Captured Review

The Hideo Kojima-helmed PT has a lot to answer for. That’s right, the man that coined the term ‘Transfarring’ put together a demo where the player followed a looping corridor that changed each time and grew ever more disquieting.

It was an unnerving masterpiece, all the more surprising in its inception as it was made by a guy that put women in bikinis and said it was so they could breathe through their skin.

As a result it has spawned a lot of imitators int he years since. I’ve not really dug into them because there hasn’t been much cause to do so. Either they have looked like exact replicas, or looked too cheap to even be worthy of the comparison.

Captured triggered more curiosity in me; it certainly was another ‘Loop-alike’ but the early press made it look like it had its own aesthetic.

The game starts off with the protagonist playing with their portable camcorder in their room where they’ve seen something weird in the dark above their cupboard. He does a tour of the house only to discover a loop, where all the windows have disappeared. There are also now anomalies in the house – these can be an upside down piece of furniture, or a glowing room – and it is on you, the player, to catalogue them as a means of escaping. Catalogue 13 of these and the game ends.

There are a few things that complicate this target.

First is that the anomalies need to be correctly categorised from a list of possible options. A miscategorised anomaly will not be detected until the end of the loop, and at that point the count will reset and force the player to start again.

The second is that there are roaming monsters that are randomly placed through the run that will murder the player. Similar to Amnesia these creatures have different triggers. Some will detect noise (while running), others react to light, and so on. It is down to the player to figure out how to deal with them – some cases it can be possible to get around them, but others will need coaxing into a room to be locked in.

It makes for a tense ride, where you are trying to get through each loop without  getting caught, but going slow enough to get the details right so that the anomaly counter doesn’t reset.

This is probably one of the best versions of this style of game I’ve played (which isn’t many as I am a bit of scaredy cat) and it is helped by the visual style. Most of the level is bathed in a blue hue, reminiscent of the afterglow of a static TV, and it feels like it takes a lot of its inspiration from the low-budget-but-with-a-ton-of-style film Skinamarink. It is a good visual inspiration as the long drawn out shadows make it look like everything is a threat, and the hues support the theme of the mundane turned terrifying.

It is fairly short experience, but the difficulty settings give you the option to make it more challenging (or you can turn the monsters off entirely to just soak up the environment) . But at the price point, this game is unassailable as a purchase recommendation.

Conclusion

Captured is an excellent little game that takes its inspiration the best thing Hideo Kojima has ever made but has enough of its own genetics to justify exploring.