Spirit of Adventure: Won! (with Summary and Rating)

Is it just me, or does "Lamarge" sound like the name of a 1980s drag queen?

         

Spirit of Adventure

Germany

Attic Entertainment Software (developer); Starbyte (publisher)

Released in 1991 for DOS, Amiga, and Atari ST; 1992 for Commodore 64

Date Started: 12 December 2017

Date Ended: 29 December 2017
Total hours: 29

Difficulty: 3/5 (Moderate)

Final Rating: 44

Ranking at Time of Posting: 239/276 (87%)

Ranking at Game #573: 513/573 (90%)

      
Spirit of Adventure's roughness around the edges is illustrated in how much I left undone despite winning. After getting the final screen, I consulted some German message boards and found that I'd missed one entire dungeon (Segan's Tower) and one entire town (Turmalin), each with their own quests. I never finished Rialdo's Castle. I never found 3 of the 18 runes, which is fine because I only ever mixed 5 spells and cast an offensive spell in combat less than a dozen times. I never upgraded to the best equipment, never found out what some of my equipment was for, and only tried a few magic items in combat during the last battle of the game.

And despite all of this, I kept a fondness for the game until the end. It had some fun quests, a couple of interesting puzzles, a decent twist in the plot, and better combat tactics than I really found time to use. That I could miss a few areas means that it had genuine side-quests, something that remains rare in the early 1990s. It was a good foundation for Attic's later offerings.
        

The city of Elfrad. Major roads keep their names despite a couple of 90-degree turns.

     
Most of my hours since the last entry were spent mapping the city of Elfrad. Like Brataya, it had its own story that I had to piece together afterwards because I hit the key encounters in the order of my mapping, not in a logical plot order. The summary is that the mayor, Prior, wanted me to help him rid the town of evil by helping the "runemaster" unite the six "rune rings." I had collected two of the rings in Brataya and needed to get four more in Elfrad. The problem was that the ring owners had been mysteriously dying, so they were all in hiding.
       

You don't see the name "Olbrecht" enough in English-language RPGs.

      
I had to track them down in their various bolt holes. One needed my help fighting some demons, one was in the morgue and I had to get someone to let me into the morgue, that kind of thing. There were a couple more interleave puzzles that were again redundant because you solve most of the game's puzzles just by showing up at the right place.

Ultimately, I got all six of the rings and brought them to the runemaster. He rewarded me with six runes and a "demon skull." The nature of the evil in Elfrad and how the rune rings would destroy it was left a bit vague.
    

By the game's own logic, the "Resurrection" spell ought to be something like life-magic-body, but instead it just hammers away at "life."

      
After Elfrad, I returned to the overworld and explored it systematically, although I still managed to miss several locations. Besides another temple—where I created a couple of "fire blast" spells—the only other new location I found was a magic portal in the mountains. It offered transport to "Talusia" or "Garth." When I tried to go to Garth, I got a message that a mysterious force pushed me back. Talusia turned out to be the place I was already in (I guess the world is Lamarge but the island is Talusia? Or maybe the reverse? Also, "Talusia" is alternately spelled "Taslusia" on one screen). I figured this was something for an expansion and left it alone.

Lacking any other ideas, I returned to Rialdo's Castle and tried to finish it, but a corridor that had previously been open was now cut off and I couldn't figure out how to get it open again.

About this time, I remembered that Yakka Deepshaved, an NPC in Moon City, had offered to tell me the name of the leader of the Dreamers (the drug-pushing cult) if I could tell him the name of the mayor in Elfrad. Now that I knew the answer (PRIOR), I returned to Yakka. He told me that the Dreamers are led by someone named Tibuk, who is "somewhat out of this world because he appears to be everywhere at the same time." I knew that I had heard the name before, so I consulted my screenshots and found that he was the person that the demon-possessed Radin had been writing to from Brataya. The same screenshots also refreshed my memory that Radin had been possessed by a "Garthian" demon.

Things were coming together. I returned to the portal and this time, it allowed me to pass through to Garth, which took the form of a relatively nondescript dungeon. Early in my explorations, I found a stockpile of Opitar; clearly, the drug was being shipped to Lamarge/Talusia from another dimension by Tibuk, a Garthian demon.
      

And why can't my characters become dealers? Isn't this a "role-playing" game?

     
"Garth" ended up being a long maze of secret doors and multiple staircases up and down. There were only a few enemy types—"Guldrons," "Gorcerers," and "Garthians"—but each was capable of mental attacks that severely damaged my party. Even with mental shields on, and the "Booster" skill recharging mental damage, and running from as many fights as possible, my party was roughed up. I had a mental healing spell, but my healer was only capable of a few of these before her magic bar needed to recharge. Potions helped a little. A lot of the time, I left my characters standing idly in a corridor for 20 minutes, playing SpurguX in another window, as their bars slowly recharged.

Let me break off the narrative here to talk a little more about some of the game logistics. First, combat. It's reasonably tactical and yet invites you to be lazy. It starts with the magic skill that each character has active in the background. You can change these at any time, and some enemies respond better to certain skills. For any spellcasting enemy, for instance, you almost certainly want someone running "Sizzle." This also prevents you from casting your spells, but it's usually worth it.
        

Titania switches among her three healing abilities depending on what we most need.

     
Right away, the laziness factor comes into play. If I'm mapping a dungeon, I probably have "Compass" activated. Now combat comes along. Do I have the lead character switch her skill to something combat-oriented, then switch it back again when combat is over? Or do I avoid taking those extra 20 seconds and just plow through combat with the useless "Compass" remaining active?

The considerations continue as you set your actions for each combat round. Through experience, you learn whether enemies most often respond to mental attacks or physical attacks. You might be attacked by multiple groups of enemies with different strengths and weaknesses. Every combat round, you have to decide whether to micromanage the party and set everyone's attack type and target anew, or just keep pounding the "1" key and using the same set of attacks over and over. Yes, the option should be clear for any serious RPG fanatic, but the combats get boring, and if you're trying to alleviate the boredom by simultaneously watching the new season of Travelers, as I was, then it's easier to pound the "1" key and then pay to heal everyone later. Until Garth, no individual combat in the game is really that threatening. Garth changes things with a one-way door that keeps you trapped in the dimension until you find the exit, and suddenly every physical and mental hit point is precious.
    

Sometimes, a dungeon corridor offers this.

