Tecmo's Deception: Invitation to Darkness

"Weird, original RPG/3D/strategy/stealth game killed by atrocious design"

In Devil's Deception (known as plain old Deception in more conservative parts of the world), you play a betrayed prince who sells his soul to Satan to return as a phantom and get some revenge! Great idea, but the execution is all over the place, resulting in major player frustration.

This game is pretty bold in mixing up lots of game styles. There's RPG, 1st-person 3D action, stealthy stuff (probably ahead of its time) and strategy and resources management. The way it works is.. you are the master of your Evil castle. In each chapter of the game, invaders break in looking for different treasures, or seeking to kill you. You start with a pool of gold and magic, with which you can rearrange and build extra rooms in your castle, and set traps into which you lure your tormentors to either capture or kill them. Once the traps are set, you have to go a-sneaking in 1st person mode, acting as bait to the bad (good?) guys and dragging them through the minefield of your traps. You've got traps like spikes you can fire from walls, deep pits and 10-ton weights. Once you've softened your victims up, you can then capture them with giant cages, beartraps, cranes or magnets etc. (or if they're particularly annoying - drop a second 10-ton weight on 'em, skip the capture and proceed to Death!)

The first few times you sneak around unleashing traps on your foes, your heart will pound and you'll think it's great. In a 1st-person game, it's hard to get used to the fact that you have no direct weaponry. You will never be able to run up to your opponents and hack them, or fire from afar. You have to run around them, watch their movements through your castle and fire off traps when they stray into range. But soon enough, you will start to experience all the game's shortcomings, and suffer from them.

The enemy AI is terrible, but worst of all, it's unchanging across all of your foes. The fiftieth adventurer you kill will have behaved in exactly the same way as the first. Of course they look different, and have different stats - some will go down in one trap, others will take much punishment. But they all just wander round following the left-hand wall pretty much, until you come into the specified range where they'll make for you. If it's a slow enemy, you're in for real trouble, because if he gets caught on an obstacle, it'll take forever for him to work around it. If s/he is shooting at you while stuck on the obstacle, you'll be getting hammered due to poor game mechanics, not due to lack of skill. The good guys' ability to dodge traps is also extremely arbitrary, and so irritating you'll rip your hair out at times. If you run out of traps, it's back to the Strategy Room, another load from the CD, then you have to mess around with the map again setting new traps, switch back to 1st-person mode, go lure them out again... you get the picture.

The creative aspects of building your own castle, and being able to walk or fly around all your new rooms, are seriously undermined by one factor.. you just don't need to. All the enemies enter at the front of the castle. Why would you bother to lure them through ten rooms (which would be very hard work) to kill them in your flashy new dining room, when you can (and would much rather) set up a minefield of traps where they enter? Bring on the 10-ton weights.

Between missions, you can choose to voluntarily lure additional adventurers into your castle, theoretically so that you have more bodies to create your monsters. Oh, didn't I mention the monsters? No? That's because the game still won't let me create any yet, even after hours of play. The manual is dire, and the game gives no clues as to what you have to do to unlock the 'monster creation' and 'trap upgrade' options. These aren't cheats by the way, it's clearly supposed to be a major component of the game, yet a lot if intense play and practise is getting me nowhere.

So why keep at it? Well, when it works out, the sneaking and trapping is very compelling. The whole game is weirdly compelling - the creepy soundtrack and spacious colourful graphics give it quite an atmosphere. There are however far too many ragged edges. The lousy enemy behaviour, the great explanatory gaps, the strange pointlessness of enlarging your castle. There is a lot of loading from the CD between sections that you need to switch between far too often for this to be forgivable. Not to mention saving - it takes nine blocks on your memory card!!!! Whoa.

Overall - Devil's Deception is original, atmospheric, and compelling by virtue of its weirdness. But on the major downside, it's hampered by some extremely crappy game mechanics, poor overall design, too much loading and too many unexplained features.

-- Devil's Deception -- 4/10 --

Addendum 2001

In spite of my own review, I persevered with this game. I progressed through many levels... an interminable number it seemed. Far too late in the piece for my tastes, some plot developments led to the unlocking of the trap upgrade and monster creation options. The new traps were fun to watch but no less frustrating to use than the ones I already had. On the monster front, summoning screaming banshees to maul the loathsome adventurers turned out to be the high point of the game.

Still, that's a paltry one-and-a-half extra positives in the face of absolutely everything else I resented about this game remaining the same. I was merely levels away from completing Devil's Deception, and I still traded it away out of existential weariness before doing so.

And yes, I did remember to get my soul back out of the jewel case first.

Reviewer's Score: 4/10, Originally Posted: 08/15/00, Updated 12/22/01