Captain Spleen ][

Captain Spleen ][ is an amateur comedy adventure for DOS from 1997, the second entry in a sci-fi series created by Colin Gagnon. It is a classic piece of home-made software from the era when games like this spread for free across BBSes and early websites — and that origin is also the source of its greatest strength: the sheer cheek with which it makes fun of itself.

The plot is built on demolishing the fourth wall. A shadowy organisation called M.S.D.O.S. kidnaps the game's actual creators, Colin Gagnon and Robert Randall, and Captain Spleen — their own creation — has to set out and rescue them. The game jokes about its own making, about computers, and about genre clichés, with humour landing somewhere between a school notebook full of absurd doodles and a parody of the big space adventure games.

Unlike the first instalment, which was keyboard-driven, the second Spleen switched to a purely mouse-based point-and-click interface, which makes it considerably more comfortable to play. You wander between screens, pick up objects, combine them and click on anything that might produce a reaction — often more for the one-liner than for progress. Digitised sound effects were another novelty, an ambitious step for a hobby project that at the time required a Sound Blaster compatible card.

It is fair to say what you are getting: the artwork is unpolished, the puzzle logic occasionally strictly private, and the whole thing is held together by enthusiasm rather than craft. This is not a lost gem of the genre; it is an honest window into the world of nineties freeware, where one author handled the art, the code and the script — and was clearly enjoying himself. If that brand of computing folk art appeals to you, Spleen rewards you with warm, sincerely goofy humour.

You can play it on oldgame.cz directly in your browser, no installation and no hunting for old hardware.