And sometimes this.

         
Partly enabling laziness is the fact that no enemy is completely immune to an attack type. There are some brainless enemies like ghouls that don't even have a mind to affect with mental attacks, and some non-corporeal enemies like ghosts that can't be hit with physical attacks. And yet each is still susceptible to critical (instant-kill) versions of both attacks, which come along maybe 1 out of every 12 hits. Thus, by just spamming one or the other, you will eventually kill everyone. This is all a good thing, I hasten to add. I like that the game rewards you for careful planning but also gives you an "out."

I'll also mention that throughout the game, the correlation between the difficulty of the battle and the experience and gold rewards is about 0. There are combats that last 30 rounds and leave you in tatters that deliver 30 experience points and 50 gold pieces, and others against single enemies that will leave you 150 experience points and 300 gold pieces richer. You learn to pick and choose your battles quite quickly. Dwarves are gold mines. So are bandits, but you don't want to fight too many bandits because they steal your stuff. You get the stuff back at the end of the battle, but you have to re-distribute and re-equip it, which is annoying. "Mage lords" are a good experience/gold balance. So are witches. It's almost never worth it to fight long battles against multiple parties; if you can't flee in the first round, you just have to keep trying.
       

The most frustrating message in the game.

      
Almost all the game's battles are random. There are fixed combats in less than half a dozen locations that I found. Thus, whether to fight at all, and particularly whether to continue fighting round after round, is almost always a player choice. Fleeing is a much more tactical, calculated decision here than in most games. If you fought every combat and never fled, you'd hit the max level within the game's first 8 hours, but you'd probably quit out of boredom before finishing the first city.

I'm sorry I never really got to experience the magic side of combat tactics. (If anyone has a link to a full list of spells, I'd be interested in seeing it.) I made the "fire blast" spells that the manual recommended, but I could only cast a few of those before all my magic points were gone, so it didn't seem worth the effort to experiment with higher-level spells. Healing spells helped a little, particularly in the final dungeon. Some spells I never mixed because I lacked the runes, some (like "Resurrection") because I lacked the power. "Awaken" would have been useful but I never found a second "Mind" rune needed for it. "Light" is a bit of a mystery (as are the associated skills and torches) because all the dungeons are perfectly lit. There's a seed of a good idea in the spell system, but to acquire all the runes and get strong enough to mix the most powerful spells, you'd have to artificially extend the life of the game.

I also ended the game well before I maximized my inventory options. Shops in Brataya and Elfrad sold high-level magic weapons and armor, but I never had enough money for them because I spent so much on healing. Another unexpected expense came when the game wouldn't let me leave the city I was in because my "map crystal" was out of charges. I had to pay over 3,000 gold to recharge it.
          

That's a lot of money for something I didn't even realize I would have to pay for.

       
Again, this is a good thing. It means the economy is strong enough that you never run out of financial aspirations. I could have grinded more for gold, or tried to economize better and spend less on healing. I'm not complaining.

Perhaps one complaint, though, is the mysterious nature of some of the inventory items. One of these days, I swear, we'll enter the era in which in every game, you can look at an inventory item and tell exactly who can wield it, what it does, and how it compares statistically with other items you have. There will be a clear distinction between quest items and other items. In Spirit of Adventure, I kept a bunch of gems throughout the game because it wasn't clear they were sale items and not quest items. I have a "skeleton key" that never came in handy, a "Radin's cape" that I can't wear, a "healer's ring" that I can't put on (seriously, what is that for?), torches that I don't need, and scrolls that tell me nothing about what they do. More important, I have no way to gauge the relative worth of items. How much better is an iron shield over a wooden shield? Why can't I wear both a "mystic cape" and armor, and if I have to choose between them, which is best?
         

No, why would you be able to equip a ring? That was stupid of me.

     
The final dungeon comes to an end when you encounter a Garthian behind a secret door. The positioning of the secret door ought not to be possible by the game's normal conventions in which there's 10 feet of wall space between corridors, but fortunately I was checking every wall. When I met the Garthian, named Gothaur, the first time, the game said it was "impossible to understand [his] tongue." I just had to brush past him and find a staircase back to the exit.

Fortunately, I knew where to acquire new languages (at 2,000 gold per lesson!) in Elfrad. I bought Garthian for one of my characters—I know of no reason to learn the five others—and returned to the dungeon. This time Gothaur had a lot to say.
         

Gothaur is like a DEA agent of his dimension.

     
Gothaur related that Tibuk was a fellow Garthian, using the portal to traffic Opitar to Lamarge and something called "Robiks" back to Garth. Tibuk was occupying a human body on our side. He gave me a horn that I could use to close the portal. I exited, returned to Talusia, and blew it.
          

Closing off inter-dimensional travel just to stop a drug problem seems short-sighted.

      
The question was then how to find Tibuk, but I had that figured out. Since the beginning of the game people had talked about how Rowena, head of the monastery in Moon City, had been different lately. I returned to her, and she immediately confirmed it, screaming that she had "hired [us] to fail." She put on her Garthian face and attacked.
       

Asked if he wanted to also transform the rest of his body, Tibuk looked down and said, "Nah, I'm good."

      
The battle was pretty pathetic—no single creature poses much danger in this game. To help, I employed a couple of magic items that I'd been saving for a tough battle, including Rialdo's Staff, which does up to 200 poison damage (a normal physical attack does less than 30). She soon died, her body turning to mist and fleeing to the vaults.

I pursued her and found an upright coffin with the paralyzed forms of Rowena and some guy who was never explained. Tibuk re-formed and attacked, killing us in a scripted way with no chance at defense.
      

What is the cat doing there?! Is the cat the real villain?

      
For a while, I though this might be the legitimate end of the game. I have some experience with German CRPGs, after all; among other things, I'm still not convinced Dungeons of Avalon was winnable.

But I decided to circle the city and see if any of the NPCs had anything to say in response to TIBUK. When I visited Yakka Deepshaved again, he had some new dialogue based on my possession of the horn. At the conclusion, he said, "You made it! Tibuk is destroyed and the Dreamers can't sell Opitar to humans any longer." What!? How did Tibuk get destroyed? I went to the monastery to confirm it and, no, Rowena wasn't destroyed. She turned into Tibuk and attacked again. But this time, after I defeated her the first time, the game let me fight Tibuk a second time in the vault. So I don't really know what happened there.
      

