Night Trap (1992)

Honestly... I anticipated Night Trap being a worse time than it ended up being. This game is notorious for how it sparked controversy in the 90's and was one of the games that incentivized congress to make the ESRB video game rating system in America.

The whole game is FMV cutscenes of a house and a bunch of people moving around in it. A group of girls gets invited to a sleepover at this house, but a bunch of ninja looking guys (called Augers) are trying to capture them and do nefarious things to them.

Your job is to monitor all the cameras and trap the Augers in crazy Home Alone style traps. The issue is that this is almost impossible on your first try and you don't actually get to watch most of the story cutscenes because you will be constantly switching cameras to make sure no augers are slipping by.

This is exacerbated once you have made it decently far into the game because failing to capture too many augers or failing to capture certain plot critical augers will force you to restart the game. The game is only about 26 minutes long but failing at the 19-20 minute point will force you to go through 19-20 minutes of scenes you have already viewed.

I hear that the remake of this game has checkpoints and that sounds fantastic because I thought I was going to pull my hair out in the last run or two before I managed to beat the game. You simply waste too much time if you lose in the later stages.

Nevertheless, this is a little piece of gaming history and its kinda funny to go back to 30 years later. If you own a sega cd then this should definitely be on your list of games to buy. You should also play it if it is cheap/free on the switch or PS5 or whatever systems it was remastered for. DO NOT LOOK UP A GUIDE FOR THIS GAME! It defeats the whole purpose of the experience and you will probably not end up watching half of the story cutscenes because you will be so preoccupied with trapping augers.

Shout out to the two actors who play the augers that high 5 each other in the upstairs hallway. That gets a chuckle out of me every time I see it.

No offense to the year 1992 but this game is confusing af. I want to seek out more live-acted games of the 90s because they fascinate me as a cultural phenomenon, a techincal middle step, and an inter-disciplinary artistic choice. I couldn't really indulge that at all because A.) I keep dying, B.) I have to keep looking for Jin-Roh: Wolf Brigade and can't hear what the Tanner Family is saying, and C.) the plot setup did not mention what I assume are vampires?

One day I will try to revisit but I'm gonna play Myst first to see whether or not I'm actually allergic to the 90s or not.

I've waited almost thirty years to play Night Trap, a game more notable for the insane controversy it dredged up than for its actual gameplay. When I was a kid, Night Trap was presented as an almost murder simulator, a horrifying game that would cause children to have a desire to kill. It's insane to play this game and see that it's little more than an 80s film that requires a few button presses, and that this game could bring about a ratings system for video games. Playing Night Trap for the first time, this game is far more interesting to me for the controversies and history of it than as an actual video game.

Playing Night Trap is essentially like trying to watch a movie, but having to leave the room every five seconds to look at an empty hallway. There's a story to Night Trap, but most of the time, you're required to capture creatures called augers in other rooms. The player has to start capturing these characters almost immediately, with no time to understand exactly what you're supposed to be doing, and no idea that you're not supposed to be watching this story. To show how much of a disconnect there is between the story and what you're supposed to be doing, I didn't realize this was a story about vampires until the last minute of the game. I don't think it's actually possible to follow this story and win the game at the same time. It's the most backwards game design I've ever seen.

Night Trap reminds me of why I hated Sega CD games at the time. There's no instructions, no help whatsoever. The game just throws you into a world of full-motion video and lets the gamer struggle to figure out what they're supposed to do. After a few failed tries, I just looked up a strategy, because I knew there was no way I could finish this without taking an insane amount of notes and failing the game over-and-over. Considering how much my Sega CD skipped and how long it took to load every scene, I refuse to believe this game was ever beaten by anybody in its original version. At the very least, this is a great remaster by Limited Run Games, fixing the video and audio, streamlining the controls and making the overall layout much more pleasing to look at.

But I can't help coming back to just how insane it is that this game doesn't care if you know its story or not. I'd prefer if this game was twice as long, just showed the story scenes, and asked for specific button presses when augers and vampires showed up, so we could at least know what the hell is going on with this story. Even weirder, there are plenty of scenes with augers and vampires within the story segments, but rarely do you have to do anything in these scenes. I don't understand the logic of having a story, then making sure you're not around to see it. Thinking about it has driven me insane.

I will again praise Limited Run Games for their remake of this game though, as I bought it simply so I could finally play it. There's no way I would've gotten as far as I did with this if I had tried to play it on my old Sega CD. I got more pleasure out of watching the various documentaries that game with this game than playing the actual game. My only disappointment is to unlock everything, the game has to be finished at least twice, and perfectly at least once. I don't have the patience for that. In order to watch all the story scenes to finally get what the story was supposed to be, I just had to go to YouTube and find them, even though they're right on the game for anyone who gets a perfect score. Look, it's a 28-year-old game. You don't have to hide this material.

I find the bones of Night Trap to be fascinating. This is kind of a cool idea - interacting with FMV sequences - that is handled in such an odd way. Besides Her Story, I've never seen a game effectively do something with recordings of actual people, but I think with a few tweaks, Night Trap could've been more than just a wild curiosity.

I was first introduced to Night Trap as a kid and for some reason liked it. Maybe it was the cheesy acting, maybe the feeling like you're controlling a movie.

Then decades later I recently played it at a bachelor party. It was intriguing the see how to trap the Augers and switch between cameras because as a teenager I didn't know the process.

Turns out the process gets repetitive, boring, annoying, and destined to fail. Let me explain.

If you haven't played this the "plot" involves some kids in a house being overrun by vampires. They shuffle in through windows, doors, or just randomly appear in rooms. Through some esoteric process of button mashing you have to chose the right moment to trap the vampires (augers). You are part of some elite strike force of idiots who control cameras in the house and the aforementioned traps set throughout.

There's way too much to keep track of. Maybe that's why my teenage self couldn't figure it out. I'm not talking like a Final Fantasy game where there's a lot going on but at least with an RPG it's fun. Night Trap is just an on going struggle.

I played it again a few nights ago and got pretty far but it was just failure after failure, the kids were getting captured and more vampires were coming in than I was trapping.

Then, to top off all the camera controlling you have to somehow listen to the cringy conversations and "acting" going on to change the color security code, another layer of difficulty to make the experience even worse.

I'm sorry, this game sucks. If it wasn't for a shred of nostalgia I would rate this one star. There is still something kind of fun about it but overall I feel like my judgement is clouded by memories of staying up all night playing video games at my teenage friend's house having fun bull shitting.

My good memories of this game involved my best buddies during our all night game fests, and not so much the actual game play.