You’re locked inside your house. Something isn’t right. All the lights are gone and the corridor loops around in circles. Something resides just in the corner of your eye chasing you and you realise it’s too late. You’ve been Captured!
Captured hides its horror within its mundane surroundings and delivers an otherworldly horror experience. At its heart, Captured is a spot-the-difference game brought to popularity by games such as Observation Report and Platform 8 where you’re tasked with spotting bizarre anomalies in otherwise ordinary environments.
You begin with a short cut-scene, seen through the lens of a video camera, operated by the person trying to document a strange occurrence happening in his room when the lights are turned off. When suddenly everything goes dark and he is pulled into another world.
While it seems like he’s still in his house all the windows and lights are missing and all the family photos are faceless. Moreover, when he walks to the front of the house the corridor loops to the back, trapping him in an endless cycle. This is where you gain control and now must navigate the house and escape. At least, that’s what you’ll try to do.
Shown through a first-person perspective, you see the game through the lens of a video camera and have only the beam of a flashlight to help. Each cycle of the house has a maximum of three anomalies to spot and record, which must be done over multiple cycles. These can range from just an extra or misplaced object to a completely deformed room.
To record these anomalies you must zoom in with your camera and then define the anomaly from a dropdown menu. If you complete a cycle without finding all of them or misdefining them, your total count will reset to zero. Find the required amount and you will be freed from the cycle and escape.
So it sounds easy right? Well on the easiest difficulty (which is just called safe) that’s all it is and to be honest is a perfect training mode as it lets you learn the normal layout of items without too much fear. I say “too much” because you do have a helper of sorts, a friendly entity who whispers in your ear and you can occasionally see peeking around a corner giving you a nice little surprise (sarcasm).
The first time you attempt to leave a cycle without finding everything they will ask if you are sure, which is a nice safety blanket, but only one time per run. Your camera also has a power meter which you must refill with batteries, but luckily the charge only goes down if you attempt to catalogue an anomaly.
As for the anomalies themselves, they are not obtuse as say “one item on a shelf is missing” but more like “the entire shelf is gone“. They are noticeable, and even if an item is missing there is a distortion where the item was, like a stain on the wall or the outline so Captured goes out of its way to help you.
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The true challenge lies in the later difficulties. While it doesn’t spring them all on you at once, you must complete the previous difficulty to unlock the next. Normal introduces the three “entities” (for lack of a better term) you must now contend with, as well as trying to document anomalies. Each cycle (apart from the first in my experience) can spawn one of the three entities you must deal with as well, failure to do so will restart your run. They are simple to deal with, in theory, but the sudden appearance, uncanny design and accompanying music sting can really throw you off your game.
Your helper will give you a hint of how to dispel them when you see them, but it can range from simply “avoiding looking at the entity” to “running and keeping a door between yourself and the scary thing“. This itself instils a different kind of fear as the controls for closing a door aren’t exactly precise and can lead to a mild panic.
Hard mode introduces a new mechanic; a sanity meter that will drain if you stay in a cycle for too long but will reset with a new cycle. Lose your sanity and this too will reset you. Paired with a higher total number of anomalies this is a challenge as you essentially now have a time limit to find and double-check anomalies, all the while entity appearances are now chipping away at your time. The final difficulty, Nightmare, turns everything up to eleven as sanity drops quicker, entities can spawn more frequently and the required amount is at its highest.
Although no era is specified, Captured does give an eighties vibe, with the video camera giving visual noise and v-sync distortions (I’m assuming this was an intentional effect) all culminating into an analogue/retro aesthetic. The house, while being basic, is a good canvas for the more otherworldly events that can occur. The anomalies look and sound unique and the entities that chase you have a suitably weird uncanny valley look to them.
While there is no music, the sound design is excellent. The silence is unironically deafening in Captured with your footsteps being your only constant. Every creak and squeak is amplified and a great use of 3D audio really gets you uneasy (especially with headphones). When things start getting freaky, the sound really kicks in with footsteps running at you, people whispering and water sloshing about but to name a few. We get some limited voice acting as well and it’s delivered fine.
Although we technically only get one cutscene, there is an underlying story that is told through immersive gameplay. Sometimes a television may be playing with a broadcast to listen to or another time I was transported to a forest with a radio with a news feed playing. Additionally, dolls of the three chasing entities could be found which give you the option to burn them. What this does is unconfirmed at the moment but what I initially thought it would do was remove that entity from this run. When that particular entity began to turn up constantly I began to suspect it may have angered it instead.
Captured isn’t a long game, and you will certainly beat the earlier difficulties with little effort. I am still tackling hard (my highest was 17/20) but there is a mix of feeling utter defeat from a failed attempt and the “just one more run” mentality. With 99 anomalies to find in total, 100% completion and story comprehension will also come down to RNG luck.
With obvious inspiration from the likes of P.T., Captured is a nice, if creepy little horror title. If you enjoy the “spot the anomaly” type of game or are completely new to the genre, I would still recommend you pick this up and have a go.
Developer: Puck Redflix
Publisher: Puck Games
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