Tell me something I don't know, Ramirez.

     
Tibuk was no harder than the original Rowena battle, though. He soon died and I got the winning message above. It was a bit of an anticlimactic ending, but at least it wrapped up the plot. Since everyone had told me that the game was "unfinished," I half expected that to translate to the lack of a plot resolution.
   

That staff is a bit overpowered.

    
In a GIMLET, I give the game:

• 4 points for the game world. It isn't terribly well fleshed out—in particular, the different races don't seem to mean anything after character creation—but the drug plot is at least somewhat original, and the various locations hold together thematically.

         

The street names added a lot of flavor to the cities.

     

• 4 points for character creation and development. There aren't many choices during creation, but at least you're choosing from a fairly original selection of classes and races. Leveling up is rapid enough and feels suitably rewarding.

      

Orithia levels up while the developers leer at her.

     

• 5 points for NPC interaction. I wish the developers had offered more than three NPC portraits, but you'll never find me rating a keyword-based dialogue system poorly, especially when thoughtful use of those keywords can flesh out the lore and history of the game world. It's not Ultima-level quality, but it's still good. 

• 4 points for encounters and foes. Half the monsters come from a standard fantasy template, half are original to the game. What I like here is that the type of monster matters for more than just how hard they hit. Their various types of attacks, defenses, and special actions have you adjusting your own tactics accordingly. That's what a good RPG bestiary should do. I also like that you can pick your battles and engage in what you might call "tactical grinding." Non-combat encounters are less plentiful and less impressive and offer no real role-playing.

         

This guy looks a lot more difficult than he turns out to be.

     

• 5 points for magic and combat. See my comments above. Magic plays a lesser role here, but in some ways that creates a more balanced game. Most RPGs are so magic-heavy that regular combat actions are almost rendered superfluous at higher levels.

• 3 points for equipment, strengths and weaknesses already discussed. 

    

Titania: "Is it a trash can lid? A table top? What? Why are you looking at me like that?"

     

• 5 points for the economy. It could use more complexity, but it never gets to the point that it doesn't matter, which is the most important attribute.

• 4 points for quests, including a clear main quest and several side quests. No alternate endings or role-playing options, unfortunately.

• 4 points for graphics, sound, and interface, all of which are functional if not remarkable.

• 6 points for gameplay. I like its non-linear, open world; I just wish there was a little more in it. More locations, but smaller, would have been a better approach. Aside from the ease of the final battles, I thought that both the difficulty and length of play were both right on target.

          
That gives us a final score of 44, which as I suspected puts it between The Bard's Tale (34) and Might and Magic (60). It's much higher than I expected going in. Earlier this year, a commenter suggested that I would "rant" about the ending, and I'm not sure why. It wasn't great, but it wasn't the shaggy dog joke that, say, Fate: Gates of Dawn was. Another commenter mentioned that it "promises more than it can deliver." I think that's a bit extreme. It lacks polish, certainly, but it at least tells a complete game. If some of the areas aren't finished, I can hardly complain given that I didn't explore all the areas that were finished.
          

I have no idea what's happening in this box image. Neither, apparently, did any of the developers.

       
Like many European games, even with English releases, it doesn't appear that western media much noticed Spirit. Computer Gaming World described it only briefly in a larger column about foreign games. European reviews were all over the place. PC-Spiele '92 gave it a 60/100, complaining about the lack of an automap (seriously, that bothers me in 2017 reviews, let alone from a year barely out of the graph-paper era) and the difficulty of early combats, which suggests the reviewer didn't make much use of the "run" feature. Power Play (75/100) laments it as another Bard's Tale rehash. But ASM (80/100) called it a "strong adventure game" with a lot of positive features, and Joker Verlag (84/100) called it a "brilliant heroic epic in German."

Every review notes its Bard's Tale ancestry, and that isn't in question. But what Spirit of Adventure does better than The Bard's Tale—what Might and Magic does a lot better—is provide a much greater sense of variety. Offer uniformly-size map after map of trash mob battles culminating in maybe one special encounter, like all Bard's Tale games do, and you've got a recipe for frustration and boredom. Spirit offers locations of different shapes and sizes, with multiple special encounters, side-quests, and low-key enemies that don't have both sides playing quick-draw on a NUKE spell every combat. Like I've said, it's not perfect. It could have used less town and more dungeon, for instance. But it was well-balanced and it didn't drag on forever.
  
Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to have been a good experience for the developers. I get most of the story here from blogger Christian Genzel, who interviewed developer Guido Henkel in 2014. What I like about this article is that Genzel focused nearly exclusively on Spirit of Adventure rather than Henkel's more famous titles. In the interview, Henkel says that the game was supposed to have been subtitled The Dream Master as it was going to kick off an entire series under the Spirit of Adventure umbrella.

Henkel says he and co-developer Hans-Jürgen Brändle were influenced by The Bard's Tale, Wizardry, The Magic Candle, Might and Magic, and Tunnels & Trolls. It's tough to detect the influence of some of these, but they could have gotten their devotion to keyword-based dialogue from The Magic Candle.

What Genzel calls in the interview "red herrings"—the Thieves' Guild, the other languages, the port in Brataya, several objects—were all supposed to play a role in expansions and extensions. The team envisioned multiple modules spanning from a central core.
       

I'm sure glad I spent money on all those other languages!

      
Repeatedly, however, Henkel mentions friction between the development team and their publishers at Starbyte. The publisher insisted on rushing production, developed the box and other production materials with no input from the developers, and cheated the developers out of their fair share of the royalties. They commissioned a Commodore 64 version of the game (in German only) with no input from the original developers. I couldn't get it to run (it kept asking for a disk that didn't exist in the package I downloaded), but reportedly it uses a top-down interface rather than first-person, and I can verify that the graphics are awful.
      

Exhibit A.

      
Sick of "making other people rich," Henkel and his colleagues determined to publish future games under their own label. This unfortunately led to an abandonment of Talusia and Lamarge but gave us the three Realms of Arkania games (1992-1996), which use an update of Spirit's engine. Their success landed Henkel a job at Interplay, where he produced Planescape: Torment (1999) and Neverwinter Nights (2002). Since leaving Interplay, he has been involved in mobile gaming and novel-writing.

