Trap Shrine is a kinetic Visual Novel centered around a newly indited chief priest tasked with overseeing a small temple. Said priest goes by the name of Masato and is joined by a childhood friend/shrine maiden called Mishiro. The game starts us off right in the thick of it as Mishiro is trying to suplex a fox deity known as Yui, which is in fact the very same god they are supposed to be worshipping. After some moments of this entertaining chaos, Trap Shrine slams the breaks and rewinds time to show us how things got like this, as well as to properly introduce the characters.
That opening scene occurs pretty late into the game. While it does grab your attention immediately, it did feel narratively unnecessary and with no real payoff to its inclusion at the start, since your two love interests are at each other’s throat from the second they glance at each other. It is hardly a big deal, however. Trap Shrine is largely a combination of Slice of Life and Comedy as our cast of characters live carefree days until a small conflict brews up towards the end. It is the type of narrative experience you should play for the journey and character chemistry, not the destination. More so given there are no choices to make or paths to choose since this is a kinetic visual novel.
If you so much as glanced at the store page, you’ve noticed that the very first sentence is “The Goddess was a crossdresser?!”. The name Trap Shrine for this title was no mistake, in case you are not aware of the term ‘trap’ and that hasn’t already tipped you off that these cute waifus are in fact male. I was actually expecting a meme game going into this. To my surprise, its humor was more refined than I was lead to believe given how many times they mentioned cross-dressing on the store page. The humor here is much more than a one-note joke about traps and does stand on its own without this unique premise. It is well-aware of how silly some of its concepts can be at times, often going the tongue in cheek route to give it a playful vibe that suits the lighthearted theme very well without overusing it.
The duration of the story will largely revolve around Masato’s interactions with the three main characters. All three of them are fully voice acted and brilliantly at that. The actors they have chosen are quite talented, bringing plenty of emotion and filling their character’s role perfectly. From the soft-spoken shrine maiden Mishiro, to the slightly pompous fox goddess Yui, their performance adds a ton to the experience. It saw me not mashing the key to skip dialogue once I’ve read it and they haven’t finished talking, like I usually would. Your character is not voice acted sadly. Hearing his reactions to the brutal rivalry as they try to win his heart would have been hilarious and further cemented him as his own character.
Finally, for the final character, there is the divine dog guardian of the temple known as Hinowa. She is pretty much just a joke character or comic relief at the best of times. Hinowa is painfully generic, with her whole shtick being she’s always hungry and is just kinda there. I wouldn’t call the fox goddess a good character either, yet her personality and Mishiro’s play very well off each other, as well as having some motive to being there or taking the actions she does. Mishiro is far and away the most interesting of the three. Her calm demeanor amplifies those moments when she goes full yandere and you begin to wonder if this is about to turn into a horror game.
Individually, the cast is nothing to write home about. It’s their interactions and the strong comedic writing that will keep you around to see what happens next. At around four hours of length, it won’t outstay its welcome. It can seem to drag on a bit towards the middle as their relationships and growth halt to a standstill, but it ramps up as it reaches its finale to keep you glued to your screen. There is little reason to replay it given its completely linear nature, though you will unlock a gallery to view all of the CG artwork and a Replay to experience all of the sex scenes once again without having to go through the title again.
To access the sex scenes in the first place, you have to install an uncensor patch from the dev’s website. Trap Shrine is a good game in its own right, yet you will be missing out on a ton of content from a title already lacking in it. At ten US dollars, that makes it a much tougher sale for any prospecting buyers. Over half of the CGs are hentai and the sex scenes make up a sizable portion of the four-hour playtime. If you are not into male on male content, I’d strongly suggest waiting for a sale if the title interests you, as this is a fun experience regardless. Sex is nothing too graphic, though by the end of them you’ll be seeing huge amounts of semen and a very sexually confused priest that willingly falls penis first into traps then acts like he didn’t like it.
Joking aside, be extremely careful downloading this uncensor patch. There are three servers on the dev’s site on which to download it and the first that links to ‘suezou-net’ has a Trojan virus. The bottom two sources are fine, but under no circumstances should you click on the first. Moving on to a much less serious issue, this title will crash if you try to set it to fullscreen. The fix to this is to go into the folder where the game files are located and double click on the app called Settings. Once there, locate the fullscreen section and click on Change to automatically allow it to choose the best resolution & aspect ratio. After that, it should work perfectly fine and cease to crash. Why that option isn’t on by default or at least have the settings app accessible through Steam itself, I do not know.
On a more positive note, the English translation is well done for the most part. You will find that minor typos are a common occurrence though. These are single-letter misspellings mostly, yet happen enough to be slightly distracting. A quick additional proofreading of the script would go a long way as the punctuation and wording are already above average. Trap Shrine is definitely rough around the edges, no doubt. It’s comedy, great art, and interesting premise does outweigh its negatives, however. I had a blast and quite a few chuckles as I made my way through this short, but sweet tale of a priest trying to maintain his chastity and denying the well-known fact that dudes make the best girls. There is a demo on its Steam store page for you to try out. It can be easy to assume that the overwhelmingly positive reviews it has are simply people memeing, which some are, yet there is honestly an amusing and worthwhile visual novel to be found here.
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