Video Game / Double Switch

Eddie: Hey... Hi. My name is Eddie. I need your help. This is my building, and since the neighborhood really sucks, I built all these traps and security systems, to protect the people who live here. The problem is, some bonehead locked me in the basement, and cut off my controls. But, see, they forgot about the phone lines, which is how I got you in. Now you can protect the tenants, and get me outta here. You and me are friends, right? You gotta help me...

An adventure Interactive Movie video game produced by Digital Pictures and released in 1993 for Sega CD, 1994 for Sega Saturn, and 1995 for PC. It was re-released for iOS and Android in 2016 by Flash Film Works. Screaming Villains, alongside Flash Film Works, and Limited Run Games released a 25th Anniversary Edition of the game on December 13th 2018 for Steam and PlayStation 4, and on October 5th 2019 for Nintendo Switch. The game has a similar format to their earlier game, Night Trap.

You play as an anonymous Internet user whose device suddenly gains access to the security system of the Edward Arms, a old Egyptian-themed American hotel. A young man named Eddie (Corey Haim) introduces himself as the creator of the system, as well as the architect of an extensive array of booby traps designed to capture intruders. However, Eddie has been locked in the basement and cut off from the controls, so it falls to you to take over the Edward Arms' cameras and traps, and protect the tenants from a stream of invaders searching the hotel for something.

The gameplay improves from Night Trap in a few ways: there is a mini-map displaying where the guests and intruders are, removing the need to constantly switch between cameras; the trap timing and visual/audio cues are more lenient; and some enemies can use the traps against you, meaning that you have to disarm as well as arm traps.

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This Video Game contains examples of:

