The surprisingly long-running Deception franchise is held together by a core idea: Traps are fun. The entire series is effectively built around a puzzle game atmosphere where you create elaborate Rube Goldberg mechanical monstrosities to kill attackers. Deception IV: The Nightmare Princess is an updated port of Deception IV: Blood Ties, which was released for the PS3 and Vita last year. It's more akin to the Xtreme Legends packs for Dynasty Warriors than a sequel, so it's a mixed bag for fans of the original version.

The Nightmare Princess has two stories. The first follows Laegrinna, a soul-daughter of the devil who is sent to the mortal world to find the pieces of an ancient ritual that bound the devil. They are now held by the descendants of the legendary heroes who stopped the evil lord. The second story, which is new to The Nightmare Princess, follows Velguirie, the titular princess. She exists in the realm of dreams and torments humans so she can offer their terrified souls to the dark lord. Both sets of princesses must find a way to use their dark powers to resurrect their creator.

The plot is barely there and isn't particularly engaging. The characters don't have a ton of personality. Velguirie is more interesting than Laegrinna in that she seems to legitimately enjoy her dark work, but Laegrinna is pretty dull, and any humor comes from her trio of demonic sidekicks. Velguirie's stages consist of unconnected "dreams," mostly serving as an excuse for lots of killing with traps.

In The Nightmare Princess, you're effectively in charge of controlling the evil dungeon by moving your heroine around the castle. Humans spawn in and home in on you. Laegrinna can cast defensive spells while Velguirie can do some of that and has the ability to kick, which allows her to knock back enemies to stomp them on the ground. Neither is capable of fighting their opponents directly, so you have to set traps around your castle and lure enemies into them.

You have three kinds of traps in the game: elaborate, humiliating and sadistic. Elaborate traps do less damage but offer great control over enemies. They can bind them in place or springboard them across the map. Humiliating traps do minimal damage but tend to have strong incapacitating effects. Sadistic traps do a lot of upfront damage and are brutal and violent, like swinging axes or piercing lances. You're encouraged to use a combination of traps — a trap chain — to receive experience points for each trap type.

Trap chains are your primary method of attacking in The Nightmare Princess. For example, youcan set up a bear trap. Once the enemy wanders into it, you can hit him with a giant ax that sends him flying across the room into a springboard and slams him against a wall, allowing you to activate the spikes there for maximum damage. If you wanted to get more complex, you can begin with the springboard, launch enemies into a waiting trap that causes them to stumble into the path of a robotic monster that's wandering the stage. Once that has pounded them, you can finish them off by dropping a boulder on a nearby slope so it rolls over them. The trap system is very free-form and includes traps you place yourself and stage traps, which you can manually activate, so you have a lot of flexibility. You're sometimes challenged to specific tasks, but they tend to be simple stuff that you can work into existing traps.

This gets more complex as enemy immunities are introduced. There are two types of enemy immunities: resistance and invulnerability. Enemies who resist certain trap types can't be caught in them by default. The only way to make those traps work on them is to include them as part of a trap chain. If an enemy resists electricity, you can't shock them, but you can electrify them him a chain attack. More complex is invulnerability. Enemies who are armored completely resist certain attacks and take reduced damage from all other attacks. To get past this, you need an Armor Break. Most armored enemies have one or more weaknesses. Hit an enemy with a trap that corresponds to his weakness, and you get a special trigger. It's a lot of work and sometimes isn't worth it, but it's satisfying when a powerful foe becomes a wimp.

The Nightmare Princess is fun for a good while. The freedom and flexibility in setting up complex in-depth trap chains is distinctive to the Deception series and works well here. It is a touch more simplified to make it instantly accessible. From the moment you start the game, you can set up absurd mazes that humiliate enemies in increasingly ridiculous ways. There's nothing as fun as defeating a crazy JRPG-style hero by forcing him to slip on a banana peel and fall into a wall full of spikes.

However, there is one core problem: It's repetitive. The game uses the requests from your demonic cohorts to encourage you to change things up, but at the end of the day, you're placing a lot of similar traps in similar places for similar effects. The variety of traps helps, but your enjoyment strongly depends on how much fun you have setting up increasingly complex trap chains. The game gives you tons of time and tools to do that, but it's front-loaded. Enemy configurations get more complex and difficult, but the acts you perform start to feel very similar.

There are also some wonky difficulty spurts. Several of the bosses just aren't fun to fight, especially those with ranged weaponry. Generally, ranged foes are so immobile that they're helpless or frustrating. Sometimes, you get annoying configurations of enemies that require specific trap chains or slow, tedious repetition of the same chain over and over again. Since one of the game's strengths is its flexibility and freedom, the repetition works against it. The game offers you the ability to customize and create enemies to fight, but this isn't particularly engaging because the customization tools are limited, which only underscores the game's repetitive elements.

There's a clear set of upgrades. Laegrinna can unlock new traps by gaining experience points and spending in-game currency, so she can unlock more traps and special bonus abilities, such as a dodge roll or a slowing spell. Velguirie has to complete special challenges to unlock new bonuses. Of the two, I prefer Velguirie because it requires you to think about how to complete a mission. There are also bonus mission modes, if you haven't gotten your fill of trap-murder by the end of the two storylines.

One other problem with The Nightmare Princess is the price tag. The new Velguirie missions are fun for a while, if just for the ability to kick your foe in the face to set up more complex chains, but they're obviously way lower budget than the already low-budget main game. The title runs at a silky-smooth frame rate, but the character models look poor even for a PS3 game. For the minimal upgrades, $50 seems extremely high. It's obviously the go-to version if you've never played the game before, but unless you're an extremely die-hard fan, Blood Ties probably sated your thirst.

Deception IV: The Nightmare Princess is a surprisingly sadistic guilty pleasure. It's tough to match the satisfaction of seeing a well-planned trap chain go off. Unfortunately, the fun lasts about as long as that satisfaction does. If you can spend hours setting up deathtraps for helpless humans, then you'll have tons of fun with The Nightmare Princess. However, longtime fans may not find enough extra content in this version for it to be worth the money. This is a solid entry point to the franchise, but only the most hardcore should double-dip with the last-gen version.

Score: 7.5/10