The description on the official website says it all: “Trap Adventure 2” is a game designed to kill you.
“Dying happens to you a lot in Trap Adventure 2! You must accept this fact if you want to conquer your adventure. Just let your hero die many times so you will know where the traps appear and make sure you memorize the locations of those traps in order not to make a mistake again at the next attempt.”
It is quite common in modern popular culture for viral “challenges” to arise. One of the most famous early accounts of this was the “Cinnamon Challenge,” while more memorable one within the recent past is the “Tide Pod Challenge,” where one pops a laundry detergent Tide Pod into his mouth and starts chewing, which went viral earlier this year.
These challenges also arise among video gamers. They often involve completing a subset of goals within an existing game that add to the original difficulty. This allows people to keep older and well-played games fresh and interesting, and maybe spark other players’ interest in the game.
One example of this is the Nuzlocke Challenge. This can be done in any of the Pokémon games. If your Pokémon faints, you must consider it dead, and lose it forever by releasing it into the wild. This makes it very hard to complete the game and forces you to really care about the wellbeing of your little virtual monster.
However, “Trap Adventure 2” is taking gamers by storm because completing the game itself is the challenge.
Upon first glance, one may think this is just your average Super Mario Bros wannabe game. However, this purposefully frustrating retro-looking game has impossible difficulty by design. The creators of the game anticipate players’ reactions to the game environment and set up ways to kill the character based on how players are expected to move within the game.
“Trap Adventure 2” came out earlier this year and is available for iOS, Android, and through computer Internet browsers, so anyone who is willing has the opportunity to torture themselves.
“Trap Adventure 2” was popularized by YouTube and memes, since everyone wants to see just how brutal this game is, and of course laugh at other people in pain. Famous YouTubers like PewDiePie, Videogame Dunkey, and Game Grumps can all be seen screaming in sheer frustration on the playthroughs they uploaded to their channels.
No one believes how difficult it is until he tries it. Each playthrough starts out similarly: it swiftly goes from “This looks easy” to “Alright, I see what is going on,” then devolves into yelling, controller-throwing, and blank stares from the existential crisis this game causes for all who play it.
Dan Avidan of Game Grumps opened their playthrough with, “Welcome to the game that is supposedly designed purely to piss off the person who plays it.” “I’m pretty sure they use this as torture,” commented Emerald Ivory.
The first stage starts out with three blocks that must be hopped on to get to a higher platform, and progress to the next stage. Easy enough, right? But hidden spikes, moving blocks, and falling platforms means you might spend 50 lives just trying to figure out how to get to the next frame.
Amazingly enough, some dedicated fans of the game can complete “Trap Adventure 2” from start to finish in about five minutes. Although all speed runs are impressive, this is especially remarkable considering that each individual frame is difficult to figure out, even harder to execute, and seemingly impossible to succeed by doing so flawlessly.
If you haven’t tried it yet, it is free to play and available on their website. Show it off to friends and watch them suffer from frustration and confusion, or try to bear the burden yourself. Honestly, you will probably regret it—but you can’t know until you play it.
