Captive

About Captive

Captive (1990) is a science fiction Dungeon Master-style RPG in which an amnesiac prisoner remotely controls four droids to raid alien bases and break himself out of a space prison.

Captive in Depth

Trill is found guilty of a crime he did not commit and sentenced to 250 years in a cryogenic space prison. He wakes 248 years later with no memory of who or where he is, or why he was imprisoned, and in a corner of his cell finds a briefcase computer that controls four droids aboard a spaceship. Using them, he must find and free himself. The droids fly between planets in a vector-graphics space interface, land by capsule, find each base's entrance and explore its dungeons of puzzles and alien and robotic enemies. In each base they recover space probes that reveal the next base and destroy the generators powering the prison's force field, then escape before the base collapses.

A full mission is ten bases followed by the space station, where the player can free Trill and end the game or let him be recaptured and start a new mission. Shops sell, buy and repair weapons, ammunition and body parts, as each droid's head, chest, arms, hands, legs and feet can be upgraded individually, along with batteries, remote cameras, optics and devscapes. Front droids attack on the flanks while those behind fire projectiles down the middle. Played in real time from a first-person view, it grows fast enough to demand quick reflexes and clever use of the environment, such as trapping enemies in doors or flooding sections to paralyse robots.

Making Captive

Antony Crowther created it with a procedural algorithm that built each planet, base and inhabitants from a numerical seed, so only one base had to be active in a saved game. Mindscape published it for the Amiga and Atari ST in 1990 and MS-DOS in 1992. Zzap! felt it shared Dungeon Master's drawbacks, such as little interaction, but praised a "well designed" world, imaginative plot and opponents and challenging puzzles "with many thrills and spills to keep you on the edge of your chair", and PC Format named it one of the 50 best computer games of all time in 1991.