Others - Trap Quest [R14 v4.0] [Aika]

Just an aside, I might be slightly biased, I have liked this game since it's early conceptualization as the first really roguelike spirited porn game, if the name wasn't a big enough hint. It's truly original in it's approach to design, and the gameplay does suffer from the age-old problem of "Lose the game to get to the content", but it's circumvented a lot of the frustration of that by designing the game with that in mind:

1. You select or de-select whatever particular things you want or don't want for your gameplay experience so you don't immediately start to dislike the direction your play-through is going

2. Save-loading and the undo command are there at your disposal to reverse stuff that you really don't want to happen

3. even getting dicked over to the point of becoming near-useless as a character doesn't stop you from "finishing the game" by getting to the end game button and revealing your ending, which is selected from an admittedly wip arbitrary mess, and hunting for a specific ending would be an absolute logistical nightmare of micro-management, but the point of the game is taking things as they come and rolling with it anyways, so it's somewhat appropriate.

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I do not think the game is perfect, but I do think the game is experimental, and has tried things no developer, particularly no porn developer, has ever tried, certainly not to this extent either. Involuntary transformation fetishism is usually limited to either shallow one-shot scenarios done in html or clusterfucks of clumped together fetishes you may or may not like in a format with no real separation between them like CoC or Flexible Survival; It's rare that a game has a thematic direction and also fills out with as much content as Trap Quest does.

Aside from that, Trap Quest also strives to do what relatively few porn games bother with at all, actually making a gameplay oriented experience that isn't just a short or looping CYOA or an unoriginal basic RPG or platformer experience. There are others, oddly normally Japanese games, that have an actual gameplay orientated experience that isn't just there as a pedestal for the porn content but is actually decent to play, but even then it's not exactly common, so I count that as an achievement in regards to Trapquest.

I could name the issues, like the clunky UI, the over-extended use of an ultimately poor choice of engine, or some elements of the game simply not being fair or fun without savescumming (which is bad for a game that aims to be a roguelike) but all of that I think can be forgiven if you recognize Trap Quest for what it is. Innovation in a direction nobody else in porn game development has properly gone before, and from what was originall a complete amateur developer no less. I don't even particularly like Aika as a person, due to our only personal interaction having been a negative one on the ULMF forums, but I do respect what they are doing as an indie dev, and I think that they deserve more than what the reviews have been dishing out on this thread, which is why this review is ultimately a full 5/5 from me.

This game is okay, pushing it to good cause I like the fetishes. The interface and the look of the game are horrible not gonna lie, the actual art isn't bad. The sex is okay the player has limited options during the actual sex, no push back, spread cheeks, dirty talk, that kinda thing, the descriptions for the sex are limited compared to Trials In Tainted Space or Tales Of Androgyny for example. Although there is a large variety of things to fuck. The set up is great, but actually playing the game can be a pain as you can spend a solid five minutes just getting your character back on their feet only for them to run out of energy a couple of rooms later so you have to crawl all the way back to the bed to reset energy. I get that part of the fun is having horrible things happen to the main character, but after a point, it becomes tedious, like when you finally get the perfect slutty outfit to whore around with only for the game to faust a new one upon you. Cheats would be nice.

Very boring . I do not know how people can enjoy this game. Good luck trying to figure out what to do. If youre going this far with making the customization just make it unity and then there will be depth. This is like a mediocre RPGM which I hate.

An intensely unforgiving game, with R.N.G traps and rogue-like harshness. I have enjoyed many a playthrough of degradation and humiliation as I tried to push myself to the end of the game only to be unable to complete it due to falling too far. If you enjoy a bit of a rough time this game is definitely a good time.

Hook: explore a kinky dungeon and experience sexy situations in a wild and random manner.

Best:
There is a huge variety of sexual kinks to explore here. And the best part is, they are almost all opt-out. Mix and match your favorites. Additionally, body parts have min and max size sliders. So if you want your tits to be no bigger than a D cup, no problem. You want H cups? You can get that too. IMO every smut game needs this feature. The writing of the sex scenes is nice enough, with a heavy focus on rough and sub/dom sex.

Meh:
There are no less than Four art styles to choose from for the images in this game. That’s great! However, they are kinda low res and only partially implemented in a lot of places. Boo. Your imagination will have to fill in the gaps often.
What items you find and what transformations you encounter is very random. Procedural generation level design at it's best and worst. Almost feels like a rouge-like at times.

Worst:
Holy crap, this has a bad UI. You can play the game like a text-based adventure, but that’s hard to do one handed, which defeats the point of all the smut scenes. There is a partially implemented point and click interface, but the MOST CRITICAL COMMAND, advance to next text block, doesn’t work with the mouse.
I play on a 2560 res monitor, which means I must increase the font size by a lot to read it from my chair. However, this causes there to only by 2-3 paragraphs of text on the screen at a time. This leads to a lot pressing a button just to navigate my inventory, look at the environment, fight an enemy and so on. It’s like reading a book if each page had only 50 words on it.

Score: 7.0 / 10

Date: 2/1/19
Version: 3.0.9