Back in 1992, many games led to controversy in the US regarding their violent and sexual content. Because see, "film like rating systems" did not exist in the games industry until that point, and societal pressure was not there to create something like that until this fateful year and the year after it, where we saw the release of games like Mortal Kombat, Doom, Wolfenstein 3D and, yes, Night Trap.
Night Trap released on October 15, 1992, was developed by Digital Pictures and is an FMV (full-motion video) game. Teenagers are having a sleepover at a mansion that is infested with vampires, and you, the player, watch surveillance footage of eight rooms in the house and partake in a hundred QTEs to activate traps around the house whenever these bad guys trigger them. You can fail a few times, but fail too often or fail at critical moments and certain characters will die.
Production values here are really poor, and there is never any actual blood seen in the game, though a drill-like device pouring red liquid out of a victim through a tube is the most controversial moment you will find here. The victim doesn't die, it continues on screaming and struggling to get out while she is getting carried out of the room, but it was a moment like this that had Night Trap added to a congressional hearing in 1993 alongside Mortal Kombat and Doom.
The result of this hearing? The creation of the ESRB, a self-regulatory organization that assigns ratings to video games in North America to this day.
Night Trap received a 25th anniversary edition in 2017 and can be played on PS4, PS Vita, PC and the Switch these days. Its ESRB rating? T for Teens...
GAMEPLAY | 14/20
Usually with my reviews, I talk about the story first, but I think this game should be discussed the other way round for clarity. As explained, this game is mainly a QTE game. Robbers (vampires) sneak around one of the eight rooms, sometimes on their own, sometimes in pairs. As soon as they reach a platform with a trap, a bar will turn from green to red, which is your cue to click on the screen. This activates the trap and a short clip of them being dropped into the floor, engulfed by a bookshelf or thrown out of the window is played, among others. During all of this, the main characters walk around the house and play out the story, at first oblivious to the dozens of robbers walking around the house.
What makes this game difficult are three things. First, at times, robbers show up on two of the eight screens. The traps don't activate after a set amount of time that they are on the screen. One trap might take 10 seconds to trigger for one robber, the other might just take 3 seconds to trigger it, meaning you might find yourself waiting to activate a trap on the wrong screen, therefore missing the trigger on the other. The game keeps a counter running of "Possible captures" and how many you actually captured. Capture too few and the game is over, requiring you to restart from the beginning unless you reach a checkpoint halfway through.
Second, the story is cheesy as hell but you of course don't know that at first, and when big moments happen, you find yourself suspensefully watching and missing out on the robbers sneaking through other screens in the meantime. Not letting this happen is one part of the challenge.
Finally, you don't just have to wait for a red light for your cue. That would be too simple. There is an additional colored code that you need to have selected for the triggers to work. There is orange, red, green, blue, yellow and purple to choose from. I believe there are 4 or 5 times during the game where the color changes. The only way to know which color you need to be on next is by listening to the characters. At very specific times in the story, they will talk to each other and say things they "I will change the code to green". If you miss this, all you can do at this point is just guess, which usually means you will miss a few traps.
I've heard plenty of things about this game since the release of its anniversary edition in 2017. A lot of it was and is negative. Having played this game myself, unbothered by the controversy and humored by its cheesy story and low production values, I don't really understand the hate. Is it a great game? Objectively, no. Is it bereft of fun? Absolutely not. I played this solo, but I can only imagine how hilarious this would have been had I played it with friends, which I plan on doing some time in the near future for sure.
The gameplay is extremely simple, but challenging and quite simply fun. Perception, quickness and a good memory will be the only skills you need in this game, and I really enjoyed how that translated. My only critique here would be that having to constantly check for robbers means you will not catch a lot of the story. Though I will go over that in the next part of this review.
STORYTELLING/CHARACTERS | 5/10
The story in this game is cheesy, cringeworthy, trashy and plain bad. Let's get that out of the way first. As someone who can enjoy low production values from time to time though, I had my fun with it. You are part of the SCAT (Sega Control Attack Team for the Sega CD version, Special Control Attack Team for the others), which was alerted to the disappearance of teenagers at the Martin winery estate. As the game starts, a new group of teenagers are invited over to this place.
