Captivity

(more spoilers than usual below)

Captivity is a parser-based puzzlefest in which you play the role of a young woman captured by the local Duke. His plan is to, well, rape you. You’re locked in the tower when the game begins, and your goal is to escape.

We have here a rather heavy and emotionally-laden premise. The author is well aware of this and includes a content warning in the blurb stating that the game’s tone is “light-hearted and whimsical” and “the story is not explicit with respect to the trauma.” There is certainly nothing explicit in here, but I have to disagree about Captivity being light-hearted or whimsical. There are some events in the game that could be described as amusing, but you’ll end up committing murder by the end. And I, for one, did not feel guilty about doing so. The most whimsical thing about the game that I can see is its cover art, which features bright colors and a yellow title. This would be a fine cover for a light-hearted game with a child protagonist, but not the game I just played. All in all, I think Captivity somewhat misrepresents itself to its own detriment: I found its tone to be more appropriate to its subject matter than its blurb or cover art would indicate.

Captivity is a puzzlefest, though, so let’s talk about the puzzles. These are pretty strong. As an example, the first two each require you to get through a locked door, but you have to do something very different with the two doors. This is the sign of an experienced author (as Aikin is) playing with the IF locked-door puzzle cliché. As for the other puzzles, they often require understanding the characters living in the Duke’s castle: their motivations, loves, and fears. That’s solid character-driven puzzle design.

In some respects the implementation is quite strong. The game understands certain unusual verbs such as “compliment,” “admire,” and “unhook.” It also autocorrected several of my typos with what I had intended to type! For example, at one point I typed OKPEN IT by mistake. The game autocorrected that to OPEN IT and proceeded to open the object in question. To see the game respond to what I meant rather than what I had actually typed was a great delight. (Unfortunately, the autocorrection did sometimes make mistakes itself, but the first few times it worked were a joy to see.) However, as the game went on I ran into a few logical errors, such as being able to talk to characters about objects or other characters I hadn’t met yet, being told that a certain character was removing his glasses when I was actually holding them, and a room description stating that a certain object was attached to the ceiling when I had just caused it not to be attached anymore. In general, the implementation seemed to be stronger near the beginning of the game than near the end (which, to be fair, is not that unusual).

Captivity is quite forgiving: If you take an action that would cause you to lock yourself out of victory, the game will tell you – in the author’s voice, no less – and automatically undo the action you just made. In one instance it even put the object that I needed in my inventory. I appreciate not getting stuck and being forced to restart, but having the author step in to communicate this to the player breaks the sense of immersion in the game world. Perhaps a better approach would have been to signal somehow to the player that the action is a bad choice.

Overall, I found Captivity to be a pretty good puzzlefest. The puzzles are probably its strongest feature (which is great for me – I love a good puzzle game), and the writing is solid, too. Implementation-wise, the game has some nice touches but could have used a little more testing. I fear, though, that Captivity might lose some players because it misrepresents itself somewhat with respect to its subject matter, and that’s a shame: Captivity is a good game, and it deserves to be played.