Developed by Digital Pictures, Screaming Villains
Published by Screaming Villains
Reviewed on PlayStation 4 (also available on Steam)
Being a Sega Genesis kid in the 16-bit era, I owned many games for the system and loved every minute playing each one.  Being 9 years old at the time, I was limited to what I could have as my parents bought most of my games. When Sega released the Sega CD add on, sadly I missed out on a slew of titles including the cult classic Night Trap. Screaming Villains decided to celebrate its 25th anniversary by remastering and re-releasing the game as Night Trap 25th Anniversary Edition on PlayStation 4 and PC. Having never played the original 1992 release, this review is for the 25th anniversary edition and doesn’t reflect past reviews of the original game.
Night Trap is a live action, interactive 80’s teen horror B-movie video game. The story follows five teenage girls named Kelli, Ashley, Lisa, Cindy,  and Megan and along with Lisa’s brother, Danny. They are all invited by their friend Sarah Martin to stay the night at her estate. Unknown to the teen girls, the estate is filled with traps and security camera within each room watching their every move. Sarah’s family are living with night creatures called Augers, vampiric beings who need to blood to live. In exchange for teens, Sarah’s family is in the process of becoming vampiric themselves. Â
As the player, at the beginning of the game you start off at a briefing of the Martin estate and learn the family’s plot to kidnap the teen girls. You also know the locations of where the traps and security cameras are set up. You’re put in the role of being part of the special unit group called Special Control Attack Team (S.C.A.T.). You’re task with the job of manning all eight security cameras along with controlling the traps in estate to protect not only the teen girl, but also the secret planted S.C.A.T. agent, Keli (Dana Plato), who is undercover to infiltrate the estate.
Gameplay is very simple and repetitive. You’ll be spending most of your time looking for Augers that repeat the same pattern while making them fall into the same traps throughout the estate. The game becomes more of a memory game as you progress further until you die and have to retry the area in the story over again. You can reach a game over by letting too many Augers miss the traps and overrun the house or by letting one of main teen girls die early. The interface, which has been updated in the 25th anniversary edition, shows all eight security camera in FMV (full motion video). You switch between the footage to keep track of what’s going on in the house. Also on the interface is a large colored bar that you can change to different code color to active the traps. Once a Auger is near a trap, there a indicator bar that turns yellow when they’re close and red flashes letting you know a Auger is over a trap. Completing Night Trap will take you about half an hour to complete even after a few retries from failing.
Night Trap has endured a lot being part of the creation of the ESRB rating system and having been pulled from store shelves, only to get reissued with an M for Mature rating. Present day it’s now a T for Teen rating. Night Trap is definitely piece of gaming history. The anniversary edition offer tons of extras with a bonus game,  Scene of the Crime, which was a prototype game that tested the camera gameplay used in Night Trap. Night Trap 25th Anniversary Edition should not be overlooked but instead celebrated for showing how far the gaming industry has come.
Checkout our Full stream of Night Trap on CFG Lazy Weekend Stream on Twitch
