2015 was NeocoreGames’ most prolific year: the studio released both The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing III and The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing: Final Cut a few months apart. But earlier that year another game was coming out of the company’s first Early Access experiment: Deathtrap!

So, where does Deathtrap come from?

If you remember, The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing had a neat minigame in which you could defend the Lair against intruding monsters by setting traps. „Around that time tower defense games were very popular,” explains producer István Eőry. „We saw that the players liked it and we started thinking about expanding it within the world of Van Helsing.”

Narrative designer Viktor Juhász remembers those early days: „It was supposed to tie into the narrative of Van Helsing, but then the game became a separate thing. Barely a few of the original lines made it into the game.” With a heavy emphasis on pure gameplay, Deathtrap was turned into a standalone spinoff, although it still connects to the Ink from the Van Helsing games. On consoles it was later re-titled as World of Van Helsing: Deathtrap to reflect this connection.

I’m going to break the fourth wall here, because I, writer of this post, joined the company just a few weeks before this game’s release. Among my first tasks was to write a blog post about tower defense games, basically, to research the topic. Little did they know I was already completely in love with the genre. Another one of my tasks was to play through Deathtrap, and I was like „There’s no way. This is fantastic!”

Alright, Deathtrap has an action-RPG character running around killing monsters, cool, but even cooler is that you can set various fantastical traps and towers to stop waves of monsters. This appealed to my arcade sensibilities. Level-based, but with meta-progression and leveling, 3-starring stages, all of it was completely mesmerizing... but very uncharacteristic of the studio’s output so far.
In fact, Deathtrap was an experimental game that used many assets and features from previous Van Helsing games, but the passion behind it is undeniable. Just by looking at the vault of concept art and the promotion videos it’s clear that both the development and the marketing was a fun, energetic process.

Even though Deathtrap had a smaller overall budget, it is still a very important game. First, Deathtrap was used to test the waters with an Early Access release, working closely with the community. This experience was invaluable for the path taken with later titles as well. Second, the studio started to take an interest in User Generated Content, to see what it demands from the developers, to evaluate pros and cons. Deathtrap comes with a map editor, so players could set up all kinds of intricate challenges way after they have 100%’d the campaign.

The three games in The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing trilogy and Deathtrap were already ambitious games for a small studio, but they proved essential steps before attempting something much greater – NeocoreGames has made a deal with Games Workshop to produce an action-RPG in the Warhammer 40,000 universe.

Not long after Deathtrap’s release the studio finally announced Warhammer 40,000: Inquisitor – Martyr, and the future was looking bright. But as usual, this is a story for a later day.