The SCAT team gives you the overseer role and tasks you with using the traps around the house on any suspicious people roaming about, whilst the overall goal is to keep track of the three teenagers and their two parents as they have a party with a suspected group of victims.
The game takes place in one continouus loop of roughly 25 to 30 minutes on 8 screens, each depicting a different area of the house. As you take care of the robbers/burglars/vampires, you also can simply switch to the screens with the main characters and listen in on their conversations. The problem is that most of the time, robbers are walking around, which means you can rarely listen to them for more than a few seconds uninterrupted. This has one good and one pretty bad point to it.
First, the good. If you fail to trap enough robbers, the game is over and you restart. This happened to me a few times, and with each run, I caught different conversations and learned more about the game's story, which mainly included hints given at the true nature of the hosts.
The bad is that the game's design pretty much doesn't allow you to catch all of the story unless you do dozens of playthroughs. Being stubborn and saying "I'll just listen for this next playthrough" doesn't work, because if you don't spend the time catching robbers, you get the Game Over screen after just a couple minutes. Personally, this wasn't a big deal to me because you don't end up missing much, the story isn't good and the gameplay was the fun part to me here either way, but how you feel about all this will depend on how OK you are with admittedly trashy games like this, which I personally think have their own charm, especially if the gameplay itself is, to this day, pretty unique.
MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE | 7/10
This is an FMV game. An interactive movie. So while the acting wasn't great, voice acting WAS present here, which in itself is unique for this time. There isn't much of a soundtrack here. Most of what you will hear comes from a specific part of the game where the group of teenagers start singing. There are some horror themes that play whenever you are in a room with robbers though, which added something I'll call "funny tension" because they just walk in the weirdest way possible.
GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN | 6/10
Hard to rate this part considering that this is an interactive movie. I'm giving it a 7 for the following reasons. First, I'm rating the setting of the game and the style of it all. It certainly has that 90s feel to it and is charmfully trashy. Second, the costume design and the walk/crawl mix that the robbers do is hilarious. Finally, the UI, which looks different depending on the version you play but succeeds in giving you a clear overview. Here I can only recommend going for the 25th anniversary edition at this point though, since that one actually has the screens at the bottom show what's going on in each room, while older versions only had a stock image displayed and made you memorize the exact timing and locations of when and where you would find the robbers.
ATMOSPHERE/IMMERSION | 7/10
If the atmosphere this game was going for was of the "comedy horror" genre, this works. You are part of the SCAT team, and you have sent a teenage girl in to aid you, so sometimes you will find her talking into the cameras and addressing you that way, which is a nice touch.
As for the suspects, they have an ominous presence to them in the way they walk and talk, they drink suspicious red liquid and there are some teases of their true nature every couple minutes which was pretty neat.
The SCAT team pulling the plug on you when you would let too many robbers pass by was also a nice touch, instead of getting a simple GAME OVER screen.
CONTENT | 7/10
There are 100 captures to be done in this game. If you want to try and get all of them, you can play this game for hours. In terms of your first full playthrough, you can expect 1 to 2 hours of gameplay. It's not much, but it's definitely the perfect amount for a game like this. That said, there isn't anything else to it besides the mouse clicking during appropriate times, so this game is what it is.
LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN | 8/10
You have eight rooms to observe and need to do so with constant focus. Sometimes, the game cleverly takes your focus from you without you noticing, and half a dozen robbers scroll by before you notice. I found this to be a well designed game on that front on most levels, apart from the fact that the story cannot really be properly observed due to the constant interruptions.
CONCEPT/INNOVATION | 8/10
This game was partly responsible for the creation of the ESRB, it is one of the most well-known FMV games of all time and it has the type of gameplay that (almost?) no other game has ever done. I can't say that a series of games like this would work, but for a one-time thing, this was a great concept.
REPLAYABILITY | 3/5
Replay value comes from all those extra story bits you'll get to see that you probably missed in earlier runs and from trying to capture all robbers.
PLAYABILITY | 5/5
Works well at all times.
OVERALL | 67/100
If you are OK with the low production values, the cheesiness and the one-dimensional gameplay, there is a good chance that you will have a fun 1 or 2 hours with this game. Personally, I had a blast, and I didn't expect that based on all the negative things I had heard about it.
