YMMV / The Trapped Trilogy

• Angst? What Angst?:
  • At no point does the protagonist of Trapped show any alarm or hesitance upon discovering that his identity is actually that of a dangerous criminal, being all too willing to return to his old ways once his memories return.
  • Dialla survives an assassination attempt, and treats it with all the emotional weight of dropping her food.
  Mickey: What happened to you? Please tell me you're ok?
  Dialla: Let's just say I had a near-death experience.
  Mickey: Well, that sounds interesting. You should tell me about it sometime.
  Dialla: Stop teasing me, you goofball!
• Anvilicious: The Christian aspect of the game. It ultimately has no impact on the plot, but every game in the trilogy has a bible or bible quotes shoehorned into it.
• Awesome Music: It's one of the strong points of the trilogy. David Orr made the main theme and intro music for the games, and it's BEAUTIFUL. Also, the music in the shotgun duel in Escape is very good.
• The Chris Carter Effect: Each successive game does nothing but make the plot even more complicated than it has to be.
• Fridge Logic:
  • How did Dialla become a police detective in the first place if she's the leader of Armor Gamsees? Likely, the intention was that Mickey quit the gang and took her with him, after which she lost her memory, but the story never tells us how she became a detective afterwards. A newspaper does claim she's one, but it's never specified how.
  • Considering McNeely's amnesia screwed up his own operation in Trapped, why would the rest of the gang still follow him after that? Hell, why accept a guy who's known to suffer from amnesia as the leader in the first place?
  • When Mickey's body is found with his jacket back on it in Escape, it has his large Bible. Why didn't Dialla notice it in Pursuit when she was looting his body? Furthermore, why didn't it protect him from getting shot like it did with Dan earlier?
  • The blatant railroading in Escape leads to this: For some reason, McNeely put the keycard renewal inside a cell, and for some reason, Jason objects if you try to go inside. The sad thing is that both of these could have been avoided without changing the story simply by having Dialla refuse to leave without getting her watch back first.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: The sequence in Pursuit where Mickey Lee traps Diala inside her own car became even funnier when Car Escape used that exact premise for a whole Room Escape Game series.
• Magnificent Bastard: Daniel "Dan" McNeely is a charmingly smug, high-ranking member of the Armor Gamsees who seeks to become one of the world’s new gods. In Trapped, after Dan kills Benjamin Gruenbaum and raids his mansion alongside his beloved Dialla Reineheart, Dan and Dialla inject themselves with Gruenbaum's immorgamsics to gain immortality, which gives them both amnesia in the process. Through a series of puzzles, Dan is able to escape the mansion and remember his previous life, which he fully embraces. In Pursuit, Dan plants Mickey Lee into Dialla's life as her supposed friend in order to lure her to his sewer hideout, killing Mickey once his purpose has been fulfilled. In Escape, Dan manipulates Dialla into discovering her true identity as the leader of the Armor Gamsees, all as a way for her to rejoin him by his side. Dan remains calm and collected even when he's trapped inside a safe underneath the ocean, confidently planning his escape.
• Narm:
  • "Why do I feel so... TRAPPED?"
  • Any time Dialla speaks or does something nonsensical, especially after you learn that she's a detective.
  • "Oh, damn! I forgot Dialla." *Gunfire outside door.*
  • Mickey asks Dialla to describe how she was attacked by one of Dan's thugs, then it immediately cuts to afterwards without even a transition, making it look like he read her mind in a second.
  • Mickey's death and Dialla's melodramatic reaction to it. The fact that she casually loots his corpse immediately afterwards makes it better.
  • "Get in there, or I'll shoot you!"
  • "Did I mention I have a thing... FOR WOMEN?"
  • "This... is a CONVENIENCE STORE. I sell MILK... MAGAZINES... ciga-RETTES..."
    • "Why thank you young lady. I have no use for this BLOW-torch of mine. Here, take IT!"
  • Jason's death is quite possibly the biggest example of this in the entire trilogy. It's clearly meant to be dramatic, but the combination of Jason's bizarre accent, Dan calling him "Whitey" (Dan is also white, mind you) and the comically swift Bait-and-Switch Dan pulls with the pistol makes the scene more absurdly comedic than anything.
• Narm Charm: Even with all of the above, the game has its followers and fans. Also, the death of Mickey Lee and the suffering of Dialla can come across as this.
• Retroactive Recognition: Dialla’s voice actress is none other than Kira Buckland, who you likely know as being the voice of 2B in NieR: Automata or Jolyne Cujoh in JoJo's Bizarre Adventure.
• So Bad, It's Good: Depending on who you ask, the game has terrible, illogical puzzles; a plot poorly held together; bizarre interfaces that change from game to game; over the top voice acting; Christian references shoehorned in everywhere... and yet it makes it work. Part of it comes from the character design, the relationships between the main characters, or the Narm Charm mentioned above.
• Took the Bad Film Seriously: The voice actors for Dialla and Dan are both genuinely good and have since gone on to become highly acclaimed voice actors in their own right, to the point that both their presence and the committed quality of their performances seem somewhat out of place in the context of a series of Flash games like these. Admittedly, though, both of them got their starts in the trenches of online Flash animation and can thus be found all over the place in plenty of bizarre and offbeat projects not too dissimilar from this series.

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