We'll be seeing the Arkania series quite soon, so I'm glad I got to see this precursor. Spirit of Adventure isn't quite a "forgotten masterpiece," but it does perform better than you'd have any reason to expect. That's a refreshing change from the other titles this year.

   

****

   

For further reading: 

My coverage of attic Entertainment Software's other titles:

    

• Lords of Doom (1990) 
• Die Drachen von Laas (1991)
• Realms of Arkania: Blade of Destiny (1992) 
• Realms of Arkania: Star Trail (1994) 

04/28/2026

 

Captive: Final Rating

Captive

United Kingdom

Antony Crowther (developer), Mindscape (publisher)

Released 1990 for Amiga and Atari ST; 1992 for DOS

Date Started: 10 August 2014
Date Ended: 8 September 2014

Total Hours: 42

Difficulty: Hard (4/5)
Final Rating: 36
Ranking at Time of Posting: 109/158 (69%)
Ranking at Game #588: 436/588 (74%)

   

Even bad games often have an enjoyable "hook." With Captive, for me, it was the satisfying combination of a burst of blood and an audible clack that accompanies each enemy's death. You get no indication of hit points or damage levels until an enemy dies, so it's almost always something of a surprise when it happens, especially when you've just spent a few minutes engaging the foe in the deadly side-step-turn dance in which one mistyped key can be fatal.

It's no secret that I didn't care for Captive—didn't hate it, just didn't care for it—but there are several ways in which I admire the game, starting with the one above. In few games is seeing an enemy die so satisfying. Another is in the programming that must have gone into the procedural dungeon creation. While this results in dungeon layouts that are overly linear and a bit bland, it's still pretty cool. The complex rules that must have gone into the procedure—no shops too soon, release buttons must always follow closing walls, enemies with clipboards must always precede computers or puzzle doors—execute flawlessly.

The procedural generation also results in a few oddities, however. First, there is no "final battle" in each base—no "big bad" or unique enemy. Given how difficult I found the combats, this was somewhat merciful but also somewhat bland from a story perspective. As we've discussed in the comments, it also means that the puzzles can only be of the most rote sort, such as password-protected computers preceded with clipboards that tell you the password. When generating random dungeons, it's harder (impossible?) to create crafted puzzles that require complex maneuvering, testing, or logical inference, such as Dungeon Master's pressure-plate puzzles or Might & Magic's wall messages.

The puzzles get slightly more complicated as the game goes on, but they always involve a clipboard that tells you the exact answer.

  
Captive is rightly famous for being the game that never ends. When you finish each mission, you're given the option to continue to the next one, and the whole process starts over. Technically, this process does have an "end," but even the low mission limit on the PC version (256) would take thousands of hours to complete—I estimate about three times as long as every other game I've played as part of this blog—and I would be filled with despair if anyone told me they'd done that. Since your droids continue to get better while the enemy doesn't (you encounter every enemy type in the first mission), it must eventually get boring.

I've been criticized for playing Captive "wrong," by not upgrading weapons fast enough. I maintain that taking this approach is hampered by a) always needing to keep enough cash to repair droids; b) the fact that only like one shop in each base sells weapons; and c) the game documentation not making it clear that the next class of weapons is always a good thing (although this can admittedly be determined with the "AG Scan" device). Contrast this with, say, Fallout: New Vegas, where a player using a handgun at a high skill is going to be more effective than a player using a machine gun at a low skill. 

But I also allow that my own RPG tendencies did hamper my progress. For instance, I have an aversion to purchasing equipment in a game that offers it for free. It's much more satisfying to loot a helm +2 from a dead orc captain than to purchase it in a shop. Since Captive offers copious found melee weapons, super balls, and handguns until all but the final levels, I tended to equip those rather than purchase expensive-but-better weapons in the stores. I also have a weird tendency to try to diversify the types of weapons I equip, perhaps ingrained by RPGs where enemies have weaknesses to different weapon types (which is not the case in Captive). Fallout: New Vegas offers the ability to break down ammo and use the resulting powder and lead to reload empty cartridges, meaning that if you want to go through the entire game with just a .45 pistol, you can still make use of the other handgun ammo that you find. Despite this, I insist on toting around a weapon that makes use of every type of ammo in the game, switching between them as I run out, ensuring that eventually I'll be taking on a swarm of deathclaws with a BB gun—a situation not so different than showing up in the final levels of Captive with magnums. Even after I understood how Captive worked, I insisted on replacing my superior laser pistols with "zlot" shotguns that I'd found, just to diversify my weapon selection.

Note that in this late game shot, I've replaced two of my lasers with inferior "zlot" shotguns just because, I don't know, they were free.

  
Nonetheless, even doing everything "right," I'd have to ding the game a bit for difficulty. Enemies encountered on the final levels are capable of blasting the droids to scrap, in just a couple of shots, even with upgraded parts and all shields blazing. Repairing droids is so expensive that you're essentially forced to play like a jackass—reloading every time you take significant damage, not just when you die—so you don't go broke and lack the ability to purchase the weapons and ammo that are so important. Yes, pushing through the final base with no weapons until I finally found a shop was satisfying, but it was one moment of satisfaction after endless hours of frustration.

Ultimately, my ambivalent feelings about Captive boil down to it not having enough of the elements that I truly enjoy about RPGs, something that I think will be reflected in the GIMLET:

1. Game World. A missed opportunity. Captive is nominally a sci-fi game that takes place in space, but it really feels more like a standard high fantasy game with sci-fi textures (the same way that Don't Go Alone felt like a standard fantasy game with horror textures). The framing story is essentially unnecessary and its conclusion confusing and uninteresting. In this, I must admit, it captures the spirit of other Dungeon Master clones perfectly. Score: 3. 

The space parts of the game were just time-fillers. They didn't in any way seem to be about traveling through space.

2. Character Creation and Development. "Creation" is limited to assigning names to the droids, which oddly determines their starting attributes. "Development" throughout the game is unsophisticated but still somewhat satisfying, as you spend experience points on skills and get random attribute increases every time you do so. Skill levels not only increase proficiency but unlock new weapons and armor.  It was nice to let a couple hours go by and suddenly realize I had 8,000 experience points to spend. On the downside, there are absolutely no role-playing opportunities, and development stalls in the last couple of bases, when you get paltry rewards for slaying difficult creatures and each new skill purchase costs thousands of points. Score: 4.

