The year is 1992, and you play as Sebastian Lee, a man from Stirling, Scotland who vanished mysteriously and was never heard from again. Kidnapped is the tale of Sebastian, and what he went through after waking up cold and all alone in a dark, dank, bloodied cellar in the basement of a 200 year old mansion. Taking place through five levels, this short psychological horror experience runs for just around an hour and a half.
There's a lot of hit and miss within Kidnapped, while the game starts off promisingly enough with a manor level that constantly shifts and changes, much to the ode of Silent Hills P.T., a couple of the later levels derail entirely. After the manor, the second chapter takes players on a journey through a cavern, which is spooky enough in it's own right, but it's chapter three where things begin to get messy. The latter level turns into somewhat of a hunting simulator, as you must gather various animal pelts for a ritual sacrifice, and the church level beyond that is one massive key finding "puzzle". These two chapters alone are enough to hold back Kidnapped from being a genuinely decent indie horror game, as they greatly detract from the tension that the others worked so hard to set up.
While the game focuses primarily on following a near-linear path and solving rather easy puzzles, it also houses a small FPS combat system. You will be picking up bullets long before you finally lay your hands on the sole gun, and aside from the bears, rabbits, foxes, and stags in the third level you will only come across one enemy type for the entire duration of the game. Needless to say, it's a half-hearted attempt to make Kidnapped into more than just a puzzle-solving walking simulator title, which it would've fared better as in the long run. As far as the "random encounters" feature listed on the store page, I can verify that this is indeed a false claim; all of the enemy spawn points are set in stone, but they are triggered by certain events.
Despite everything, I am giving Kidnapped a recommendation. There's nothing significantly wrong with it now that the developer has patched the majority of the bugs, and at the very least it's a good time killer for about an hour and a half. The controls are very clunky, however, and going up an incline of any sort is a huge pain since it causes the speed of the character to slow dramatically. There are a few good scares, and the atmosphere has a semi-Resident Evil quality to it. The narrative that takes place between levels is also very well done, in both writing technique and voice acting; to top it off, the story is actually worth paying attention to. It would also be nice if there weren't so many useless objects to interact with, it's simply unnecessary. If anything, grab this one on sale and don't hold your standards too high.
Rating: 2.5/5.0 - It's not awful, but it's not great.The Horror Network
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