Trap Quest

It’s always fascinating to see what the internet will come up next to take the world of interactive smut to a whole new level. Since 2015, Trap Quest has been performing a public service for both the online porn game industry as well as people who are fascinated by gender transitions for one reason or another.

A Unique Psychological Thrill

The idea of changing one’s gender has been around with non-pornographic connotations for a very long time, and more on that needs to be said later. Within the scope of sexual interactions in gaming, however, it’s had a very unique place in the hearts and minds of people with a very specific type of preference. Normally, one would default to classifying a unique pornographic concept as a genre, fetish or depravity. Societal implications play a large role in how these concepts get classified, but generally, it’s all fun and games in pornography and entertainment is only there to be consumed rather than judged for veering off course. Therefore, if you’d like to make or enjoy a smut game in which, among other things, your main character can swap genders, you can.

A Virgin in a World of Smut

Trap Quest is a text-based game which takes this concept several degrees further. And speaking of degrees, games like Degrees of Lewdity have already brought the concept of sissification to the smut world, in a very well thought out way. The basic concept is that within the game’s world, your character is perhaps the least sexual entity among all characters. However, everything around you is sexual.

This is a sort of juxtaposition against the two other possibilities you’ll often see in Flash games. In those, more popular games, your character will be a sex god and every eligible lay will be willing to get down on their knees for your pleasure. Then there are the more out-there games where you are a sex god, but everyone else is an unwilling participant in your smut games. Those are the types of games that more often than not get banned on Steam for good reason.

Both Degrees of Lewdity and Trap Quest have your character thrust into a hyper-sexual world of dangerous sexual predators, but this is normalized by damn near everyone except for you. This means that avoiding sexual encounters, especially forced ones, is a key element of the gameplay.

Fake Loss of Real Control

You might find it a bit odd that people would want to play, let alone make a sex game in which sex is a bad thing, but the concept’s a bit denser than that. The message isn’t that sex is bad, rather, that choosing when you get to have sex is much more important than the opportunity of having it. It is this sense of control that matters more to your character than their sex appeal or their track record. That’s why in Degrees of Lewdity you’re more than free to be the most promiscuous girl in the neighborhood or an absolute saint and still, the scariest on screen message that you can experience is: “Your sense of control falters”.

And this is where it gets somewhat convoluted. Non-consensual sex is bad across the board, for everyone. It is the absolute worst experience you could go through. So then why would someone opt to play a video game within which this is a constant possibility? Further, how could anyone find this game appealing? Well, Degrees of Lewdity is appealing for the same reason that rape-fantasies are so commonplace. It’s not an actual loss of your own control, it’s play-pretend. You opt to play the game and so you take on the challenge.

Sissification and Gender Alteration

Back to Trap Quest, this game follows every amazing step that Degrees of Lewdity has taken, but combines it with certain psychological and anatomical concepts that are intriguing to those who do not relate to them and might terrify those who do – in a good way.

Your character in Trap Quest is also pushed into an oversexualized situation that they cannot handle. They’re fighting as hard as they can to stay sane and stay in control, with the added pressure of being experimented on in ways that can alter their anatomy. You see, the longer your character stays under subjugation, the more opportunities arise for them to be sissified or slutified, depending on their gender. The machine they’re strapped to also alters their anatomy proportionally, changing their entire body into a sluttier version of itself, complete with all the associated tropes, between larger breasts and even a complete regendering of the player’s genitals.

About Dysphoria

This is roughly the part where Trap Quest took a significant portion of the internet by storm. By the game creator’s own admission, transgender individuals have contacted them to thank them for the experience, saying that they’ve used Trap Quest both as a relatable form of therapy and as a way of communicating their feelings to their partners in ways that were previously unavailable.

Now, you cannot argue that Trap Quest is the perfect transgenderism simulator – far from it. It is a smut game after all. Still, it’s fascinating to see that transgenderism along with transitioning have made their way into the video game world past the point where a woman simply has a penis and that’s cool because it’s an additional tool for the action to follow. There’s a lot more psychology in this game. You’re invested in your character and you’re under threat, so if you’re properly immersed, you’re going to want to keep them away from transitioning, especially since that transition is loaded with the implication of submission.

Perspectives on Domination and Gender

This rings true for any game out there, but especially so for Trap Quest – if you are properly immersed through a character that’s supposed to symbolize you, then your impressions of their experiences will be different than other players’, depending on your personal experiences and preferences.

It’s safe to say that a cis individual will experience this game differently than a transgender individual, starting from the fact that it would be more relatable for the latter, but going even deeper than that. Gradual gender alteration, particularly when it’s loaded with the secondary implication of submission, has not been and probably will never be pegged as either good or bad. People transition into opposite genders every day and for many this is a godsend. For others it might be a fear, and to tons of people it is a mystery. Submission too is a matter of taste. Within the BDSM world, domination does not dominate submission in popularity. Sometimes individuals will play both roles, whilst keeping them separate. That fascinating cross-section of preference as well as the ability to experience them differently make Trap Quest a magnificent experiment neatly packaged in a text-based smut game.

If the game didn’t come with the threat of submission and was instead, say, a sandbox game in which you can do whatever you want with no consequence, then it wouldn’t hit any of these notes. It would be a sex simulator. In those, you’re free to switch up your genitals and your preference on the fly. You don’t learn anything and you certainly aren’t affected psychologically. Trap Quest gets you thinking about your sexuality while you’re having fun, and it all happens in under 5 hours of gameplay. The game is made to be replayable with the promise of different outcomes, which is much wiser than it being a static experience that you play once and forget forever. It’s not just a story – it’s an experience, and it’s up to you to forge a unique path.

Technical Comments

It’s very unfortunate that one of the greatest porn games ever made hits so many all-time lows in the technical department, but Trap Quest’s gameplay aspects were kneecapped from the start. They decided to build the game atop the Inform engine, which is an interactive fiction platform that should make the entire process easier. Undoubtedly, this cut a lot of corners for them and lessened the amount of man-hours they’d need, but it also crippled the game in some ways.

It could be the case that Inform isn’t to blame, but one way or another, Trap Quest ended up with one of the worst interfaces ever seen in gaming. It’s clunky, poorly organized and just flat out looks bad. It comes with a “dark mode” option which should lessen eye-strain, but the pain you’ll feel over how cluttered everything is cannot be remedied.

There’s the option to download different versions of the character preview, but that does nothing for the rest of the interface. Still, the game can be called perfectly playable if you can overlook these small details. And it’s so immersive that once you get going, you’re not going to have any attention left over for small gripes, so you should definitely check it out. Don’t forget, it’s completely free!