One character towards the game's end. I never got to use a "spaygun," and I'm not sure I even want to know what it does.

3. NPC Interaction. There are, alas, no NPCs. Turning the shopkeepers into NPCs would have significantly improved the game, as I'll discuss below. Score: 0.

4. Encounters and Foes. Captive has a variety of foes original to the game, though some clearly based on pop-culture references like Go-bots, Robocop, and Critters. Moreover, they are well-distinguished in power and attributes, such as whether they can shoot missile weapons, what types of damage they do (fire vs. physical), the speed they move, their relative hit points, and whether they can fly. These various characteristics determine the strategies you need to employ to defeat them, which is as it should be. There are no other satisfying "encounters" in the game, with all of its "puzzles" somewhat sophomoric and no role-playing choices. Some level of respawning would also have been welcome, to compensate for poor skill and money selections. Score: 4.

Didn't quite close that door fast enough.

  
5. Magic and Combat. I have to give Captive a lot of credit for being among a small number of games in which the player really makes use of the physical environment in combat. Between leading enemies in a "fighting retreat" along long corridors, smashing them with doors, laying mines, tricking them into shooting each other, freezing them in place by flooding rooms, and a variety of other tactics I outlined a few days ago, there are a lot of ways for the under-equipped player to (very slowly) whittle down the enemies. I maintain that for most of the game, you essentially must do these things to avoid taking too much damage.

The rest of combat was a little less interesting to me. The game offers Dungeon Master's basic mechanics but without the special attacks and magic system that allowed you to fine-tune attacks and defenses. And in general, I don't like real-time combat unless it's a bit more forgiving. I'm old and clumsy. Score: 5.

6. Equipment. In my opinion, the game's best category. Between weapons, armor (droid parts), devices and optics with special uses, cameras, and mines, you have a lot of options for outfitting characters. This game is (I think) tied with The Keys to Maramon to offer the first mines in RPG history, and I don't recall any previous game offering something as sophisticated as cameras that let you spy on what's happening in other parts of the dungeon—and to detonate them when an enemy approaches. I also liked that you could find limited-use versions of most weapons ("zlots") throughout the game. Considerations of weight (more weight saps more power) and item damage also added to the game's strategy.

Captive leaves it entirely up to the player to figure out what each of the items does and how it works. For instance, you have to purchase and test each "dev-scape" and "optic" to figure out its use, and even then it can be somewhat obscure (does the "Power Sapper" do anything but drain power?). To understand damage levels of each weapon, you have to run the "AG Scan" optic. I don't know any way to determine what ammo each weapon uses without just buying it and trying to reload. While in other games, I might appreciate the extra challenge afforded by all this experimentation, I generally felt Captive was challenging enough. Score: 6.

A late-game inventory illustrates some of the game's diverse equipment, including a dagger, a rifle, a shield, a die (to figure out door combinations), several clipboards with passwords, a battery, gold, three cameras, and several types of melee weapons and handguns.

7. Economy. Well, unlike many games, gold in Captive—as nonsensical as it is—remains valuable all the way to the end of the game, what with the constant need for upgrades, repairs, and ammo-refills. Because I was always on the verge of being broke, I didn't even fully experience all of the devices, weapons, and parts the game had to offer—perhaps the most compelling reason to continue on to Mission #2. Other than that, the economy isn't very sophisticated, and I didn't care for the fact that it was a closed system (since there are no random encounters), nor that you couldn't sell back unneeded ammo or zlots. Score: 5.

8. Quests. The game has a main quest, but it's so bereft of any real story or information that it's hard to regard it as much of anything. Even the final "choice"—whether to end the game with Trill's liberation or let him be re-captured and go on another mission—doesn't really make any sense thematically. No side-quests, no role-playing, not even the satisfaction of a real ending. Score: 2.

9. Graphics, Sound, and Inputs. I found the graphics reasonably good for the era—certainly above the "not distractingly bad" threshold I set for full score. Sound is about as good as you might expect for the era, and I definitely found gameplay enhanced with the sound turned on. I liked that the game had redundant mouse/keyboard controls for most things; didn't like that it didn't have keyboard controls for combat actions. Score: 5.

10. Gameplay. I would characterize it as very linear, overly hard, not very replayable, and too long even for the first mission. The ability to keep playing as long as you want is, I suppose, a "good" thing if you like the game, but for me every base offers the same bland experience punctuated with the occasional thrill of dispatching a particularly difficult foe. This is not enough to sustain the 10 bases that the first mission requires, let alone unlimited additional missions. Score: 2.

The final score of 36 puts it just above my "recommended" threshold. I think Captive could have elevated itself to something I truly enjoyed with just a little additional effort, such as a few dialogue options with the shopkeepers offering tips on equipment and foes, a few fixed encounters interspersed with the procedural dungeon creation (would it have been so hard to plug them in for the first mission, at least?), maybe a text screen at the end of each mission, or with each computer hack, that revealed a bit more about Trill and his crimes. Heck, if this story had been any good, I might have been tempted to go on to the second mission just to continue fleshing it out.

Players that don't care much about plots, NPCs, and role-playing choices would probably scale the score up to an equivalent of a 50. I understand if you're one of those players, and I admit the game's mechanics are good for what it does, but even you have to admit that a game purely about mechanics is not what people generally think about when you say "RPG."

MobyGames's review round-up shows that contemporary reviews were all over the place, ranging from 44/100 to 94/100, but each notes its Dungeon Master heritage and suggest that the game appeals most to fans of Dungeon Master-style games, with which I agree if what you like most about Dungeon Master is the real-time combat mechanics.

I always try, often unsuccessfully, to separate my personal enjoyment of a game from my admiration of the development. I didn't like Keef the Thief much, but I thought it was an impressive effort for a couple of teenaged developers. In this case, I think 25-year-old author Antony Crowther deserves a lot of credit for designing the game by himself (apparently after his brother, a Dungeon Master fan, suggested it) in an era in which most single-developer games feel like throwbacks to the early 1980s.

Crowther had been building up experience prior to Captive, as a developer of minor arcade-style games like Bat Attack (1983) and Zig-Zag (1987) and a programmer on several Starlight Software titles like Deathscape (1987) and Dogfight 2187 (1987). Since Captive, he's continued to be active in the gaming field, working most recently for Electronic Arts on the Harry Potter series. His LinkedIn profile currently shows him as a "Technical Consultant" at Sumo Digital, a UK-based game company that seems to specialize in board, sports, and fitness games.

