The early FMV game Night Trap is notable primarily for three things: Dana Plato, not being very good, and helping to usher in the Entertainment Software Rating Board. So what makes it worthy of a 25th anniversary re-release? I don't know. The world is a strange place. But as we noted back in April, it's happening, and developer Screaming Villains has now confirmed that a PC release will take place on August 15.
The release date trailer gives a pretty good idea of what's in store from the updated game, but it also constitutes the totality of the launch date announcement. I suppose that's one of the upsides of remastering a 25-year-old game: You don't need to explain what's going on. But let's do so anyway. To Wikipedia!
"In Night Trap, the player takes the role of a special agent tasked to watch over teenage girls visiting a house which, unbeknownst to them, is full of danger. The player watches live surveillance footage of the house and triggers traps to capture anyone seen endangering the girls. The primary antagonists are Augers, vampiric beings who want to capture the girls for their blood. The player can freely switch their view between different cameras to keep watch over the girls and eavesdrop on conversations to follow the story and listen for clues."
To give credit where it's due, Night Trap was an impressive technological achievement. It just wasn't a very good game, and while its then-controversial content brought it no small amount of notoriety, it didn't do much to encourage sales, nor did its reliance on the relatively niche Sega CD hardware. All you need now, though, is a few bucks (pricing hasn't been announced, but the disc-based PS4 version will be $25 so I would imagine Steam will come in somewhere slightly lower), a mid-range PC, and a willingness to actually play the thing.
Got an hour to kill and want to know more? A documentary on the history of the game featuring co-creator and director James Riley, entitled Night Trap: 25 Years Later, is right down below.
