If you wanted a new punishing adventure to occupy an hour or so on a chilly January day, you’re in luck. Hiroyoshi Oshiba’s Trap Adventure 2 came out on iOS in 2016, but people are only getting into it now, because that’s how the Internet works. It’s a free to play title, but you’ll need to pay $1 to get more than 1 life, which…you’ll need. This game is as popular on Youtube and Twitch as it is on iOS, because it is a brutally difficult and subtly hilarious adventure through platforming design. The second screen tells you all you need to know about the game:
It looks pretty straightforward, doesn’t it? It’s the sort of thing you’ve seen in a half-dozen Mario games. And yet you’ll die the first time through, I guarantee it. The random spikes that pop up on the third block will kill you. No problem, you say: I’ll jump to trigger the spikes, then head back to the second block. Sorry, the third block will fall back on you and kill you. Jump over the third block? You should get nailed by some more random spikes at just where you expect to land. Okay, fine, you say. Jump over the second set of spikes. Sorry, they’ll move over to where you’re most likely to land. You can finally get through the thing by jumping over the third block but not so far as to hit the second spikes, then jumping over the second set of spikes with enough clearance to make it to the next screen. Congratulations.
Trap Adventure 2 succeeds by playing off of literal decades of accumulated platforming knowledge and then throwing it in your face at every second. Where other games try give players signposts towards the optimal route, Trap Adventure 2 gives you those signposts and then ensures that you die by following them. At every moment it tries to anticipate your movements and then punishes you for taking them.
And so that’s my advice for progressing through. Ask yourself: how would I normally do this? Then ask yourself: how would the game kill me for doing that? You’ll start to be able to anticipate not only what the game expects you to do, but what you’ll be able to do to get around that. Don’t get me wrong: it’s still very hard. It’s hard even when you know what you’re supposed to do, because that’s the whole point. But there’s something devilishly beautiful about the way this game hurts you. It’s genuinely hilarious to see your player crushed by what felt like a reasonable move, and actually funny gameplay is a rare feat for a game.
Typically one compares difficult games to Dark Souls, but Trap Adventure 2 is nothing like Dark Souls. Dark Souls tells you what to do in obscure ways, but it definitely tells you what to do, and then only punishes you for not executing that as well as you can. Trap Adventure 2 is much crueler than that, but that’s what’s fun about it. This game is definitely worth the $1 it takes to play it properly.
