Trapped is a first person dungeon crawler made in RPG Maker VX Ace. That alone made me want to check it out, since I'd never played a first person RPG Maker game before. Fortunately, there's more to recommend the game than just that.

Story:
You are Silas (or whatever you name him), an elf who was thrown into the dungeon of Ravenstein for unspecified crimes, and you have to find a way out, battling monsters and other prisoners along the way. That's about it. There's not much expository text, though what little there is is well written. If you're hoping for an epic story or a psychological thriller or, really, anything other than an excuse to explore a dungeon, you won't find it here. On the other hand, you won't be constantly interrupted by cutscenes or bombarded with bad jokes, either.

Gameplay:
You navigate the dungeon in first person, limited to 90 degree turns and steps that cover a full tile at once. The dungeon layout isn't really too complex, and there's a minimap, but because of the perspective it's still quite possible to get lost, although it doesn't take long to get your bearings if you do.

There are enemies in the dungeon. All of them are visible and stationary, and you can always escape from battle with guaranteed success, so you'll never have to fight unprepared, but many enemies block paths you have to take, so you will have to fight them eventually. Combat is turn based. Every attack made by you or the enemy deals a fixed amount of damage, and we're talking small numbers here. Normal attacks do 1 damage, and nothing does more than 3, although a few attacks can hit multiple times. Enemies with abilities will always use them on fixed turn counts, and you can always act before the enemy. You have a Focus ability that lets you see the enemies' HP, and once you've focused on an enemy, any future encounters with enemies of the same type will show their HP from the start of combat. At first, all you can do is attack, heal with items and hope for the best, but once you start learning bow skills, the system gets pretty interesting.

The main challenge in Trapped is resource management. There's no free healing, just items to refill your HP and arrow supply. You can find these in treasure chests, and enemies drop them as well, but generally you'll lose more than you gain by fighting. All of the items restore different fixed amounts that will often leave you at awkward numbers, forcing you to choose between, say, drinking a beer to heal 2 HP when you're only missing 1 or going into the next fight below full health. You can puzzle out an optimal strategy for each fight assuming you have unlimited arrows, but since they are in fact quite limited, you might want to leave an enemy alive for a couple of extra rounds and finish them off with normal attacks, saving some arrows at the cost of health. On top of that, some of your bow skills strike random targets, so you have to plan for every possibility when fighting multiple enemies. Despite, or maybe because of, the battle system's simplicity, the actual battles are balanced to be challenging, but never unfair, and push you to use every option available. That's the kind of design I like.

There are paths in the dungeon that have to be opened by flipping switches and doors that have to be unlocked, some with lockpicks and others with color-coded keys. Lock picking is a timing minigame where your cursor goes back and forth on a line and you have to stop it over the green section; failure means one of your lockpicks breaks. While I didn't mind this minigame, it didn't add much to the experience, either. It would be more interesting if it interacted with the resources used in combat, like if you had to use your arrows as lockpicks and risk breaking them, or if failing triggered a trap that damaged you. As it is, it's just a way to get softlocked if you mess up the timing too much, though to be fair, I don't actually know whether it's possible to get softlocked this way. The game is generous with lockpicks, and I had a dozen or so left over at the end.

Graphics & sound:
The dungeon looks simple, but the first person perspective is cool to see and it animates smoothly, so it looks nice in motion. The tiles used for the dungeon walls are probably RTP, but I didn't recognize them when seeing them "up close" like this. The enemies and battle animations are RTP, and that works just fine for a game with a classic RPG feel like this.

The sound effects are RTP and are, again, totally fine for this kind of game. For music, there's one ambient theme for the dungeon and another, faster paced one for combat, and fights are short enough and frequent enough that you won't hear either one for too long at a time. Like everything else in Trapped, the music works but doesn't stand out, letting you focus on the gameplay.

Overall:
At around an hour long, Trapped is a nice little game that's worth playing if you like short, gameplay-driven RPGs.