Captive is an RPG Maker horror game in which you play as an unnamed captive of an unknown captor. The captive wakes up in a room with no memory of who she is. With only thirty minutes until she bleeds to death, the captive must escape the building she is trapped in and discover what she is doing there.
Can be found on Steam here
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This game contains examples of:
- Big Bad: The captor who kidnapped the protagonist and several others and is holding them inside the basement complex. The endings reveal it to be the amnesiac protagonist herself, who did everything to find a cure for her father, who came down with an unknown illness.
- Bittersweet Ending: The normal/Free ending is an odd variant. The protagonist finally escapes the basement with her life, only to be shot just as she escapes the basement. It turns out she was the amnesiac killer all along. Given that the Remember ending has the protagonist regain her memories and kill the blonde girl who escaped her, this is the happiest ending. And then she briefly blinks.
- Chainsaw Good: The captor/protagonist apparently liked to use chainsaws when tormenting the captives, as two bloody ones can be found in different rooms of the basement complex.
- Cruel Twist Ending: In the Free ending, the protagonist finally escapes the building... only to be shot and killed by a policeman. Just to twist the knife in, it turns out she was the killer all along. And this is the Bittersweet Ending — the Remember ending is a full-on Downer Ending.
- Downer Ending: The Remember ending has the protagonist remember everything and turn back into the killer she was before, going after and successfully killing the Final Girl who evaded her prior.
- The Ending Changes Everything: The premise of the game is the amnesiac protagonist trying to escape the basement she is trapped in while discovering how she got there, who put her there, and what is the meaning of the place. Meanwhile, she discovers various bloody corpses and bloody tools. The endings ultimately reveal that the captor is none other than the protagonist herself, and the Remember end heavily implies that her motive is to help her father, a famous doctor who contacted an unknown illness, by finding a cure, by any means necessary.
- Foreshadowing: There are a handful of clues to The Reveal:
- An attentive player might notice that the captor, despite being the Big Bad responsible for the protagonist's abduction and memory loss, never seems to show up, even as a shadow, to obstruct the captive's progress, and seems wholly unaware that the captive is escaping. This is because the amnesiac protagonist is the captor.
- Occasionally, words will flash across the screen saying various things like "DON'T LEAVE", but one of the messages is "YOU CAN'T HANDLE THE TRUTH". This likely refers to the truth that the protagonist herself is the captor and doesn't remember.
- In the B1 library, there is a newspaper story of a famous doctor who came down with an unknown illness. At first, it's unclear what connection this has with the story. The doctor is heavily implied in the Remember ending to be the protagonist's father, and the reason that she became a Mad Scientist and kidnapper was to cure him.
- Minimalist Cast: The protagonist/captive and her captor are the only defined characters in the game, and they both turn out to be the same person. The only other major characters are the Doctor, the protagonist's father and the blonde girl, who escaped the protagonist.
- Multiple Endings: Two endings, Free and Remember.
- The Free ending is the normal ending, in which the protagonist escapes the basement, only to get shot by police. It is then revealed that she was the amnesiac killer all along.
- The Remember ending, which can be gotten if the key in B5 is used to unlock the last cabinet in the B2 lab, has the protagonist remember everything because of a photo of her and her dad, the doctor. She then leaves and catches the Final Girl who attacked her, making her lose her memory, and takes revenge by stabbing her to death.
- Mushroom Samba: If the protagonist uses the morphine syringe on herself, she will begin to hallucinate the dead captive haunting her.
- Nameless Narrative: None of the major characters have any names. The only names we see, Mike and Alice, belong to unseen characters who are only mentioned briefly and have no role in the story.
- Ontological Mystery: The protagonist is inside a large basement, in a tiny room, with blood all over. She escapes and spends the rest of the game trying to figure out why she is there.
- Playing with Syringes: The lab in B2 reveals that the captor has been experimenting on the captives, killing many of them, for some reason. The Remember ending heavily implies that the protagonist did it to make a cure for her father, who came down with an illness that doctors could not find a cure for.
- The Reveal: The protagonist herself is the captor and killer. The Remember end heavily implies her motive was finding a cure for her terminally ill father through mad science.
- Timed Mission: The protagonist has thirty minutes to find her way out of the basement before she bleeds to death. You can extend the time a bit with the morphine syringe.
- Wham Line: After the already shocking event of the protagonist getting shot just as she escaped, when the policeman who shot her asks a nearby girl if he got the right target, she delivers The Reveal:Y-yes... She killed those men... tortured them... And if I didn’t manage to attack her and escape... she would have killed me too...
- You Wake Up in a Room: The protagonist wakes up in a small room with no idea who she is or how she got there, but she seems to be in captivity of some sort.
