Each room in the mansion has its own traps, some of them have only one use and some others can be reusable, the fun part of it is that you can mix your traps with room traps to make bigger combos and earn more points.
The way you lure enemies is very simple, you can only run away and activate the traps so basically you locate yourself between your trap and the enemy and wait for them to enter the activation zone, if it sounds simple it’s because it is and the enemy AI isn’t as clever to avoid them, although as you advance through the campaign enemies won’t be susceptible to some traps so you need to get more inventive. The problem with the fixed room traps is that many times it’s hard to understand how to activate them, and even when I finished the game twice I couldn’t activate a couple of them. Maybe some kind of cryptic hint would help to figure out how to use it without losing its mysterious nature.
As you may expect, the fun aspect of the game depends a lot on how creative can you get with the usage of traps, so if you don’t experiment by yourself it could be easy to get bored, in this regard I recommend you to change your set of traps with each chapter this way you kind of force yourself to be more resourceful with what you got, or if that doesn’t bother you, it is easy to use the same traps and exploit them over and over, I like this free approach, however, it could rob much of its challenge as the game isn’t that difficult and get away from pursuers is certainly an easy task at least for the first two-thirds of it, after that, it has a considerable increase of difficulty but nothing too impossible.
I don’t think it is a masterpiece by any means but it does what it is supposed to do right and that is to have fun putting traps to kill your enemies and to the hunted become the hunter, or at least it does it right in a more subdued way. Still, it is an interesting premise that I’m very glad that it exists and it is hard to imagine a game like this being made in 2021, at least not by a big studio like Tecmo but with an indie developer, I understand that there is a sequel (as Trapt is the 4th game in the series) that I’m eager to try even when Trapt isn’t that great from a narrative or mechanic perspective, but it’s hard to not feel allured to its unique premise.… Expand
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