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Night Trap: 25th Anniversary Edition Review


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1100252044_NightTrapboxart.png.9bce9419a2ec799a980156b48bb4f5ca.pngWell, they did it. It took 25 years, but they proved him wrong. During the 1993 US congressional hearing on violence in video games, Howard Lincoln, then president of Nintendo of America, said Night Trap would never appear on a Nintendo system. But thanks to the questionable dedication of developer Screaming Villains, Night Trap: 25th Anniversary Edition can now be played at home or on-the-go with the Nintendo Switch. Whether or not any of this was a good decision depends on your tolerance for cheesy 80s horror acting and tedious, mindless gameplay.
 
You're part of the Special Control Attack Team (unfortunately abbreviated as SCAT) who is investigating the mysterious disappearances of five teenage girls at the Martin family winery estate. Upon investigating the house, SCAT finds a bizarre series of traps and cameras, and by hacking into them you are now able to monitor the house and activate the traps remotely. A new group of teenage girls is staying the night at the Martin estate, including a special teenage agent of SCAT, and your job is to keep them safe while uncovering the truth. Night Trap is a blatantly goofy, cheesy, B-movie horror, complete with bad acting, terribly costumed "creature" villains, and hilariously awkward late-80s fashion, all presented with full-motion video (FMV). Your enjoyment of the story hinges entirely upon your tolerance for "so bad it's good" filmmaking, because the storytelling here really does feel like something you'd catch on TV at 3AM on a local broadcast channel. There's a certain charm to its cheesiness, though it wears thin over the short length of the game.
 
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What's odd about Night Trap is that the storytelling completely interferes with the gameplay. In order to catch the estate's black-clad attackers before they can catch the girls, you need to constantly monitor each room of the house by flipping to different camera views and activating traps with the press of a button once the on-screen indicator turns red. There are 100 attackers in the game so they pretty much never stop coming, but while you are, for example, watching the upstairs hallway for attackers you're missing the conversation that the characters are having in the living room. In order to play the game well you have to technically miss out on most of the storytelling in the game, which doesn't make much sense. This is certainly one way to pad out the game's length as much as possible though, since a perfect playthrough is only a little over 25 minutes long. If you're playing blind you'll have to run through the game dozens of times until you learn where attackers appear and when to trap them, so the idea is that you'll gradually see the story unfold piece by piece.
 
As you might expect that means progressing in Night Trap is an incredibly tedious experience, especially when some attackers appear so close together that you need to switch between rooms in a split-second. It also makes the game extremely repetitive since you'll end up seeing the early parts of the game over and over as you memorize where and when to trap attackers. The game plays out exactly the same every time so it really is just plain memorization, aside from a few moments when the Martins change the key code color for the traps and you have to eavesdrop on them. In a way Night Trap exemplifies the worst of 80s video game design: make the player repeat things over and over to keep them playing instead of creating unique, innovative challenges. It's a shame this re-release didn't add any convenient modern features—there is only one checkpoint halfway through the game, and some key moments are instant game overs if you miss saving a teen—so be prepared to replay the game a lot if you hope to see the ending.
 
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The 25th Anniversary Edition of this game adds a few additional features, though they'll only be of particular interest to the few players that truly enjoy Night Trap. There are a couple of documentary features available to watch, production images, a playable version of the original prototype, and a theater mode to rewatch story scenes at any time. All of these come with some inconvenient caveats, though. The documentaries are just straight videos—there's no option to fast-forward, rewind, add subtitles, or even pause, which seems like a silly oversight. The production images are locked until you reach different endings (there are multiple bad endings of girls getting captured) and the theater mode is only available after you've watched the scenes play out in the main game—just another way to stretch the game's length as much as possible.
 
Sadly this edition of the game also suffers from a few minor technical hiccups. Certain traps can be strangely finnicky and not activate even when it seems like you hit the button at the right time. The audio can become desynced at times, especially if you're flipping between cameras rapidly. The video quality has been improved from the original 1992 release on Sega CD but there's still some bad compressing happening at times—though it's understandable that footage from the late 80s wouldn't look great on a modern TV.
 
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There's no denying that Night Trap has carved out an infamous name for itself in the annals of video game history, not only for being an FMV game but for its salacious content (which is ridiculously tame by today's standards and just plain silly most of the time). As a piece of entertainment though, it struggles to maintain even the awkward charm of a B-movie horror flick, mostly due to the ill-conceived disconnect between watching cheesy story scenes and actually progressing in the gameplay by capturing attackers. Players might appreciate Night Trap as an oddity of video game history, but it's hard to find much value in the repetitive, monotonous entrapment of bad actors.
 
Rating: 4 out of 10 Traps
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