In 1993, while still working for Mindscape, Crowther wrote Liberation: Captive II with a much bigger team. Judging by the screenshots, its a very different game, preserving some of the first game's elements (like a party of four droids and associated equipment) but set in a much less linear world and featuring an actual story. I look forward to giving it a try. [Ed. I tried it in 2021 and decided it wasn't even an RPG.] We'll encounter Crowther again before then, however, with Knightmare (1991), based on a British children's show, which appears to be yet another Dungeon Master clone but with a simpler interface than Captive.

For now I return to Secret of the Silver Blades, a game so different from Captive that we must marvel that they're considered part of the same genre.

     

****

   

Previous entry in this series

   

Further reading:

• My "Index of Games Played by Lineage" shows Captive's place in the line of Dungeon Master clones.
• Other games by Anthony Crowther:
• Knightmare (1991)
• Liberation: Captive II (1993)

10/13/2026 

Captive: Won!

Guess what option I chose?

When I last posted on Captive, I was in the space station where Trill was being held, but I had run out of ammunition and all my melee weapons had broken, leaving me with nothing but bare fists. Since the nasty creatures in the base require hundreds of bare-fisted blows to perish, techniques like ladder-scumming and the old side-step-turn tactic were out of the question. I had announced my intention to reload from the previous base and stock up on more ammo before attempting the space station again.

Well, I didn't do that. It was probably the best idea, but I just couldn't bring myself to cover all the territory again. Instead, I settled in for a long process of killing enemies with electric bolts. I tried to master the art of luring the station's behemoths one-by-one to a 4x4 area with a power outlet, then dispatching them via the side-step-turn method. Electric bolts significantly under-perform even the weakest guns, so each enemy took 5-10 minutes to die--assuming I didn't make a mistake during the process, which was rare. I'm not very good at anything requiring manual dexterity, and inevitably I'd turn when I meant to side-step or vice versa. This would lead to a period of momentary confusion in which I'd try to figure out what happened, during which the enemy inevitably shot my droids to rubble.

The last base made me kill what felt like a hundred of these damned things.

I was also able to employ the "friendly fire" method in a few places, lining up enemies behind closed doors and letting them blast each other. There were a few areas where I could shoot at foes across obstacles, like fire.

Of course, they were shooting at me, too.

Avoiding areas with pressure plates that closed the walls behind me, I slowly penetrated the station. When I finally found a shop, it was like finding an oasis in the Sahara. Although the shop didn't sell any of the "cannons" that would make use of that skill, it did sell refills for my handguns and laser guns. I also bought a large supply of mines.

The damaged, empty-handed droids encounter the most welcome sight in the world.

With a healthy stockpile of ammo, the base became much easier, though it never became "easy." There were an absurd number of enemies, almost all capable of killing at least one droid in one shot, shield or no shield. I'd push a wall and open up an area with dozens of them. I'd have to let them come to me one at a time and fight battles of firing retreats. I'd finally clear them out, open up another door, and face dozens more. All told, the space station took almost 8 hours to complete. 

Finally healed, and loaded up with guns and ammo.

The station ended up being indistinguishable from any other base. It had a generator room, for instance, even though blowing up the station presumably kills Trill and ends the game. It had a computer that delivered a probe even though I didn't need any more for this mission.

The presence of the generators is a mystery. I assume the procedural method used to create each base insists on putting a generator room in every one.

I never did find a shop that sold cannons, but I did eventually find one that sold lasers, so I outfitted my entire party with laser guns and plenty of ammo, dumping the handguns and melee weapons that had filled non-laser slots until then. Though not the best weapons in the game, they worked well enough.

After an endless series of combinations, doors, passwords, button puzzles, and pattern puzzles, I finally found a combination door like those at the entrances to the bases. Since I knew I wasn't at the entrance, I figured Trill must be behind it, and I was right.

Trill rises from his chair as I enter his cell.

At first, I decided to just kill Trill and see what happened. He died in a single shot and the game immediately ended with the note that "Droid's are to be wasted!" which I don't know what it means. I assume something similar happens if you blow up the station's generators, but I didn't try it.

If you walk up to him instead of killing him, you get the end game message: "Amendment to the legend of Trill: A small party of four droids brutally outwitted the entire federation force, and succeeded in freeing the Creator of Evil.."

If this is supposed to be a twist of some sort, the game really doesn't offer enough information for it to sink in. Granted, Trill's crimes were unspecified in the game's back story. All we know is that he was hoping for community service and got sentenced to 250 years in suspended animation. That seems harsh for most crimes but somewhat mild for being the Creator of Evil, whatever that means.

Trill is transferred to another facility.

At this point, the player has the option to "Call it a Day" or "Let Battle Commence," the latter of which sees Trill re-captured by one of the station's behemoths and stuck on a new space station. The droids end up back in space in "Mission 2" with a new set of 10 bases to explore and blow up. If you beat Mission 2, from what I understand you get the same options and can continue on to Mission 3. Eventually, a bug breaks the game in Mission 2315, and in the DOS version, it loops back to Mission 1 after Mission 256. It's impossible for me to imagine any player getting up to either of these numbers. I'm curious what the highest documented mission actually is.

I naturally chose to call it a day, but I can see the appeal of continuing if you actually like the game. When I ended, I had only just received the "Sprayguns" skill and didn't have the chance to use the "Cannon" skill at all. There were several orders of better droid parts that I never purchased. There was, in short, lots of room for continued character development, although at some point the challenge must plateau and descend, once the droids have the best parts and all skills at 24.

I never did find myself really "liking" Captive. It had moments of exhilaration, sure, when tough enemies finally burst into sprays of blood, or when I came upon a much-needed store or power outlet when I was just about to give up all hope. But these are "rewards" in the same way a bully "rewards" you when he stops beating you, or the same way a piece of bread is a "reward" when you're about to die of hunger. You may appreciate them, but it's much better not to be in those situations in the first place. In that sense, I feel less like I "won" Captive and more like I just got paroled from it.

A short post for a long gameplay session. GIMLET coming up.

Captive: Surviving on the Inside

Reaching the station where Trill is being held. It looks ominously like the Death Star.

Despite what I said at the end of the last post, I decided to try to marathon my way to the end of Captive. It partly worked. I finished the regular bases and made it to the space station where Trill is being held, but I've gotten stuck there and probably won't be able to finish.

