Abducted

About the game

You wake up in a containment pod. A gentle voice speaks inside your mind: it is your mother, far away, and she tells you that you have been asleep for a very long time. Someone on the inside has let you out, an earnest researcher who has spent years studying your people and now wants to get you home. Your ship is still on Earth, locked in a silo, and between you and it stand the security forces of a whole secret programme.

Abducted is a first-person dungeon crawler in the old style, seen through your own eyes one grid square at a time. You walk corridors and turn corners in the lab, then out into forests, caves, a warehouse and an aqueduct, with a compass at the top of the screen and a minimap one button away. Guards, police and soldiers come at you in turn-based battles, fought with a raygun and the gear you pick up along the way.

Between outings there is a base to come back to. Your ally's van restores your health and saves the game, and the scrap you collect from crates and defeated enemies buys supplies and upgrades for the raygun and your uniform. Keys, a drawbridge and a few sealed doors stand between you and Silo B.

Mike MacLean built it for the Game Boy Competition 2023 in GB Studio, writing his own first-person engine as a plugin. Version 1.01 fixed a handful of bugs from the competition build. The game has sound effects but no music.

Playing it here

This is a homebrew game made for the Game Boy: a new game by an independent developer, not a commercial release. It runs here in binjgb, a Game Boy emulator compiled to WebAssembly. Click Play, press Enter at the title and read through the opening with X; the first screens explain the controls.

Leaving the van saves the game to the cartridge's battery memory, which is kept in this browser. F2 also saves the emulator state and F4 brings it back, which is worth doing often, since the author warns that the competition build still has rough edges. A gamepad works too.

Controls

A few things worth knowing

Keep your bearings. The letter at the top is your heading. Attacks from behind can spin you round, so check the compass after a fight.

Use the van. Getting in restores HP and MP, and getting out saves.

Spend your scrap. Crates and battles give scrap; turn it into raygun and uniform upgrades and supplies such as MedGel, flares and escape beacons.

Flares and caves. The author notes that flares do not light the caves properly in this version; he published maps of the caves on the game's itch.io page.

Credits and licence

Abducted is by Mike MacLean (grimmrobegames): story, pixel art, game logic and the first-person engine, under the MIT licence. It was made with GB Studio 3.1 (MIT, by Chris Maltby), with an event from Pau Tomàs's Plugin Pak (MIT). The sound effects are from Tronimal's GBFX pack (CC BY 4.0), with a few extra effects by the author. The licence texts are linked from this page.