Abducted is a solo or co-op story-telling tabletop role-playing game that places players in the shoes of a human character who has been abruptly abducted by an alien race.
Players create both their human character and their alien character, determining their characteristics and motivations, and then utilize a deck of playing cards, with corresponding in-game tables, as prompts to progress the story forward.
As the game unfolds, players journal their experiences in first-person, chronicling their struggles to understand and communicate with their alien captors, their attempts to escape, and the emotional toll of being forcibly removed from their home planet.
With each draw of the deck, players are presented with new challenges and opportunities, and must use their wit, cunning, empathy, or aggression to navigate the alien environment they find themselves in. Abducted is a game that tests players’ ability to think creatively, empathize deeply, and write compelling narratives as they craft their own unique stories of survival in a world that is completely foreign to them.
(Co-op rules for 1 human and 1 alien player are included!)
I don’t think any video game I’ve ever played that tries to deliberately play up the “liminal spaces” angle has ever achieved even a quarter the liminality captured by sheer accident in the act of backtracking in a certain brand of late 1990s to early 2000s console RPGs.
You know the ones – from that era where the idea of linear, event-driven stories had just caught on, but the practice of putting the world map itself on rails wasn’t yet de rigeur, so you could in theory revisit anyplace you’d ever been, including the areas that literally only existed for the purpose of one specific setpiece.
When you returned to such an area, all of the monsters and NPCs would be gone, and there’d be no music or audio ambience because no non-event-related soundtrack for that area had ever been written, which made the game’s regular sound effects seem conspicuously louder. Just wandering around in this empty, silent backdrop; maybe you’d run into an NPC the devs forgot to dummy out who still acts like the event is ongoing, repeating now-contextless lines of dialogue and gesturing frantically at thin air. Maybe you’d stumble upon a treasure chest you missed the first time around, and the “item get” jingle would crack like a gunshot. Maybe there’d even be a room where the devs neglected to unset the event flag, and you’d suddenly be assailed by pulse-pounding techno heralding the approach of absolutely nothing.
Like, forget the Backrooms – give me a game that plays with that.
My favourite thing about this is, he didn’t even have to call him ‘Captain’ he could have used the screen-name but he was SO MARRIED TO THE IMMERSION that he DID.
Passenger: CAPTAIIIIN!!!
Captain: y-yeah?
Passenger: LOOOOOOOK!
(FULL BLAST PIRATES OF THE CARRIBEAN MUSIC)
my fav.
Fun fact, the developers of this game loved this video so much that they made it an official advertisement of the game
This is the best advertisement for a video game ever made.
