River Trap - Synopsis

Short evaluation:
Story: Shigeko live with Akemi, the love of his life, and Shizuka his sister and close friend. But soon their relationships will change forever. Very original and well told story. Almost no branching until end, despite the eight possible different endings.
Presentation: Interesting scenarios. The whole game has a blue filter, something that enhances the mood of the story. Good art and presentation. Excellent music, despite being rather short.
Strongest points: Original and deep plot. Many endings. The game has many strong elements and they all combine well to form a meaningful whole.

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River Trap - Review

Ah, is it time for another of my long, nonsensical reviews already? Well, yes… And no… Because this review is special to me, in a certain way. River Trap is one of my favorite games ever, and my number one favorite of ATP projects. Period.
Reviewing games can be very rewarding, since it’s a privilege to share your thoughts and ideas of English VNs here, and keep them recorded in bits and pixels long after you’ve forgotten about them. But when you get to a personal favorite, there is a very difficult, and yet exciting task ahead of you. You must explain your thoughts and opinions carefully, without too much bias or personal rambling (like what I am doing right now) and your writing has to live up to the great work that inspired you to write the review in the first place. It is hard, but also incredibly rewarding. I can only hope this will actually accomplish what I meant it to be.
River Trap is a complex game, with a story that is difficult to label and a superb atmosphere that is ATP’s specialty. It is the second game of ATP projects and took more less 6 months to finish, being unsurpassed in length and production values for some time in the early Lemmasoft forums.
The story of the game initially seems to be that of a love triangle with a twist, that being the fact that two of the characters are actually brother and sister, and maybe something more… The beginning already sets the tension that will continue through the rest of the story, and leaves the player imagining what is the nature of Shizuka’s relationship with her brother, the main character Shigeko. The ambiguity of the situation remains for the first half of the game, and helps create the atmosphere. Akemi is also a very complex character, and her many sides add interest and make her more than a mere rival. In fact the plot spins almost as much around her as around any of the other characters and we learn to care for each one of them. That makes the whole situation all the more dramatic when things unfold as we expect (or fear). But in the middle there is a plot twist that gives the whole game a different meaning, relying on the player’s expectations they built from the first part and surprising them with a development that is unexpected and original, forcing you to revise the first part of the game and realize the clues and references that you missed.
AKEMI’s revelation (I spell the name in the same way as mikey did, to separate her from Akemi) also gives the game a different theme, that is too complex and deep to be properly explained, and yet links perfectly with the first theme. If the first half was about a love triangle, incest and the relationships between the characters, the second is about identity and validity of love. AKEMI is, in my personal opinion, the most complex character to ever grace and ATP game, a biased and very personal statement, but that has a very good reason to exist. AKEMI personifies the dilemma of seeing yourself without being yourself, realizing how you really are without the charitable perspective of your own eyes, and how one can change by the circumstances around them and what people believe they are. AKEMI is Akemi, and yet she is different. Her experiences changed her and now she fights against her other self for the man both love. Although the writer himself appointed his favorite character as Akemi, the true heroine of the game is AKEMI, that is certain. Maybe a tragic heroine but, nevertheless, the game would not be truly “River Trap” without her. Her ending is also quite difficult to obtain, and considering the fairly large quantity of endings (eight in total, more than any other ATP game, except for Ori, Ochi, Onoe) the odds are more in favor of an unhappy ending to AKEMI, rather than a happy one, although there is not truly happy or unhappy ending. That is another strong feature of the game, which ties with its themes and general atmosphere… In the end one must get hurt.
But if the great story carries the game, the execution is no less effective, with the blue tinge and the interesting backgrounds helping immersion in the rich mood of the game. In the “author’s notes” mikey mentioned that the game would be a lot about bridges and rivers, and there are many parallels between that choice of scenario and the plot. Rivers are strong symbols of the passage of time, the water always flowing and yet the river remaining constant and steady. Maybe it’s no coincidence that the main change of the game is caused by a river. The second visual theme, bridges, is deeply connected to the first. If rivers represent time and the inescapable changes that follow it then bridges are the ties that bind people together, especially love, and that can resist even the passage of time. The characters of the game are tied together, for good or for worse, and in the end one bridge must be severed. AKEMI, in the climax of the story, tries to kill herself by jumping from a bridge. The tragic irony of killing yourself in a place that is supposed to connect people together is perhaps a metaphor on how love, the strongest of all connections, can cause so much pain. Of course I may be reading sings where none exist. Mikey, in an answer to my review, revealed that he had no intention of drawing such parallels in the first place. I guess that if sometimes a game looses some of the author’s intentions along the way, other times it can mean more than what the creator himself thought, creating a deep, personal meaning for just the right player. The character images are thoughtfully designed, and the close-ups and different poses enhance the general effect.
The music also does its job remarkably well, even though all tracks are fairly short (the whole track doesn’t even reach 5 minutes) the emotion they convey is perfect for the game, especially the “walks” and the “think” tracks. I believe that this is the one and only project in which the musician Xenorakis worked, and he has a style that helps the mood of the game on both the thoughtful and tense situations. It is one of these occasions where it just clicks right and everything works well together, creating one unified and atmospheric game that has an original development and manages to touch and impress as few stories ever can.
As I’ve rambled on about this wonderful game, I have also realized something else: the importance of reviewing games, especially the ones you liked/preferred. It makes you analyze the components and think “Well, what made this game become what it is? Why is it so meaningful to me?” It’s a great pause to think about VNs in general and that game in particular, and makes me reflect on the separate parts that make the whole so powerful. This review also made me play River Trap again, and that just by itself was already worth it.
Now I only wish that you, patient reader that has stuck with this long, long text until the very end, have also gained as much benefit from reading my review as I have from writing it.

Review written by Mr. E, founder and sole member of the AKEMI fan-club.

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