The Captain (2021)

Playtime: 2 hours (entered Evylon's ship)

Played: 2025

Intro

This is a P&C adventure. You travel between different locations and talk/trade/puzzle your way through problems.

The Good

• You can drag (=use) items over interactible locations to see if it does something.
• The meat freezer bit was fun.
• I only needed a guide because of weird controls.

The Bad

• When booting you get skippable videos and an unskippable 5-second animation.
• When clicking "continue" in the menu it always asks if you want to restart. That should just be a different menu option.
• You have to click "skip" every time to skip the drop pod animation.
• No way to quickly skip read text when replaying a section.
• No proper hints function.

The Ugly

There's no manual saving, you have to replay sections over and over if you make a mistake or just want to try an option.

Conclusion

I don't like P&C adventure games and i thought i'd filtered most of them out but this one slipped through the cracks. It's an ok game within its genre. It has mildly amusing interactions and logical puzzles. It also has a bunch of clunky design beyond even the standard P&C flaws.

I may have played this further but i got a bit bored during the section where you're a droid. Since there are no manual saves i would have to replay some of the mission, and after already replaying the meat locker mission several times i just got fed up. I guess i've just been spoiled by Hidden Object Games and Visual Novels that are actually player-friendly.

The Captain is a fantastic adventure game in many ways.

It's a game that both captures the Star Trek magic and the feel of classic adventures. Every planet is beautiful and full of charming details. I found all puzzles to be logical rather than frustrating and they a joy to play through. Some puzzles, like one where you have to meditate and find your Zen, are even groundbreaking.

The writing of is of consistent high quality and is unexpectedly comical many times. A shuttle with an attitude(!) made me smile more than once. Those of you that have played the Space Quest games will feel right at home here. This game is vastly superior to the Space Quests though: no unexpected deaths, no cluttered inventories and some planets have quite touching, dramatic stories. Fenton Perth for example is a planet well worth visiting, more than once!

Besides Fenton Perth, there are a plethora of planets that you will want to visit more than once. Because The Captain is one of very few games that do choice and consequence right. Like the game "80 days", you travel on a map, visit places and experience relatively self contained events. This makes your choices very visual. You choose to visit some planets, but might have to skip others to save time. For many other games it has been a challenge to visualise choices. Some games (Witcher 2 for example) can have choices that completely alter the game without the player realising. Other games, like many from Telltale, give an illusion of choice where seemingly important choices don't change the outcome very much. Another good design choice in the Captain is to provide so called "ending cards". They serve two purposes: you can play the ending card to fast forward through parts of the game in a replay. The other purpose is to show the player where there is more content to be found and where you might want to go when replaying the game.

Not sure if I can find anything bad about The Captain really. It even has a surprisingly deep turn based battle system. Battles are completely optional but I found myself spending many hours killing pirates and upgrading my ship. There have been a few minor bugs but they have been promptly fixed by the devs. A fun fact is that this massive game was made by two friends over a period of five years!

Highly recommended, and well worth the full price!