The game got a little easier for me after the last post, for a couple of reasons. First, I spent money on better weapons and droid parts, although I kept my lead characters going primarily with melee weapons until late in this session (ammo is expensive). Second, the muscle memory in my fingers got used to the turn-side-step combo on the keypad, so I could flank all but the fastest monsters as long as I could find an area of at least 2x2. Third, I started to master some of the game's other mechanics, which I'll cover below.

I still maintain that Captive is absurdly deadly, even by the standards of Dungeon Master clones. Even with all four of my droids blazing their shields, and with all of them upgraded to the best Bronzite or Ironide parts, I still was unable to stand up to more than two shots from some of the late-game monsters. Sometimes not even one. Fortunately, I slowly grew to master--or at least understand--the arsenal of tricks that the game allows. Some of them are adopted from Dungeon Master, but several are unique to the game. They include:

1. Hit and run. This tactic takes advantage of the fact that enemies can't strafe. If they encounter a 90-degree angle, they have to step forward and then turn before they can fire or continue pursuit. Thus, a long, bendy hallway is your friend. Wait for the enemy to enter an angle, fire off a few shots, then flee to the next bend when he turns to face you. When enemies can't pass certain obstacles, like water, this becomes even easier. Dangers: You forget the map and end up trapping yourself in a dead-end, or there simply isn't any suitable hallway to do this.

This guy has just turned to face me on a bend. I need to strafe to the left, then turn right, and shoot him a few times when he enters the square I'm currently in. Then I'll run to the next bend in the corridor and do it again.

  
2. The side-step-turn. This uses the same mechanic as "hit and run" but without the benefit of corridors on either side. You lead the enemy to an area of at least 2x2 squares. Since enemies follow predictable patterns as they chase you around the squares, you can use this to your advantage. Just as the enemy turns to face you, you side-step (strafe) to a square that puts you diagonal to him, then turn to face the square that he'll enter as he tries to get next to you. When he does, fire off a few shots (or melee attacks) before he can turn and face you, then quickly do another side-step before he can shoot. Repeat, constantly dancing around in a 2x2 square pattern, until he dies. Dangers: Finger fatigue ensures that you will occasionally screw this up. It works poorly on fast enemies, and you don't have time to save in the middle of it, so one mis-typed key causes you to lose your progress beating down a foe.

You can do a kind-of hybrid of the first two strategies if you can find a room with a pillar in the middle.

3. Mines. Shops sell mines, and occasionally enemies leave one behind when they die. Enemies will avoid them if there are alternative paths, but if you can find a corridor that an enemy must travel to defeat you, you can lay any number of them. I found that 3-4 mines were very effective against even the tough enemies on the final base, but they're also very expensive and heavy. Flying enemies are immune to them. Dangers: You set off your own mines, so you have to remember where they are and use the anti-gravity device to walk over them.

4. Cameras. Cameras sell for less money than mines but are slightly less effective. When set up, they look like Daleks from Dr. Who. When you switch them on, you can see the facing corridor on one of your monitors, and a little yellow square denotes the presence of an enemy in the corridors. When the enemy steps on the square with the camera you can press a button to detonate it. Dangers: Fast moving enemies often zoom by the camera before you can react.

Setting up a camera. Hitting the right "X" on the monitor screen will cause it to explode.

  
I suppose cameras have tactical purposes other than blowing up--perhaps to warn you of the approach of any enemy on your backpath--but I don't see the value here. The bases are all organized into small, discrete sections separated by doors, ladders, elevators, and walls. It's comparatively easy to determine if you've cleared a section, and fairly easy to tell when a switch or panel opens access to another hallway. You'd have to be a fairly careless player to get surprised by enemies, in which case you're probably not using cameras anyway.

5. Shooting through slits. Walls occasionally offer slits through which you can view enemies on the other side. You can fire electric bolts and super balls through these slits, or regular guns if you're inverted on the ceiling. Since some enemies can also fire at you, and they often have a wide range of motion on the other side, limiting how often you can shoot at them, I haven't found these to be very helpful.

Shooting electricity through a slit at an enemy on the other side.

6. The door crush. Position yourself in front of a closing door or wall and let it pound your enemy while you supplement its damage with melee attacks and shots. This is a viable strategy in the early game, but not so much in the late game when standing in front of some enemies for even a few seconds is enough to wipe out your party.

7. Friendly fire. When enemies sense you, they fire at you, even if they're on the other sides of doors or walls--and even if other enemies are in between. You can sometimes trick enemies into wiping each other out this way. A few enemies have shots that automatically bounce off walls and doors if they don't encounter anything in between, and if you can get them firing at you from the other side of a wall or door, they'll kill themselves.

Bases 9 and 10 featured enemies of living fire. Since they have to stay rooted in the fire on the floor, however, it was easy to use hit and run tactics on them.

  
8. Super bouncy ball. The "super balls" you find throughout the game will bounce back and forth between walls until they hit something or exhaust themselves in 6 or 7 bounces. I keep a big supply. Send them careening in a big room and there's a good chance that they'll intercept something eventually. You can also use them to test for the presence of enemies on the other side of a room or corridor that's so long you can't see the end. If the ball comes bouncing back, it's clear. Dangers: The balls can hit you, and cause significant damage, so you'll want to find a place to duck out of the way if you start hurling them.

9. The crowded ladder. It's tough to get into a situation where this works, but when it does, it's fun. Your party cannot occupy the same square as an enemy. If an enemy is standing at the top of a ladder when you ascend, you'll automatically nudge him into an adjacent square. But if that adjacent square is occupied by another enemy, he cannot move and automatically dies. If you can get a bunch of enemies milling about the top of a ladder with only a single adjacent square, you can kill a lot of them this way and just have to deal with the one remaining. Unfortunately, it's more common to find ladders with at least two adjacent squares, meaning at least three enemies have to be in the right position for this to work.

10. Ladder-scumming. The last refuge. Lead an enemy to the ladder. Head down. Pop up, squeeze off a few shots, pop back down. Save and repeat. If the enemy gets lucky and shoots you the instant you reach the top of the ladder, reload. Dangers: Some enemies react so fast that you basically have to hit "fire" before your brain can register whether the enemy is actually in front of you when you reach the top of the ladder. This wastes a lot of ammo when the enemy isn't there. Some enemies react and fire so fast that you have to reload a lot even when ladder-scumming.