• All Part of the Show: At one point, a talent scout from a record company is sent to the audition of the rock band staying in the apartment building. Unfortunately the performance gets messed with by secret society members showing up whom you then have to trap before they can attack the lead singer; if you do trap the goons, the talent scout thinks this was part of the act and he promises to recruit the band, so the audition succeeds.
• Ancient Egypt: The theme for the whole building, even down to the manager's wardrobe.
• Ancient Order of Protectors: The Society of the Scroll and Key, whose members show up about halfway through the game, are there to recover an ancient artifact Elizabeth's father stole.
• Ash Face: Eddie sports this look after going through a few traps near the end of the game.
• Ax-Crazy: Eddie is revealed to be this.
• Battle Discretion Shot: Perhaps as a response to the public backlash against Night Trap, the game avoids showing any violence against civilian characters, usually cutting away just as they are hustled off-screen by an enemy. One character is choked to death by having his shoulders lightly squeezed. And the traps themselves are played more for Slapstick than grievous bodily harm.
• Benevolent Architecture: Eddie tells you at the beginning that he designed the entire security system with traps around the apartment building, because "the neighbourhood really sucks", according to him. Later, Lyle the Handyman will set up one trap "that even Eddie doesn't know about": the phone line trap.
• Big Bad Ensemble: The gangsters, the secret society members, and Eddie.
• Big "NO!": Eddie yells this a few times when you trap him at the end of the game. Jeff has a couple of these as well if you accidentally trap him.
• Bitch in Sheep's Clothing: At first, Eddie appears to be a nice guy stuck in a bad situation. In reality, he's a violent sociopath who will stop at nothing to achieve his goals.
• Booby Trap: Most of the gameplay is using them to defeat attackers. Though there are also times when you have the chance to activate one but should hold off.
• Boss Rush: Slightly subverted, as there's only one last enemy to face in the final act, Eddie. First, you have to head to the basement to save Lyle from being trapped with the conveyor belt. Then, you head to Alex's room to save her and push Eddie into the now-electrified chair trap. You then go to the Grads room to protect Phoebe and the statue, and trap Eddie with the hands trap. Then, you go to the band room and trap him with the cage trap, and finally, get him with the basket trap in Brutus' room to finish the game off. Screw up at any point, and after a huge scolding from Lyle, you start back at the beginning of the act.
• But Thou Must!: To complete the first act of the game, you need the keypad codes that goons keep exposing to let Eddie out of the basement. Refusing or failing to do this is an automatic game over at the end of the act if you miss so much as one digit of four. But then you let Eddie out and it turns out he's the real Big Bad that stirs the rest of the plot. You have no way of preventing this whatsoever and must do so every playthrough.
• Child Supplants Parent: Eddie gives off very strong vibes of this, because he apparently wishes that his father was dead, and he loves his mother.
  Eddie (to Lyle): Hey, why don't you just shut up, alright?! Why don't you just get the hell out of our lives?!
  Lyle: Eddie, your mother and I are worried!!
  Eddie: Don't you talk about my mother, alright?! This is my building, MINE! If it wasn't for me, this place would be crater city! Now if you mess with me, you're gonna get it! Got it?!
  Lyle: Well, we'll see about that!
  Eddie (to the player): The old man just doesn't get it, does he?
• Cliffhanger: Eddie presumably snatches the Egyptian statue and causes the vault containing treasure to be sealed again. The ending seems to be a Sequel Hook, but no sequel has been made.
• Continuing is Painful: Lose at any point during an act, and you have to start that very same act all over again. Act 2 will especially be painful.
• Creator In-Joke: When Eddie's mother (played by Deborah Harry) meets the talent scout who comes to audition the band:
  I'm a singer! Torch songs, mostly.
• Destination Defenestration: One trap is an extending arm on a spinning column meant to knock people out the nearby window. Not anymore dangerous than any of the others, it would seem, since it gets used against Eddie before he shows up for more again soon.
• Dumb Muscle: Both Jeff and Brutus can be considered this. Jeff, while much nicer than Brutus, acts fairly childish through out the story. Brutus on the other hand is not as nice and will resort to intimidation and fists to distance himself from other tenants and the mobsters that are after him. But he also proves to be pretty dumb, with things like thinking a mummy trying to kill is an actual mummy and not someone in a costume.
• Elite Mooks: The Secret Society members that are after the statue. They're portrayed as dangerous and stealthy individuals. To make them even more difficult to trap, they can sometimes enter a room without triggering an audio cue, and the opportunity to trap them is much smaller. However a player can learn their patterns and still trap them fairly easily.
• Even Bad Men Love Their Mamas: Eddie loves his mother very much, possibly to Oedipus Complex levels.
• Evil All Along: It's eventually revealed that Eddie is seriously messed up in the head, and his parents locked him in the basement to keep him from hurting others.
• Featureless Protagonist: We never see that player character's face, and they have no lines of dialogue.
• Game-Over Man:
