I have never felt more trapped than when I was playing Trap Them. Trapped in a reality in which 'perfect' video games are neither creative nor entertaining to play.
Despite the creator's lofty ideals for 'clockwork perfect' gameplay, Trap Them falls so short of the mark that it feels hard to call it a game. Rather, the experience can be likened to moving an emoji face around blocks with no intelligible physics to 'trap' enemies that look like rejects from other, better games or were just stolen from Pac-Man.
Let's look at Trap Them's 'clockwork perfect' gameplay. Playing the game consists of trying to decipher confusing levels, mostly through trial and error. Clearly creator J-Snake took the quantity-over-quality approach to puzzles, preferring to overload the player with information rather than making an actually simple and elegant problem. Solutions to said puzzles always feel unrewarding, because they rely on as many contrivances as possible. Almost every level I solved required a solution that felt simultaneously wrong, bland, incredibly fiddly, and depressingly like the only viable solution. Sometimes there are literal *minutes* of required setup before a fiddly solution requiring precise bomb detonation timing can be attempted. Do you enjoy pressing 1234 with robotic timing? Messing up these precise inputs means starting over from scratch, of course. There are also countless cases where the player will have to wait for long stretches of time for a stupid enemy to move into the correct position. J-Snake might try to hide behind defenses such as 'brutally hard' and 'demanding', but it's not the kind of difficulty that is actually fun. Rewarding difficulty comes with fairness and deep understanding of the mechanics. TrapThem seems to scream through its design a harsh and unyielding denial of these things over and over again.
About the enemies: though there is a medium-sized pallette of enemies in the game, J-Snake heavily relied on the use of only two types. The most prominent is an obnoxious bomb that - despite the name of the game being TrapThem - is completely untrappable (you lose if you destroy this enemy. And lord help you if you accidentally destroy more than one at once- the loud sound effect stacks to deafening levels quickly). The other overused enemy is the collector, obnoxiously introduced with a powerpoint presentation detailing the dubious and confusing mechanics of its movement. And it's not even descriptive enough, due to all the gross edge cases you are forced to know about. The other enemy types suck for various reasons as well, but they are so few and far between that they aren't worth mentioning here. Also, it's worth pointing out that the 'red' versions of enemies, which move 1.5x as fast as the player, are by far the most common enemy variety, especially for the bombs. If you work backwards from the creator's philosophy, the reason for this should be obvious - it's to cut out as many 'other'/'non-valid' solutions as possible. Solve puzzles J-Snake's way or be punished.
The final nail in the TrapThem coffin is the arbitrariness of the very mechanics J-Snake claims are 'perfect'. J-Snake has long had an obsession with making every mechanic absolute, but he fails dismally at that. Consider a bomb enemy ('Them') a few spaces away from a two-block high dirt wall, with the player on the other side. In several puzzles you are required to perform the relatively basic trick of digging away the bottom space of the wall, drawing the sight of the bomb 'Them' and simultaneously blocking its path with the rest of the falling wall. But now consider what happens if that bomb 'Them' was right next to the wall instead of a few spaces away. If the mechanics were as clean as J-Snake wants them to be, you could make some inferences about what would happen without actually having to see it firsthand. I know that I had two guesses initially - either the bomb would see me and instantly get crushed under the falling wall, or it would see me and bounce immediately off that falling wall. But no. Defying all prior reason, digging away a dirt space when the bomb 'Them' is directly on the other side of the wall causes it to not see you at all. It doesn't even move. Yeah, makes sense, J-Snake. The game is rife with other nonsensical moments just like this. What does a collector do when faced with an option between two gems equally far away? Why can't you drop a series of one-space blocks in front of the sight of an enemy to sneak past, even if the blocks are staggered properly so that it visually looks like you should succeed? Play TrapThem and you will come across many other cases like this.
In conclusion, TrapThem is a bad game built on bad ideals. Its creator has crystallized some of the most un-fun and uncreative designs that I have ever had the displeasure of muddling through. The only joy I managed to get from the game was watching the TrapThem guy get crushed under stupid falling dirt over and over. And if you were wondering about TrapThem RC: It seems to be even worse, full of more contrivances, more fiddly mechanics, and probably much more frustration.
This game shouldn't be called Trap Them. It should be called F*** Them (the players).