Ladder-scumming to defeat this pack of robots in the space station.

As I grew more adept at these methods, I found the last three bases a little easier, although the last base featured this horrid thing:

Notice how well all those shields are performing. They might as well not even be on.

  
It moves so fast I can barely react to it, and since it flies, it's immune to mines. I had to resort to ladder-scumming to defeat every one of them. Overall, as I fear I've said ad nauseum, while I can appreciate this type of combat, I don't really like it. Too much relies on fast fingers, and I'm just lousy at that.

Replacing my droid parts. When I get done, do I really have the same droid?

   
On equipment, I eventually upgraded every droid to "Bronzite" parts, and on the last base my lead droid got "Ironide" parts. There were even better parts available, but I didn't invest enough points in "Robotics" to equip them. I didn't notice a huge difference in the amount of damage they repelled, but I did notice that the higher-level parts made my devices consume far less electricity. Also, repairing these higher-level parts is a lot more expensive.

The secret to surviving Captive--both financially and physically--seems to be to avoid getting hit at all.

The skill problem haunted me with weapons, too. Throughout the game, I made the "mistake" (if you can call something you have no way to foresee a mistake) of trying to master the early skills before investing a lot of points in the later skills. This is partly because you find melee weapons and simple handguns all over the place, whereas you have to pay for more advanced weapons and their ammo. It's also because the more advanced weapons require a lot more skill. For instance, for my droid with 49 wisdom, advancing from Level 2 to 3 in "Cannons" costs 4,389 experience points, whereas advancing from Level 16 to 17 in "Rifles" requires only 570.

This has some weird consequences. Commenter MOZA, for instance, assures me that the worst laser is better than the best handgun. But since the best handgun requires 24 skill points in "Handguns" and the worst laser requires only 1 skill point in "Lasers," this suggests that you're wasting your time ever getting all the way up to 24. Best go only to 9, at which point the next skill becomes available, and I guess always invest your points in the best available skills? I want to re-iterate that the Captive manual is absolutely no help with this question, and in the typical RPG, a high-skill level generally trumps the type of weapon.

One droid's current skills. I probably should have concentrated more on the later skills and made sure I got the last one--"Sprayguns"--before the final base. Despite investing some in "Cannons," I haven't actually bought any cannons.

  
Anyway, partly because I didn't want to waste the substantial investment I'd made in lower skills, and partly because ammo for higher-level weapons costs so much, I remained well behind the curve in weapons for the entire game. This created a much higher level of difficulty for me, but I managed to get by anyway--until the space station, where my paltry selection of laser guns and handguns were no match for the absurdly difficult monsters there. 

The final three bases grew progressively bigger, until they were so large that walking around them took about 30 minutes even when they were completely cleared. I still didn't have to map, however. The nature of the procedural map generation means that no matter how large, the bases will be almost completely linear. Never does a late section suddenly re-connect with an early section. What does happen, however, is that the passcode needed to get through a door in an early section might not be found until very late in the base. This dynamic ensures that you end up looping through each base multiple times as you acquire new passcodes. I got rather sick of this towards the end.

Opening a new section of the base with a passcode I found way, way, way far away.

In the last couple bases, these types of passcodes became more common, but it's the same dynamic: find the clipboard, then find the panel that it opens.

   
A few other notes:

• This keeps happening. I don't know why.

• The weapons you find in little alcoves on the wall, although they look like brass knuckles, swords, handguns, rifles, and so on, are all called "Zlots." It took me a while to understand how these differ from the ones you buy in stores. They're meant only for temporary use. They have a limited number of blows or charges, they disappear when they run out, and they can't be repaired. Throughout the game, I was using them as primary weapons when they're really meant as backups for when you run out of ammo.

• The procedural nature of dungeon creation means that occasionally you have weird stuff like this, where I've gone through all the trouble to find and enter a passcode, only to find a two-square, empty corridor on the other side. Ladders and elevators routinely lead to empty squares.

Good thing there were lasers blocking this area.

• The battery was the best purchase I made. It's often a long time between power outlets, but since one battery can fully recharge four droids, I rarely worry about running out of power anymore.

Recharging at a wall socket.

After I cleared the last of the 10 bases, I had no idea what to expect from the space station. I rather hoped that I would just arrive at the station and the endgame sequence would commence. I should be so lucky. Instead, the space station is a base just like the others, only with much harder monsters. Even Bases 8 and 9 featured some of the easy monsters from the first couple of bases, and the really tough enemies (like the one above) were punctuations in a long series of easy or moderately-challenging encounters. But I found no easy encounters on the space station. The moment I entered, I was greeted by this behemoth . . .

Well, hell.

. . . and it just got worse from there. The only three creature types I've found on the space station are two types of these giant cyborgs and packs of robots that look like Robocop. All of them are capable of wiping me out in a hot second, and ladder-scumming and mines are the only techniques that have had any effect.

Unfortunately, I'll soon run out of even these options, as I'm out of ammo (despite loading up all my available inventory slots on the previous base) and I haven't found any shops to restock. I'm not even sure there are any shops on the space station. I'm going to have to reload a saved game from Base 10 and get everyone equipped with better weapons, and a lot more ammunition, before I try again. I don't know how soon that will be.

****

In list news, I've removed Secret Valley (1983) for the ZX Spectrum. In mechanics, the game is virtually indistinguishable from The Valley (1982), which I already reviewed. You enter a direction to move and random stuff happens. There simply isn't enough gameplay content to be considered an RPG under my rules, although I confess I don't know what other category I'd assign to it. I suspect this fate is going to befall a lot of the "RPGs" I recently added from the World of Spectrum site.

I've also taken the advice of several of you and rejected Bad Blood as an RPG. It was a tough call, as the game features world exploration and NPC dialogue that you rarely find in non-RPG games. But its lack of any character development and its all-action combat mean that it violates two of my core criteria. I briefly considered playing it anyway, as it would have been fun to contrast its post-apocalyptic theme with Fallout: New Vegas, which I've had going on my Xbox for the last few weeks. As I went through the manual and initial game areas, however, the back story and plot--centered on problems between "Mutes" and "Humes"--just struck me as irredeemably goofy. Origin may have created worlds, but sometimes they made a hash of the job.