(This is the 73rd game in my challenge to go through many known games in chronological order starting in 1990. The spreadsheet is in my bio.)
Night Trap released on October 15, 1992, was developed by Digital Pictures and is an FMV (full-motion video) game. Teenagers are having a sleepover at a mansion that is infested with vampires, and you, the player, watch surveillance footage of eight rooms in the house and partake in a hundred QTEs to activate traps around the house whenever these bad guys trigger them. You can fail a few times, but fail too often or fail at critical moments and certain characters will die.
Production values here are really poor, and there is never any actual blood seen in the game, though a drill-like device pouring red liquid out of a victim through a tube is the most controversial moment you will find here. The victim doesn't die, it continues on screaming and struggling to get out while she is getting carried out of the room, but it was a moment like this that had Night Trap added to a congressional hearing in 1993 alongside Mortal Kombat and Doom.
The result of this hearing? The creation of the ESRB, a self-regulatory organization that assigns ratings to video games in North America to this day.
Night Trap received a 25th anniversary edition in 2017 and can be played on PS4, PS Vita, PC and the Switch these days. Its ESRB rating? T for Teens...
GAMEPLAY | 14/20
Usually with my reviews, I talk about the story first, but I think this game should be discussed the other way round for clarity. As explained, this game is mainly a QTE game. Robbers (vampires) sneak around one of the eight rooms, sometimes on their own, sometimes in pairs. As soon as they reach a platform with a trap, a bar will turn from green to red, which is your cue to click on the screen. This activates the trap and a short clip of them being dropped into the floor, engulfed by a bookshelf or thrown out of the window is played, among others. During all of this, the main characters walk around the house and play out the story, at first oblivious to the dozens of robbers walking around the house.
What makes this game difficult are three things. First, at times, robbers show up on two of the eight screens. The traps don't activate after a set amount of time that they are on the screen. One trap might take 10 seconds to trigger for one robber, the other might just take 3 seconds to trigger it, meaning you might find yourself waiting to activate a trap on the wrong screen, therefore missing the trigger on the other. The game keeps a counter running of "Possible captures" and how many you actually captured. Capture too few and the game is over, requiring you to restart from the beginning unless you reach a checkpoint halfway through.
Second, the story is cheesy as hell but you of course don't know that at first, and when big moments happen, you find yourself suspensefully watching and missing out on the robbers sneaking through other screens in the meantime. Not letting this happen is one part of the challenge.
Finally, you don't just have to wait for a red light for your cue. That would be too simple. There is an additional colored code that you need to have selected for the triggers to work. There is orange, red, green, blue, yellow and purple to choose from. I believe there are 4 or 5 times during the game where the color changes. The only way to know which color you need to be on next is by listening to the characters. At very specific times in the story, they will talk to each other and say things they "I will change the code to green". If you miss this, all you can do at this point is just guess, which usually means you will miss a few traps.
I've heard plenty of things about this game since the release of its anniversary edition in 2017. A lot of it was and is negative. Having played this game myself, unbothered by the controversy and humored by its cheesy story and low production values, I don't really understand the hate. Is it a great game? Objectively, no. Is it bereft of fun? Absolutely not. I played this solo, but I can only imagine how hilarious this would have been had I played it with friends, which I plan on doing some time in the near future for sure.
The gameplay is extremely simple, but challenging and quite simply fun. Perception, quickness and a good memory will be the only skills you need in this game, and I really enjoyed how that translated. My only critique here would be that having to constantly check for robbers means you will not catch a lot of the story. Though I will go over that in the next part of this review.
STORYTELLING/CHARACTERS | 5/10
The story in this game is cheesy, cringeworthy, trashy and plain bad. Let's get that out of the way first. As someone who can enjoy low production values from time to time though, I had my fun with it. You are part of the SCAT (Sega Control Attack Team for the Sega CD version, Special Control Attack Team for the others), which was alerted to the disappearance of teenagers at the Martin winery estate. As the game starts, a new group of teenagers are invited over to this place.
The SCAT team gives you the overseer role and tasks you with using the traps around the house on any suspicious people roaming about, whilst the overall goal is to keep track of the three teenagers and their two parents as they have a party with a suspected group of victims.
