Tourist Trap

Tourist Trap begins in what is either a psychedelic experience or a bizarre dream, it quickly turns out to be the latter. In the dream, our protagonist Lucas is talking to a dying whale that's in pretty bad shape with guts and everything hanging out of its body giving him some pretty ominous news.

The very first feeling I get is that it could almost be an episode of Black Mirror. Our protagonist Lucas lives with his mother and father in the fictional South American city of Santa Ballena in a house paid for by the company Pharos that owns everything and who Lucas also works for. The problem is that they live in so-called open houses, which means that tourists can constantly walk in, sit down and watch what they do, a bit like a sitcom audience. To the inhabitants of Santa Ballena, there is nothing strange about that, even though they are practically animals in a zoo, and they don't seem to know any other reality. The tourists, of course, want to be entertained and these have travelled from all over the world and in addition to sitting as an audience in Lucas's house, they are also found outdoors, and there are even dedicated guides, giving you the impression that they believe that Lucas and everyone else in the open houses are very unintelligent creatures.

But when Lucas is finally on his way to work, he meets an escaped monkey who reveals that all is not quite what it seems. It's all part of a conspiracy and it's now up to Lucas to find "Frank the Tourist", as the monkey calls him, for more information. However, Lucas is perhaps a bit too naïve and doesn't really realise the seriousness of the situation but is mostly concerned about being late for his job. But you have to give him credit for being very dutiful, at least initially. Slowly but surely, however, he begins to realise that perhaps the monkey was right that Pharos is not such a nice company after all and that there is a lot going on that he has turned a blind eye to or simply unintentionally missed in his foggy carefree everyday life.

The setup is classic, there's side-scrolling controls and then point and clicking too where you either interact with objects or talk to people you meet along the way. Often you need to help someone with something to move forward or something is requested of you and then you sometimes even have to think a little to solve the problem. A few times I got stuck for a while because I missed some detail, but usually there are clues in the dialogue choices, so you can always come back for hints. However, the actual execution is certainly not without problems. You have to stand in exactly the right place to be able to interact with something or someone and it is far too precise of an action that applies here, which becomes frustrating very quickly. If a couple of the points are also very close to each other, it becomes even more frustrating. One wrong click and you may end up in the wrong area or you may trigger a conversation you've already had and be forced to hear the same dialogue again.

Visually, it's pretty tidy. The characters look like comic book characters and as an old comic book fan I appreciate that look. It reminds me a bit of the style I had when I had my sights set on becoming a cartoonist and mostly sat and drew all day. Pretty simple character design but still very charming I think.

There is plenty of dialogue and dialogue choices in the short duration, and here we find one of the game's strongest but at the same time weakest elements. Where the dialogue in text form is often entertaining and cleverly written with intelligent, dark humour, the recorded dialogue is not. "Blah, blah, blah" is all that is said and for the first five minutes I still giggled a little at it but then it became so annoying that I switched it off completely. If I were to give any kind of plus to that part, at least all the "blah blah" is done with empathy, which actually doesn't happen all the time, not even in games where there are actual words in the picture that should be delivered with feeling. Sometimes it also gets a little confusing as my two-year-old son speaks much the same way, so at times it was even difficult to determine who was saying what.

What I like most during my playthrough is that it feels original in many ways. Sure, there are plenty of stories about conspiracies where big companies control everything and everyone, but here it still feels quite fresh. Much of course is thanks to the constantly twisted humour and the unexpectedly clever dialogue choices. The humour is constantly present and permeates Tourist Trap from the very beginning all the way to the end and that's pretty much always a plus in my book, especially when it's as twisted as it is here.

Aside from some clunky controls and annoying speech, I still had quite a bit of fun with Tourist Trap. However, it didn't take much more than two hours to complete and I can feel that's a bit on the small side. If the game length had been double that, the developers could have gone a bit more in depth with the very entertaining story. On the other hand, two more hours with the controls might have made me quit before the finish line. If you have two hours to kill, it's pretty solid entertainment and I don't really feel that it's two hours of my life that I've wasted, and sometimes that's enough.