Captured 2 review – One of the best anomaly games available

That’s not to say you have to embrace Captured 2’s lore and themes. You can skip right through its cutscenes and get down to the serious business of spot-the-difference in each loop if you’d rather. Spot all the anomalies and you proceed to the next day. Fail, and you start that day all over again.

Sometimes it’s obvious, like the aforementioned porta-potty. But other times, you’ll have to scour every inch of every room. With a few exceptions, Captured 2’s suburban domicile has a more familiar, non-liminal quality, which requires you pay extra attention compared to, say, The Exit 8.

The lack of windows and lighting will seriously unsettle you, and it’s brown trousers time when one of the game’s four monsters puts in an appearance, unless you’ve enabled story-only mode. But in a similar manner to the Cmabrigde Uinervtisy eeffct, your brain is telling you what to expect.

I can’t count the number of times I overlooked an absent object, just because my brain filled in the gap. I’m happy to report, however, compared to the original game, there are fewer missing objects and many more creative anomalies. Forget Psycho: Captured 2 will put you off shower curtains for life.

Once you’ve spotted an anomaly, you also have to scan and classify it, whether that’s electrical, wall writing, a deformed room and so on. The latter type often sends you on a detour through the Backrooms, the Poolrooms, where liminal unease does get a look in.

Related: Captured 2 walkthrough – Anomaly and monster guide

Scanning eats up your camcorder’s battery life, so you’ll also be frantically looking out for spare batteries. When you do encounter the entities (each loop you’ll pray they don’t put in an appearance) you’ll be thoroughly traumatised, whether you elude them or not. Ring-a-Ding may be the easiest to elude but it’s by far the most terrifying because, like many a child, there’s a good chance you owned the toy telephone that makes up its body.

Once again, Captured 2’s familiarity adds to its fear factor, but you’ll also grow to dread the Day 2 and Day 3 loops which, aside from extending the game, add new rooms to explore, new entities to evade and a slowly-draining sanity mechanic. Soon you’re juggling anomaly spotting, monster-dodging and battery collecting, all the while shivering at every creak or flicker.

Lore-hounds will love how this sequel delves into the reasons that your protagonist, and the previous game’s main character, have found themselves in this situation. It’ll also raise a smile if you’re a fan of Greek mythology.

My one gripe is that while the game does a better job of cataloguing the anomalies (there’s a scrapbook that gradually fills in as you play), there’s no way to stop anomalies repeating. The Exit 8, on the other hand, won’t show you ones you’ve already identified, which is far handier for completionists.

Captured 2 takes the original and uses it as the foundation to build something rather special. Gripping and nerve-wracking in equal measure, and with one hell of a touching ending, it’s one of the best anomaly games I’ve played in ages.