Horror Games Special Feature – Night Trap

Posted on 29th October 2015 by

With Halloween just around the corner, we felt it was time to delve into some of the horror classics of gaming!
In the nights leading up to All Hallows Eve, we’re going to do a short feature of some of the more notable horror games that have been released. This isn’t a list of the best or even our favourites.
Just some Horror games which have stood out to us, for one reason or another.

Many of the games in this Horror feature are quite modern, with 1996’s Resident Evil often being referred to as the trail blazer.
Any gamer with a modicum of interest in survival horror knows that the next sentence they read will have a passing reference to the game Sweet Home. Released in 1989 on the NES, this was the first game to have a strong focus on horror (and every survival horror hipster loves to rub that fact in the face of Resident Evil fans)

But let’s nestle ourselves snugly between these two titles and have a look at a real oddball of a game, 1992’s Night Trap for the Sega CD.

The central hook of Night Trap was that, instead of rendered graphics, the game was made up of actual film footage, something that was only possible with CD-ROM storage.
The focus was on a group of sexy young ladies in a house, who were being stalked by vampiric creatures called Augers during a slumber party.
The special effects for the Augers were really something special: Black leather, a black balaclava and a ray gun that fell right off the set of Plan 9 From Outer Space.

The gameplay came from triggering booby traps around the house, such as revolving bookcases and trap doors, making sure the girls made it through the house alive. You played as a member of the ‘Sega Control Attack Team’, operating the traps from a van outside.
There were 8 hidden cameras in the house, and you could switch between them, one at a time. In order to flick the switches for the traps, you needed to know the security codes, which changed at fixed points throughout the game. The codes were learned by eavesdropping on the residents’ conversations.

The gameplay was basic and gimmicky, but novel enough to be a hit. It sold particularly well in the UK before being taken off the market for its controversial content. Many people cite Mortal Kombat as the reason for the Entertainment Software Ratings Board (ESRB) coming into being, but Night Trap played a significant role in its inception also.
The complaint was that the game encouraged violence against women, as well as being voyeuristic and sexist. Based on the fact that it contained footage of at least five sexy women being sexily slaughtered in sexy night gowns (including Diff’ rent Strokes’ own Dana Plato), they may have had a sexy point.

Mortal Kombat might have had the stronger influence in making people realise that games could be unsuitable for kids (pulling someone’s spine out will do that), but Night Trap was clearly the more sinister of the two.
It showed that games could be about more than getting points. It could be sick, twisted and full of bone-chilling crappy dialogue.

Best moment:
The game is laughable now because of it’s OTT kitsch, but the thing that embodies that more than anything is the phenomenally cheesy theme song, sung here in a karaoke scene shortly before the Augers attack.

Where is the franchise now?
Its DEAD!
A sequel, or even a re-release seems pretty unlikely. This years Until Dawn has a similar tone, but thankfully, it actually has some half-decent gameplay mechanics behind it and considerably less frilly nighties.