The game takes place in one continouus loop of roughly 25 to 30 minutes on 8 screens, each depicting a different area of the house. As you take care of the robbers/burglars/vampires, you also can simply switch to the screens with the main characters and listen in on their conversations. The problem is that most of the time, robbers are walking around, which means you can rarely listen to them for more than a few seconds uninterrupted. This has one good and one pretty bad point to it.
First, the good. If you fail to trap enough robbers, the game is over and you restart. This happened to me a few times, and with each run, I caught different conversations and learned more about the game's story, which mainly included hints given at the true nature of the hosts.
The bad is that the game's design pretty much doesn't allow you to catch all of the story unless you do dozens of playthroughs. Being stubborn and saying "I'll just listen for this next playthrough" doesn't work, because if you don't spend the time catching robbers, you get the Game Over screen after just a couple minutes. Personally, this wasn't a big deal to me because you don't end up missing much, the story isn't good and the gameplay was the fun part to me here either way, but how you feel about all this will depend on how OK you are with admittedly trashy games like this, which I personally think have their own charm, especially if the gameplay itself is, to this day, pretty unique.
MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE | 7/10
This is an FMV game. An interactive movie. So while the acting wasn't great, voice acting WAS present here, which in itself is unique for this time. There isn't much of a soundtrack here. Most of what you will hear comes from a specific part of the game where the group of teenagers start singing. There are some horror themes that play whenever you are in a room with robbers though, which added something I'll call "funny tension" because they just walk in the weirdest way possible.
GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN | 6/10
Hard to rate this part considering that this is an interactive movie. I'm giving it a 7 for the following reasons. First, I'm rating the setting of the game and the style of it all. It certainly has that 90s feel to it and is charmfully trashy. Second, the costume design and the walk/crawl mix that the robbers do is hilarious. Finally, the UI, which looks different depending on the version you play but succeeds in giving you a clear overview. Here I can only recommend going for the 25th anniversary edition at this point though, since that one actually has the screens at the bottom show what's going on in each room, while older versions only had a stock image displayed and made you memorize the exact timing and locations of when and where you would find the robbers.
ATMOSPHERE/IMMERSION | 7/10
If the atmosphere this game was going for was of the "comedy horror" genre, this works. You are part of the SCAT team, and you have sent a teenage girl in to aid you, so sometimes you will find her talking into the cameras and addressing you that way, which is a nice touch.
As for the suspects, they have an ominous presence to them in the way they walk and talk, they drink suspicious red liquid and there are some teases of their true nature every couple minutes which was pretty neat.
The SCAT team pulling the plug on you when you would let too many robbers pass by was also a nice touch, instead of getting a simple GAME OVER screen.
CONTENT | 7/10
There are 100 captures to be done in this game. If you want to try and get all of them, you can play this game for hours. In terms of your first full playthrough, you can expect 1 to 2 hours of gameplay. It's not much, but it's definitely the perfect amount for a game like this. That said, there isn't anything else to it besides the mouse clicking during appropriate times, so this game is what it is.
LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN | 8/10
You have eight rooms to observe and need to do so with constant focus. Sometimes, the game cleverly takes your focus from you without you noticing, and half a dozen robbers scroll by before you notice. I found this to be a well designed game on that front on most levels, apart from the fact that the story cannot really be properly observed due to the constant interruptions.
CONCEPT/INNOVATION | 8/10
This game was partly responsible for the creation of the ESRB, it is one of the most well-known FMV games of all time and it has the type of gameplay that (almost?) no other game has ever done. I can't say that a series of games like this would work, but for a one-time thing, this was a great concept.
REPLAYABILITY | 3/5
Replay value comes from all those extra story bits you'll get to see that you probably missed in earlier runs and from trying to capture all robbers.
PLAYABILITY | 5/5
Works well at all times.
OVERALL | 67/100
If you are OK with the low production values, the cheesiness and the one-dimensional gameplay, there is a good chance that you will have a fun 1 or 2 hours with this game. Personally, I had a blast, and I didn't expect that based on all the negative things I had heard about it.
(This is the 73rd game in my challenge to go through many known games in chronological order starting in 1990. The spreadsheet is in my bio.)