Dominated by a woman - now there's an idea, I thought to myself while I was chained to the wooden abrasive horse-block, eyes focused on the wall, helpless. The puddle of water beneath, which was formed by ice torture ice earlier on, allowed me to see a monochrome reflection of what was behind me. I saw the pain before I felt it, as the leather whip cracked down on my now tender behind. Excruciating agony, a throbbing sensation that got worse over time - I was ready to beg for mercy. "Twenty nine" words left my lips without thinking, that number being the amount of lashes I've received up to this very point - and if I forgot to count, we'd start from number one again. After the thirtieth leathery lash came to pass on my red raw ass, this heartless dominatrix untied me. She was baring the fiends' mark, too.

In Trapt, the new sadistic game from Tecmo, you play as that heartless dominatrix woman. You bare the fiends' mark, which is some kind of magical arm, something which people are afraid of, I might add. The fiend is about to resurface after so many hundred years, and he has enlisted you to take souls for him. How you take souls is the best part though; you kill people with merciless, callous, brutal traps. You'll never know how satisfying luring in and killing foes with well-timed traps of malice is until you have done it in Trapt. Even though Allura, the woman with the mark, doesn't really want to kill these people, the mark and her quest for survival drives her to slaughter hundreds of hapless souls.

You might have played the PSOne version of this game. I know I have, and fellow reviewer Christopher Martin has too. Deception was its name and the same kind of trapping was the game. In Trapt, unofficially the fourth game in the Deception series, those people who enjoyed the PSOne predecessors will really feel at home with this current-gen version; the nostalgia and fond memories this game brings back is untrue.

To try and explain the premise of Trapt is quite a task; it's not your regular game when all is said and done. Basically, when you come to battle it out with your foes, you are given a map with a couple or a few rooms unlocked, (depending on what's available on that level, or if you've unlocked new rooms with keys and such) - in each of these rooms you can lay three types of traps: wall traps, floor traps, and ceiling traps, although you can only have one of each per room. Each type of trap is assigned to one of the corresponding coloured buttons on the PS2 pad, so triggering these traps is a breeze. You can lay traps on the fly by pressing the start button, bringing up the map where you can place traps in the room. This means you don't have to load all of the rooms with traps until you need them, or you can revise your traps at any given time.

Sounds simple enough really. The gameplay comes into its own when you add a few more things into the mix. Each trap is on a cool down; more powerful traps will take longer to be ready than your puny traps. When you first lay a trap, you have the wait for the traps to be ready before you can use them, so speculating your foes' moves early on is the key here. When you have your traps laid around the room, it's a matter of running around in real time, letting your enemies chase you (preferably not letting them hit you, as you have limited health) and luring them into their doom. Just make sure you don't trigger a trap when you're in the way!

So this enchantress and this armoured swordsman are chasing me with their powerful spells and their long bronze swords respectively - I have to kill them both with minimal fuss and maximum gore. Make those bastards pay, trying to claim the bounty on my head, they deserve to die, they deserve to suffer, they deserve to slowly perish in their own self pity. The swordsman is chasing me up the staircase, while the enchantress has only just found her way into the open hallway, where they will both die - but they don't know that yet. At the top of these stairs lays my first cunningly placed trap, the flaming magma rock, a ceiling trap, a rounded rock that incidentally rolls - in this instance, it will roll down these stairs. The cocky worthless man is on my tail, I reach the top of the stairs before he does and when I'm only just safe, I trigger my ceiling trap. The flaming rock falls and rolls down the stairs - it can't be stopped now, three, two, one - the rock hits the swordsman, engulfs him in flames and sends him flying all the way back down. I stand proud at the top of the stairs, on this gallery, overlooking the entrance hall with my spiteful eyes.

Even though I didn't think I'd need my spring loaded floor, which springs up and tosses whatever stands on that space in the direction I originally placed it in, the enchantress was coming up the other flight of stairs, at the other side of the hall - both stairs connect to the balcony. I placed my spring-loaded floor here as a precaution, but it looked as if she was going to use wit, or dumb luck, and avoid it. I ran to the other side towards her, and then doubled back on myself to get her on my tail - deviously leading her to the right hand side (as opposed to the left, which is where she was originally heading). She thinks she has me now, but I know differently - I hit my X button and the floor suddenly sends her flying off the balcony, into the middle of the entrance hall for 15 damage. Not much when compared to my molten rock, which did 75 damage and then some more flame damage overtime, but it's got her out of the way for now.