  • Eddie (played by Corey Haim) becomes this role for Act 1, and the first half of Act 2. Lyle the Handyman (played by R. Lee Ermey) takes over the role for the second half of Act 2, and all of Act 3.
  • Lyle is very effective in this role at that; when he berates you for screwing up, his tone of voice and his diction sounds very strongly like a father scolding you for having stupidly broken your mother's priceless china collection, or for misbehaving in school. Given what is revealed about Lyle later, this is deliberate on the game's part.
  Lyle: YOU THOUGHT THIS WAS JUST A GAME, DIDN'T YOU?! WELL, IT'S OVER FOR YOU!!
• G-Rated Sex: There's one scene where Lyle and Elizabeth have sex. You don't actually see it, but it is strongly implied to have occurred between them.
• Guide Dang It!: If you think it's possible to beat all three acts of this game first time in, you're dead wrong. Like Night Trap, the intruders appear at random times, and there are events where you have to rescue a character, but unlike the aforementioned, you also have to look out for code numbers in Act 1, watch for special traps to unlock in Act 2, and disarm the traps set by a serial killer in the same act. So, yeah. It's impossible to beat this game first time in.
• Harmless Electrocution: Lyle overloads the security system in the final act, electrifying all of the "hidden" traps. Eddie falls into them one after another, but always shows up again pretty much unhurt a few minutes later.
• Hero Antagonist: Lyle the Handyman. In the beginning, Eddie tells you to trap him, because he's screwed everything up for him. However, after you set Eddie free, Lyle is revealed to be Eddie's dad, and he locked him in the basement to protect the tenants from his psychotic rampage. He creates special traps that you need to listen to, as these are required to trap Eddie.
• Hoist by His Own Petard: In the second and third act, Eddie's security system is used against him.
• Jerkass: Eddie, while being friendly enough throughout Act 1, he tends to be condescending and hateful, if you mess up and get a game over. His comments range from being snarky to downright awful. This aspect of his personality becomes more apparent in later acts.
  Eddie: You thought Luigi was Brutus's friend...? He doesn't have any friends... Aaaand neither do you.
• I Should Have Done This Years Ago: Lyle says this in Act 3 as he proceeds to smash and destroy Eddie's security system control deck with a sledgehammer.
• Interface Spoiler: The interface on the Sega CD, Sega Saturn, and PC versions have little colored dots to determine if said dot is a tenant/Eddie (Green), members of a secret society (Red), or mobsters/Lyle (Yellow). The 2016 iOS/Android rerelease, and the 25th Anniversary Edition, on the other hand, change the interface to make it feel more like a security system, with footage of what's going on while you're focused on another room.^note That said, on the 25th Anniversary Edition, you can choose to play the game using either the Sega CD, Sega Saturn, PC, or "modern" interfaces.
• Intrepid Reporter: Alex is very much this. She ends up getting a story, and then some!
• Luke, I Am Your Father: Lyle the Handyman is Eddie's father, and Elizabeth, the apartment manager, is Eddie's mother.
• MacGuffin: The Statue of Isix.
• Madwoman in the Attic: It is revealed in the game that Eddie was locked in the apartment building basement by his own father, who was just trying to protect people from Eddie.
• Mama Didn't Raise No Criminal:
  • Eddie's mother knows that her son is insane. However, she is strongly in denial over it and even acts as his accomplice at one point.
  • Specifically, at one point she presses a button that electronically locks the lobby doors shut so the "Grads" can't simply exit the building to escape from Eddie.
• Meaningful Name: "Brutus" is a Latin name that can be interpreted as "brute" or "stupid". The character himself proves to be pretty stupid in some ways.
• Mooks: The Thugs that are after Brutus. Not only are they portrayed as bumbling and comical, but they also always trigger an audio cue when they enter a room and they also tend to require less reaction time from the players to trap them.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: The first half or so of the game involves figuring out how to help Eddie escape from the basement. Then you do, and it turns out he's the villain...
• Nintendo Hard: The game is much harder than Night Trap.
• Nonstandard Game Over: Eddie reappears in the basement in Act 2 for a little talk with the player, and to also switch the player off from his controls. He appears again in the storage room to yank the cords out of the phone box, severing the player out of the security system. And if you don't save Lyle in the basement in Act 3, Eddie turns the player off.
• Press Start to Game Over: Just like its older brother Night Trap, if you stay idle on the intro cinematic, you automatically get a Game Over for just doing nothing. Unlike Night Trap, this was not removed for the 25th Anniversary Edition.
• Properly Paranoid: Eddie set up traps all the building out of apparent paranoia. The scary thing is that he is both right and wrong. He is right because there are Mafia goons as well as secret society members who start running loose in the building. He is wrong because he is dangerously insane and wants an Egyptian statue that everyone is after.
• Psychopathic Manchild: Eddie seems to be this.
  Eddie: Oh, you think you've won, huh?! Think you can just take control of my building, my traps?! Forget about it! NO ONE'S GONNA LEAVE THIS BUILDING ALIVE, NO ONE!!!
• Sadly Mythtaken: It probably doesn't even need to be said, but there wasn't an Egyptian god named Isix who was the guard of the portal to the afterlife.
