O Captain! The Captain!

Another 2 weeks have elapsed and do you know what that means? Another set of free games on the Epic Games Store!

This time there was a game up called “The Captain.” I love science fiction. I love exploring space. I love indie games because they go towards a different path rather than trying to get to super-shiny, triple-A, first-person-shooter graphics. So, I figured I would give it a go. (And it was free! Who doesn’t like free?).

Disclaimer: I have not finished the game yet. The indicator says I only finished 9% of the game even though I thought to myself I’ve completed a significant chunk already.

Even up to this point only, I have seen so much of the game’s beauty.

“The Captain,” by Sysiac Games is a work of art that respects where it descended from.

Point-and-click adventures. Mystery movies. And of course Star Trek.

At first, I thought the game was a bit slow in the beginning (I thought it might have been another random game throw for the game store). The text appeared to be a bunch of fluff.

However, I stepped through some doors. I went through a lab. Boom! I soon learned that I was on a large 3-level ship! Then, the ship is actually larger than what the idle flight screen shows because you can access other places with the elevator.

I’m given a directive of obtaining 3 fuel cells spread across different planets. Sounds easy peasy. Can’t we just buy them?

The game said “No.” You’re going to work hard for these fuel cells and you’re going to get into adventures along the way.

I pressed the ship’s star map and made my way!

These first two levels, across two planets respectively, were already amazing on their own.

The first was a desert world.

I’ll try to avoid spoilers here, so...

Something funny and inconvenient happens once the player lands but before I realize the bad thing that happens to my lander I am in awe of the detailed pixel landscape. I see my space lander, a mountainous backdrop, a platform, and a lone worn-out building.

“The Captain” is very good at having a minimal amount of objects in each walkable scene but each object has a lot of story attached to it. The world feels lived in than versus say a rogue-like game that randomly generates its worlds.

I wish the character could be moved using WASD but the point-and-click system is fine and provides for suspense in the story events. Clicking my first steps on this barren planet, I make my way all the way east. I can’t move any more east so I enter the lone gray building. Just as the overworld is lone, the inside is just as lonesome but with someone in some kind of sleeping chamber and a computer module. The next parts of the story that ensue are hilarious or helpful depending on how you follow the puzzle.

The next memorable place is a “hidden” laboratory. The first charming detail I found out about this level is the landing pad scale. Since the laboratory is large in its in-game universe, the pixel scale of the captain avatar becomes two stacked color blocks (a 2 pixel column). Then I hop my avatar along the landing pad across a bridge to an immense opening into what looks like a huge loading bay. It reminds me of the “Men in Black” corporate entrance with the single attendant reading a newspaper yet when you take the elevator down you realize there’s many more levels and alien secrets underneath. When you press the nearby “activation” button, this old complex comes to whirring to life with great sound design and in-game lighting effects.

I take a look at the given digital map detailing the different rooms present at the lower levels. If horror movies have taught me anything it is that I can foresee that scary, murderous things will be down there, but I’m excited to find out! So I ride the elevator down and proceed to the first level down. Here, I pick up clues from two rooms that show us how busy some scientists were on their creations just before tragedy struck. Eventually, I pick up on some clues and delve deeper. Possible death awaits me and even some companions. However, I don’t think I completed this available mission as best as I could because I ended up getting amnesia and I could tell this was just the vanilla outcome.

Overall, “The Captain” encapsulates this quote, “It’s not about the destination, it’s about the journey.” The game isn’t also focused on just item collection. The game is about how would you navigate mystery and hi-jinks in space.