Night Trap – 25th Anniversary Edition

Genre: FMV Game

Players: 1

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Review:

Night Trap is a a game that is at this point pretty much remembered for the “controversy” surrounding it more than the actual game itself. Looking back at the drama playing out between Nintendo and Sega in Congressional testimony about violence in videogames way back in 1992 feels so silly and quaint in an age where America now has mass shootings every month. And that the game is now on the Nintendo Switch is particularly amusing in the wake of then-president of Nintendo of America Howard Lincoln sucking up to a pearl-clutching Congress by declaring that the game would never appear on a Nintendo system. It took two and a half decades, but we did it, everyone! Night Trap on a Nintendo console! Woo!

For those worried about the “extreme violence” Congress saw in this game all those years ago, don’t be. The game does have scantily-clad teenage girls being attacked by “vampires”, which the security camera-watching player is tasked to defend them from by triggering traps throughout the house. However, by today’s standards this is a pretty tame affair – this release of the game couldn’t even manage to garner an “M” rating from the ESRB, and the production values here are so laughable that it’s kinda’ hard to see how anyone could have gotten riled up about it in the first place.

Publisher Limited Run Games went to the trouble of gathering together the original video footage to reconstruct this game with improved visuals, bringing it more or less into the modern day, and even included the “Scene of the Crime” proof-of-concept as a post-game bonus, so while there are definitely parts of this game that have aged poorly, this is nevertheless the best it has ever been.

The problem is, those “parts of the game” that have aged poorly are pretty much all of it. Like I said, the production values here are terrible (even if they’ve been cleaned up for this release). The writing isn’t just absurd, it’s at times nonsensical. And while some might be able to enjoy the presentation as camp, the gameplay itself is so terrible that even that much will be a tedious slog.

The setup here is vaguely similar to the Five Nights at Freddy’s games, with players jumping around among various stationary cameras to both follow the plot and to try to catch enemies scampering around and try to ensnare them in traps. In theory, this means that all the gameplay involves is jumping from one camera to the next and pressing a button if you see an enemy.

However, that’s “in theory”. In practice, it’s much worse because often those traps aren’t responsive, and you’ll find yourself repeatedly tapping the button to try to get them to work. Also, if you find yourself actually wanting to follow the plot by watching characters doing things, that means you may well be missing enemies cropping up in other rooms. In other words, this is a game that can literally punish players for following its plot, the one thing some players might arguably be interested in.

In short, Night Trap is a historically-important videogame, and it is presented here at its very best… but its very best is still a terrible game, and while this might deserve a spot in your collection as a museum piece, it is absolutely not worth touching as a videogame.

tl;dr – Night Trap is an FMV game that is an important landmark in videogame history, and this version of it does a great job of cleaning it up for a modern release, but at its core this game is trash and all the polish in the world doesn’t change that it’s still absolutely terrible.

Grade: D

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