Soul Trapper is an interesting new App Store game from Realtime Audio Adventures. What makes this application stand out from the pack is that it is more of a "chose your own adventure" audio book than a pure game.

Soul Trapper's story line is pure pulp noir as it follows the exploits of Kane Pryce, a 27 year old drifter who hunts down and dispatches ghosts to the after-life with the aid of his Soul Trapper. The story line has all the main plot vehicles of a 40's/50's detective novel; a one-man army "hero", a beautiful love interest and seemingly impossible obstacles to overcome. While the story starts slow, it builds fairly quickly and I was hooked in from about Chapter 3 onward.

The gaming portion of the application is somewhat limited. While you can direct Kane to do certain actions (using arrows on the touch screen), the story doesn't move on until you pick the correct option. As such, there aren't alternate story lines and you really can't "die" (as you could in the early computer adventure games). As Soul Trapper is truly an "audio adventure", there really isn't much in the line of visuals, outside of a different image for each of the 23 chapters. The audio though is quite rich and it ranges from vocals narratives from the different characters (almost like a radio drama) to providing clues for many of the game vignettes.

As a book, I really enjoyed this application and it took me about four hours to finish the story. Looking strictly at the game functionality, this is probably not an application for hard-core gamers. The game play is pretty limited and it seems unlikely that you would come back to the application for the games once you have completed the story line.

As a fan of the pulp noir style of writing, I'm looking forward to hearing Episode 2.

Links:
Soul Trapper (Apple App Store)