The Captain

Deep story, one of the best storytellings I played. loved the game, became one of my favourites. Each decission you make, even the ones you don´t think so, matters

This is the best game I have played in a decade. The story is so intriguing, fun and just brilliant, the style and settings are remarkable, the opportunities seem endless and the way you can influence the story and fate of so many characters is absolutely amazing. I just love it. It‘s perfect.

The Captain feels like Mass Effect, FTL and Monkey Island had a baby. Remarkably, it manages to be more than the sum of these parts, as well as improving on the individual mechanics in some cases. You play the titular Captain of a science vessel racing back to earth from the far reaches of space after a wormhole spirals out of control. Similar to FTL, you choose your path through various planets and space combat encounters, all the while trying to keep ahead of an enemy attack heading toward earth. The ship combat looks superficially similar to FTL, but is turn-based, and does not use any randomised effects. You can simulate each encounter exactly before committing to a real battle, giving you the chance to experiment and figure out a watertight strategy before risking your ship and resources. This avoids the frustration of unpredictable fail states, in a nod to the lucasarts adventure game philosophy. The planets you visit each contain point and click adventure style sections, with a self contained branching narratives. These vary in length from 10 minutes to a couple of hours. The adventure sections are very enjoyable on their own terms, with diverse locations, interesting mysteries to uncover, and puzzles which are engaging but not frustrating. The narrative is awash with humour which is charming and sometimes dark. It also features horror, mystery and at times can be very poignant. For one story in particular, I took a different path on my 2nd run which revealed a completely different tragic side to that story, which actually moved me to tears. Bravo Sysiac. The outcome of each mini-adventure grants you an "ending card" which thoughtfully allows you to skip to the same ending on a second run. The different endings feed into the macro narrative by granting or consuming particular items, or even people to join your crew, or consuming time in your race back to earth. Some items are very rare and essential to proceed down certain routes of the wider narrative. This injects real weight to your decisions - if you try to help everyone you meet along the way, you may struggle to save everyone in the end. I really love how this mechanic includes player choice on a micro and macro level, rather than the decisions just filling up a meter which gates access to the "good" ending (I'm looking at you Mass Effect). It's honestly one of the best implemented decision mechanics I've seen in a game. On the whole, The Captain manages to take a pretty generic overall Sci-fi narrative framework -saving earth from destruction - and turn it into something I think really special. The diverse episodic mini narratives and how they contribute organically into the macro narrative are just so engaging and fun. It is clear that a huge amount of love and thought went into this game. Personally I'm a big fan of sci-fi settings, choice and consequence mechanics and point and click adventures, so this game is very on point for my preferences. I'm not sure the game received much critical attention - maybe it's too niche or wasn't very well marketed. But after getting it on a whim, I had an absolute blast with it - exceeded my expectations many times over.

The Captain is a really good point and click adventure. Each story felt fun and got me to replay each one to see all the different endings. The only problem is low replayability but i feel the quality of the first playthrough makes up for that.

The Captain is a classic pixel-art point-and-click adventure game set in a Star Trek-like universe, which also features nail-biting turn-based ship-to-ship combat. Given the tiny development team, this game is a masterpiece! It has its flaws, but they are easily forgiven given how overall fun and well-designed the game is. THE GOOD: - I enjoyed the Star Trek style of a multi-cultural spacefaring civilization full of hope. The main character exemplifies this ideal nicely. Real world events are pretty grim nowadays, and it's nice to take part in a story with some hope for the future. Like the Doctor, the Captain doesn't even carry a weapon! - The away missions are generally very well done. The scenarios are creative, interesting, and original! There are several missions I was able to replay and get an ending that I thought was ideal. It's really fun how at specific inflection points you can go in a different direction and get a completely different ending! - The game is designed for (some) replayability, so you can try out different solutions to the problems presented. It is possible to skip missions if you're willing to take the same ending you've already achieved. You can also skip cut-scenes. - The combat is turn-based strategy with no random element at all. It is very tense for most of the game, quite challenging, and fun! THE BAD: - The idea that an entire war can be won by one person or technological item is absurd. I think the writer could have tried harder to come up with a plot that, while it might have been less epic, would have been more believable. - On the first away mission, I made a bad mistake that caused me to reload from a previous save point. The game is actually designed to allow for different endings to each away mission, something that I don't think the developers communicated very well to me before the first mission. I found this quite frustrating at first. - You can't save the game whenever you want, which leads to occasional times when you need to replay sections of the game for no good reason. - You have a ship and crew, and yet you must handle away missions alone. - Repeat after me game developers: it is *not* possible to transfer a person's mind (that away mission is pretty cool anyway)... - As is pretty much true of *all* point-and-click adventure games, it's good to have a walkthrough handy to avoid unnecessary frustration. While most missions are pretty straightforward, it's not always possible to guess what the designer was thinking. - When replaying the game, it is annoying that you cannot skip dialog or won battles! As a result, I recommend you do a non-violent playthrough your first time around, and do your serious run (including combat) on your second playthrough. Otherwise, you're going to have to do an awful lot of fighting twice... THE UGLY: - When viewing dialog and some cut-scenes, there is usually no visual indicator that you need to press a key to continue to the next frame. - You can build a special item called a Suppressor Beam Disruptor. Using this item causes the game to freeze in the combat screen. This happened to me twice (during two different playthroughs), and both times I had to re-load and try again. It always worked on the second try, at least.

Not bad point and click game. Every planet you visit is a mini story, most of the times too short. I missed a common thread that is pointing you in the right direction or a story line. There are just random planets that you can visit or not and get materials, crew, ... or not. And most of the time you don't have any reason to visit a planet. I don't liked the combat mechanics. Is more an energy management minigame than anything related to combat. At least you can skip it.

Very boring... Not worth a buy imo.. Refunded it after an hour of gameplay.