Where is Tecmo’s Deception?

Thanks to a friend of mine with good taste in gaming, I’ve recently been playing a lot of Madworld for the Wii. It’s not perfect by any means, but it’s certainly fun; there’s just something about mutilating the human body in creative ways that really appeals to me, even though I’m not a sociopath. That being said, we haven’t seen too many games focus so intensely on dispatching your enemies using painful and overly-elaborate methods–which is why playing Madworld brought back warm, fuzzy memories of my time spent with Tecmo’s Deception series.
If you’ve never heard of Deception, don’t feel too bad; despite featuring four games over roughly a decade (Deception, Kagero: Deception II and Deception III: Dark Delusion for the Playstation, along with Trapt for the PS2), the franchise is relatively obscure. Much like so many other games in those experimental days of the original Playstation, the bizarre and somewhat-janky nature of Deception probably turned a lot of people off. But the fact that the series is a sort of demonic, violent take on Home Alone made me overlook its flaws and really dig into the satisfying–and somewhat disturbing–gameplay.

The series may share a lot of similarities with the basic mechanics of Madworld, but it differs in how you use various environmental traps to kill your enemies. Instead of actively throwing people into spikes, pits, and under heavy objects, you act as a sort of “bait” to lure enemies into the path of traps that are placed throughout your mansion in a Sims-like “build” mode. It’s easy to get some shmuck to walk over a simple spiked floor a few times, which is why most of the fun of Deception comes with comboing traps. For example, you could drop a blinding item on an enemy’s head, then send them right into a bed of spikes before they’re crushed by a rolling boulder, Indiana Jones style. Here’s a little video that will show you an example of trap comboing in action:

Adding to the fun of all this creative murder is your protagonist’s decidedly dark persuasion; each of the games feature main characters which make some sort of evil pact to achieve their goals, and said pact involves killing any would-be home invaders, despite their good intentions. A lot of the folks trying to hunt you down are just plain no-good, but a few have their own sob stories that make melting them with lava just a bit less rewarding. Especially at the time the first Deception was made (1996), it was unusual to see a game make you walk an entirely-dark path. This antagonistic quality of the series is probably why it’s so memorable to me, and maybe why Deception didn’t see succcess with a mass audience.

The franchise was brought to its logical conclusion with 2005’s Trapt, which didn’t do much aside from giving the graphics a much-needed facelift. I’m not sure how much more content can be mined from Deception’s fundamental concept, but a Wii remake of the older games wouldn’t be entirely unwelcome–and I’m sure Nintendo would welcome another bloody, hardcore title to their library. Until that happens, I recommend you check out Trapt, or, if you can still stand Playstation-era graphics, one of the earlier Deception games. I guarantee that you haven’t played anything like it–well, aside from Madworld.

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Tags: bob mackey, deception, kagero, tecmo, trapt, where is