Both of my candidates are standing at the middle of the hall downstairs; the swordsman has just recuperated from his nasty shock from the flaming rock and my enchantress has just picked herself up from her flight downstairs. Both my ceiling and floor trap have cooled down and are ready to use again if need be. My last trap, the wall trap, is placed cleverly. It makes use of the environment in the room. You see, all rooms have things that can be activated by you manually triggering something, or by using your trap on something to set off another event. In this case, my wall trap, which fires a bomb along the floor, actually fires a bomb at a fragile pillar in the middle of the room; which is where both my enemies are currently standing - and weakened from my first attacks, they're moving slowly. Perfect. So I trigger my wall trap, the bomb starts rolling, hits the pillar, which knocks that pillar in the original direction of where my bomb was headed. The pillar crashes down onto both my foes and they bleed to death. My work here is done, and for my hard work, my payment was to see them suffer. I got paid. Several times.

There can only ever be two enemies in the environment chasing you around at one time. Although some levels might have dozens of enemies, you'll have to work your way through them with only two on your tail at any given time. When you kill one, another foe spawns somewhere on the map and makes his or her way to your location - he or she might spawn in the library, but you still might be in the hall for example. Upon your foe's entrance, the camera cuts to that enemy and they will say some cocky phrase. "I don't want to kill you - but the reward is too good," or words along those lines. Upon their death, the camera cuts to them in the same way and they exit with another strange phrase before spilling a pool of blood: "I must be losing my touch" - no love, you're just no match for my witty traps. I'm not so keen on seeing my enemies disappear like this; I would have rather seen them decay on that spiked wall, or be sliced in two by that swinging blade-pendulum.

See, as fun as Trapt is, and as entertaining as killing multiple people and racking up combos from traps is, the game isn't without its flaws. The frame-rate suffers quite a bit, which is somewhat puzzling, as the graphics aren't that spectacular. When you've activated all three traps and you're seeing your enemies take damage, the game slows right down temporarily, before speeding back up to normal pace - but this is an annoyance in its own right.

As mentioned, the graphics aren't really up to scratch; flickering textures, basic menu systems, no frills - the cut scenes aren't too shabby and the rooms in which you roam don't look too bad, if a little samey from time to time. Trap effects are fine though; I like to see a flaming rock drop or a bloody saw fly from the wall - they all look pretty painful or menacing to some degree. The sound department is another disappointment for the most part; the music is terrible - the Japanese death music might be alright for a period of time, but when the same one minute track loops in both menus and levels, well, it tends to sicken you after a bit. Some boss battles have different music, but for the most part, the music is repetitive. Sound effects, thankfully, are a lot better - bone crunching sounds to compliment every gruesome trap and environmental trap too - and Japanese dialogue portrays every emotion well, from anger to fear to sadistic laughs.

If you gave me more time, I might come up with more things that are wrong with Trapt - but the unique gameplay really does win my heart over. Not only that, but the story mode is quite good; it actually has a gripping story - although it's all subtitled over Japanese dialogue, it's quite an interesting supernatural tail of betrayal - gripping stuff, if you ask me. The story mode also has a side story, allowing you to play the tale from another perspective, while my favourite mode, Survival , allows you to battle though hundreds of foes over dozens of rooms with minimal downtime. The Story mode is the only way to earn money to buy new traps however, something which I think you'll want to do - especially when that flaming magma rock I keep talking about is something that you have to buy for yourself.

Despite its flaws, Trapt is something that any sadistic gamer should play once in their life. There really is nothing else quite like it - which could be a good thing or a bad thing, as no competition for Trapt means that the flaws can stay. It also means that we'll only see this genre once in a blue moon. If you fancy a gameplay change, more importantly, if you fancy playing as an inhumane dominatrix, Trapt is for you - and if you don't try the game, you could be punished.

Ouch!

"Forty two"

Reviewed by Dexter Pearson for AceGamez (All Rights Reserved).