It’s safe to say that no other game in the world contains as many ways to kill and hurt enemies as Deception IV: Blood Ties, which is out today on PS3 and PS Vita. More than 100 different traps allow you to slice, hit, launch, trip, and otherwise torment your victim in a variety of imaginative ways. Dropping a flower vase onto the head of a powerful hero as a giant high heel descends from the ceiling to crush him is not the kind of experience you can have in most other games.
Besides the traps that you can select and place yourself, you can also take advantage of stage traps. In one stage you can set up a launching trap to hurl your victims into the Car Wash, and in another you can roast them alive inside a Brazen Bull.
But while Laegrinna and her Daemons show neither mercy nor restraint toward their victims, we’ve worked hard to keep Deception IV: Blood Ties from getting too graphically violent. Dismemberment, for example, is never shown. Because more than anything, we wanted it to feel rewarding when a trap combo is successful, and for this we felt it was necessary to achieve the right balance between serious and comical.
This emphasis on the feel of trap combos affected our decisions in all areas of the game’s development. For example, the way enemies react when hit by a trap had to be satisfying not only on its own, but as part of a chain of traps and reactions, which means we had to keep the flow of the combo as a whole in mind when designing the scale and tempo of each reaction.
To be able to watch a victim stumbling around with a jack-o-lantern over his head, launched into the air by a springboard, knocked aside by a hammer, squished by a rolling boulder, and then finally attacked in the groin from underneath by a sharpened wooden horse is something that players can’t get from a comedy movie or TV program, so we wanted to make sure we did it right.
The difficulty of developing so many possibilities for different trap combinations in Deception IV: Blood Ties is more than words can express, but so is the happiness we feel when we see our fans’ enjoyment.
