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Let it be known that this game is not exactly kid friendly and may disturb your good faith. You have been warned ahead of time.
The ESRB are a very surprising bunch at times. After trekking through turn-based RPGs, strategy RPGs, and action RPGs, you tend to need a break and turn your attention elsewhere. However, sometime in 1996, Tecmo decided that they wanted to make an RPG. Despite being bored with RPGs for a while, I decided that I should still give their product a chance...a game called Tecmo's Deception: Invitation to Darkness (or simply Deception). The game gave gamers an opportunity that sounded dumb on the surface...You must lay traps. This is not the first game to utilize traps as the main focus of the gameplay though. Games like Night Trap and Double Switch for the Sega CD (produced by Digital Pictures) required the use of traps. However, Deception was revolutionary because the game gives more freedom to the player and offers a different perspective. Deception was also somewhat controversial, though not on the level that Night Trap was. It doesn't sound like a good idea to base a game around Satan (the devil), but Tecmo did it anyway. To be fair, the game warns you of the satanic references firsthand (see image on the left...do not complain to me about it later).
You play the role of a nameless prince who has returned from a long journey. The people greet you kindly and the King is proud to see you. You are also soon to be married with the beautiful Princess Fiana...life couldn't get much better for your protagonist. However, The King begins to cough up blood and you lose control of your sword! As you watch the King suffer, you witness your own sword stab the King in his back! Having no control over the matter, all you can do is gaze in horror at the bizarre death of your father. Your brother, Yurias, then announces that YOU killed the King! Powerless to do anything, you are led to the gallows and are sentenced to a cruel public execution. Your life has just turned from a wonderful dream to a hellish nightmare. You're completely innocent, yet all the people who loved and respected you now hate you and want you dead. Cursing your fate, you ask for a power that will save you...Good...Evil...it didn't matter! However, the forces of darkness call you instead of the light and you soon end up at "The Castle of the Damned". In order to repay your debt to the dark forces that saved you from an early visit to the afterlife, you must make a pact with the devil and do his bidding by killing anyone who enters the castle. The devil grows stronger for each life that is taken...and thus the story begins.
Revisiting this game over a decade later, one thing I should automatically point out is that the graphics are not amazing in any shape, form, or anything of the sort. The game was an early Playstation title and it shows. Blocky character designs, relatively simple special effects, fuzzy textures, and fairly basic 3D animation are all present within the game. Nowadays, play Tecmo published games like Dead or Alive 4 and you wonder how the hell Tecmo's titles (or games published by them) have turned into that from this. Still, it was only 1996, and despite what I just said, that was the standard for many early 3D Playstation titles, so if you hate any of the above, you should stop reading right now. Considering this, Deception looks acceptable and the castle is decorated rather nicely with cool wallpapers and other simple touch-ups that make the game a little more appealing. The game carries itself smoothly and the flow of the game is respectable and uses a first-person perspective. You aren't going to see some world shattering kind of trap with unbelievable special effects because the majority of traps you use are simple things like spikes, pits, cages, cranes, and other simple traps.
The music is what you might expect from the dark story and presentation. The tunes are dark, eerie, and haunting. Footsteps can be heard in the distance and the closer the enemy gets, the louder they become...adding the chilling effect that they could be right behind you! The music adds that extra spark to make the experience more rewarding. At the same time, the music can also be light and nearly silent. With that being said, the music present in Deception is the kind that can either keep you on your toes or put you to sleep. My personal experience is that it works to keep the dark mood present whilst I play, so I find the musical score to be pleasing. Not outstanding, but good and to the point.
The premise behind Deception is to lay traps all over the castle and you cannot attack enemies directly. At first, your abilities are very limited, but eventually, you gain access to more power. You can create floor, wall, and ceiling traps as well as damage, capture, and confuse type traps. Each type of trap has varying usefulness and since you will face off against numerous types of castle intruders (skilled in different abilities), some types of traps will be more effective than others. You need MP to make traps and you gain MP by completing missions as well as using "capture" type traps to either kill the invader for gold or take their soul for MP. Deception is also significantly different than all the other games in its series and it actually has some awesome concepts that should be implemented in a future Deception title *Vyse stares at employees over at Tecmo*. You can create monsters by capturing victims and using their bodies for monster creation. When a monster gains enough EXP by killing its foes, it can evolve into a more gruesome creature. Speaking of EXP, this game allows your character to level up and raise stats, something the other games also didn't do. The game also has gold (as stated before) and you can buy numerous items and use masks to lure enemies. You can also develop more powerful traps over time too, though they are generally just more powerful versions of existing traps.
I feel that the coolest (and I was shocked that this was not a feature in "Trapt" for the PS2) feature of Deception is that you can create your own rooms within the castle! You can build various rooms that can be setup to connect to one another and you can create a crazy catacomb of bedrooms and such in which to confuse invaders. Unfortunately, you can't actually MODIFY the rooms you create (which is to be expected for an early Playstation game), but it's still a fun as heck feature regardless. I was expecting Tecmo to go crazy and allow you to create your own room down to the furniture in Trapt, but I was disappointed when I played it to find no such thing. At any rate, the game has a number of stages as well as multiple endings that can be found under various circumstances. You can also view enemy data and formulate strategies and decide what traps you want where. Unlike other Deception games, you can set as many traps as will fit in the area whereas the later games had you work with one wall, floor, and ceiling trap. Lastly, I like the change of pace...it's good to play the role of a misunderstood bad guy every now and then.
The faults of this game is that certain traps can be rather annoying to use properly in certain confined areas. Traps set in corners (unless it is a wall trap) tend to be exceptionally frustrating to use if you aren't good at it. The monster system is OK, but killing enemies with monsters only gives the monster experience and not you. The game also costs a whopping 9 blocks to save your game and it takes a fairly long time just to save your game due to how much information has to be recorded every time you save the game. Other than these things, the game is just simple and harmless fun. The Deception games are all about having fun and taking it too seriously will ruin the charm behind it. It isn't the greatest game ever made, but I fell in love with this game and eventually fell in love with the series (minus Trapt). The game is relatively uncommon these days so getting one for a cheap price has become a little more difficult, but if you have nothing against the satanic references (which the back of the case CLEARLY warns about) or you always wanted to play the first game in the Deception series, you should definitely do so. Who knew laying traps could be so much fun?- Written by Vyse the determined - |
