It's been over five years since the last game in the Deception series, and that was on PS1, so it feels like it's been even longer. In the meantime, the folks behind Deception - Keisuke Kikuchi and Makoto Shibata - went on to create the mega-superb Fatal Frame series on PS2... so for a while there, it was looking like we'd never see a new Deception game.

I'm kinda bummed that they didn't retain the word "Deception" in the title. I would hazard a guess that it was Marketing who decided Deception 4 would be dubbed "Trapt." Since A) it's been five long years and one entire console generation since "Deception 3: Dark Illusion", and B) once you get above a "3" in your series, people start to ask tough questions about the quality of your franchise.

I really like these games, so it's good to be back. Once again, you take on the role of a lost girl who finds she can place and trigger booby traps inside some cookie-cutter medieval castle. Each level begins with you being chased by a random assortment of knights and wizards and whoevers... you pause the game and set up some traps... then you walk yourself around as bait to get the jerks to come within range of your smashing floors and falling guillotine blades. Aside from navigating the pause screen, your only controls are running and setting off traps via remote control (each trap is assigned to either triangle, square or X). Easy.

Good fun. But...

This is a final-year PS2 game, yet it looks and acts like a first-year game. It won't take you long to realize that the graphics are downright awful. Crappy textures, little-to-no detailing, just plain ugly all around. In fact, were it not for the advanced character models, you might think you're playing one of the PS1 versions. When your victims bite it, the game cuts to a specialized death scene that features only the dying character, regardless of whoever was standing right beside him when he caught the killing blow. Not to mention that despite the whole concept being about people dying in hilariously gruesome torture devices, there is very little visceral connection between trap and victim. Not that I want to see a bloodbath, but it would be nice to see the intruders believably interact with the traps, instead of duping the same contortion animation no matter which trap did the deed. In 2005, we should be seeing quite a bit more realism coming out of the PS2.

Then there's the painfully over-organized menus and sub-menus, all of which wait a palpable beat before loading. This game could have used some serious streamlining. Don't even ask about all the text typos.

All of which makes me think that Tecmo finished this game in '01 (pre-Fatal Frame 1) and then dropped it down a well. There are literally NO advancements between the PS1 Deception games and this one. You're still limited to three traps per room (which is stupid, we could certainly manage more than three trigger buttons). You're still limited to "equipping" only nine traps total per level (which is stupid, we could certainly manage an entire library of traps). You're still limited to only two intruders at a time (which is stupid, we could certainly face down more than that). You're still interrupted at every opportunity for looooong cutscenes showing victims entering the room and, later, the same victims in their death throes, complete with subtitles. It's like I don't even have a PlayStation2.

Was this a PSP title and somebody accidentally shipped it on CD?

So I've pretty much convinced myself that it's late 2001 and either I play this game or I try to finish the Target Test Mode in Smash Bros. It's still a lot of fun dropping giant rocks on the heads of angry soldiers, or tossing bitchy archers into electrified rivers. It's just not the "next-gen" advancement I had hoped for.