• "Scooby-Doo" Hoax: Roughly around the middle of the game, an Egyptian mummy runs around trying to trap and/or kill people. It's Eddie in disguise, and he dressed up like one so that he could get an Egyptian statue without anyone figuring out it was him.
• Stating the Simple Solution: At the end of the game, Lyle has Eddie at his mercy, and he asks everyone what should be done with the guy. Brutus says "Nail him!" However, Lyle ends up activating a trap that sends Eddie flying around a couple of times, and then through a Trap Door, supposedly sending him back to the basement.
• Stalker with a Crush: Eddie seems to have a crush on Alex. However, this is subverted after Alex tells him about the story she's writing about the Edward Arms.
• Stock Footage: Some of the intruder scenes with the mobsters and secret society members are reused for the sake of gameplay, which sometimes gets a little odd when you see the same person in different rooms at the same time.
• Take That!: "You tell Luigi and Mario their days are numbered!" ^note  For context, Brutus is actually talking about a pair of mob bosses he owes money. The reference is easy to pick out, of course, and there were a fair number of developers at the time who thought FMV games like this were the wave of the future.
• Token Good Teammate: Lyle helps out the player in Act 2 by revealing secret traps you didn't have access to before, to use them to trap a serial killer, a.k.a. Eddie. After you help Lyle in Act 3, he helps out one more time by overloading the security system, electrifying the secret traps.
• Trap Door: A number of the traps are essentially this, but some of them are a little more complex than that.
• Trial-and-Error Gameplay: Watching the rocking party early in the game? Whoops, you either let Alex get caught by a mobster or another one flipped the power switch that ends the game immediately, and a third one opens a crucial keypad to observe as soon as the party ends. This is in the first two minutes. In the old versions, the only way you even had a way of knowing any of these were about to happen or figure what to do was to find the screens that had red or yellow dots and figure how to counter them if necessary, keeping track of the safety of the green dots and especially watching Lyle and the Mummy/Eddie at every opportunity, and the game is filled to the brim with tossing you towards a Game Over if you don't know what's going to happen ahead of time. All of this with six screens and a lobby to manage simultaneously, as well as the game getting more difficult with each passing Act of three and the basement to manage once Eddie escapes.
  • This goes double for the Lock code, as you need to be watching when they're input as well or game over at the end of Act 1. But the only way to tell that someone's going to open a keypad so you can see part of the code is to know they're going to open it - and since the game throws in plenty of filler mobsters you can completely ignore, you never know when the keycodes pop up until it's too late! It's an especially evil dick move in that the second and third digits are basically being opened at the same time with only a second's gap; since the codes come and go so fast, this means you have to see the second digit, and then immediately swap over to the third or else you're screwed.
  • Meanwhile, Act 2 immediately flips this around by forcing you to have to watch Lyle not to trap him, but instead witness him setting up secret traps to use against Eddie and figuring out that the mysterious trap-activating Mummy needs to be countered, as well as figuring out that Eddie is trying to antagonize the cast and needs to be trapped at every possible opportunity. The game doesn't explain any of this, naturally - you just have to get a few game overs to figure out how it works.
  • The Updated Re-release added an option to have all the screens happen simultaneously so that you really can see everything going on at once - but now you have no way of sizing up a threat without seeing it personally. This does alleviate part of the keypad problem though, in that you can personally see when someone's going for one now instead of having to memorize a guesstimate.
• Unwinnable: In the intro to the game, Eddie tells you to trap Lyle, the handyman, whenever you can. However, in the second act, trapping Lyle will make you lose access to new, secret traps that you absolutely need to beat the game.
• What the Hell, Hero?: Both Eddie and Lyle, in their warning/Game Over scenes, are quick to call you out on either not trapping the intruders, leave the tenants in danger, trap the tenants, letting one of the intruders shut off the power box in the storage room, etc.
  Eddie: Hey pal, you're here to PROTECT the tenants, not TRAP them! No offense, but you're an idiot, and I can't tolerate raging idiots! You're gone.
  Lyle: Whose side are you on, anyway!? You're outta here!
• Video Game Cruelty Potential: The player has opportunities to trap some of the tenants. Likewise, you can just let the tenants get trapped, or killed, by The Mummy/Eddie. However, Eddie (Lyle in Act 2 and 3) will be quick to give you a warning to not do that again, or just straight up give you a Game Over.
• Villain Protagonist: Eddie is revealed to be this later on.
• You Have Outlived Your Usefulness: Early on, Eddie needs your help to escape the basement he's trapped in. After you free him, he goes on a rampage, and when he realizes that you are thwarting him, he will try to cut off your connection to the security system, and you will have to stop him from doing so.

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