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Warning: This review contains minor spoilers for Life Is Strange and The Awesome Adventures of Captain Spirit
The Awesome Adventures of Captain Spirit is a short episode of Life is Strange before the next Life Is Strange 2, and it costs nothing to download and play. A cynic could call a simple act of marketing, a demo to whet our appetites. But Captain Spirit has the impression of being much more than that, despite the fact that it remains only one place and ends rather quickly. It looks more like Ground Zeroes to Life than The Strange 2's Phantom Pain: it suggests what might be the next series, with a nice visual upgrade and some new mechanics, but it also looks whole. From the moment Sufjan Stevens was captivated by the beautiful song "Death with Dignity", I was hooked on The Awesome Adventures of Captain Spirit. It's a beautiful game.
Captain Spirit is the playful alter-ego of Chris Eriksen's superheroes, a boy who loves comics, an unvarnished sense of childish wonder and a bubbling inner turmoil and sorrow that only digs the surface . Chris lives alone with his father, Charles, a former basketball player whose trajectory has been drifting for years. The pair lives alone in a drab, cheap house on the outskirts of Beaver Creek. Chris's mother died sometime ago, and without going into details, there are parallels to Chloe's situation in the first version of Life is Strange. It is strange to see Captain Spirit dive so explicitly into this same emotional well, because otherwise, it's really his own thing, despite some interesting links to the original game for players in the eyes of the world. eagle to find and speculate.
The game – which lasts maybe three hours if you're a finalist, but can be accelerated much faster – runs on a single Saturday morning. It opens, charming, with Chris scribbling a superhero costume, stunned at the prospect of having a full day to play. It's up to you to decide how you want to spend this Saturday. Most of the game's goals are strictly optional, and you can "finish" the game after you finish a few, but Chris's stated desire is to go on an adventure under the name of Captain Spirit. These go from banal to fantastic – Captain Spirit needs to throw snowballs on beer bottles to improve his goal and play with all his toys for "check-in" on it, but he also has to assemble the parts of his costume to go on bigger adventures, like defeating the Snowmonger (an evil-looking snowman), and the "monster" of hoarding water in his house (a faulty water heater) ). There is a whole mythology in Chris' games and fantasies, and they are a pleasure to dig.
Mechanically, accomplishing these goals boils down to standard adventure game puzzles. You travel around the interior and courtyard of Eriksen House, accumulating your inventory and discovering how to solve many puzzles. In fact, Captain Spirit is much more a classic adventure game than many titles of the genre since The Walking Dead of Telltale, and it's even better. The puzzles, although they are rarely difficult, have a good sense of logic and order that make them satisfying.
Chris is also a great character. It's a 10-year-old kid who looks like a kid, which is rare not only in games, but in all media. He faces a difficult life as best he can, and succeeds as a likeable figure. He also has a powerful imagination, which sometimes sends him into fancy sequences while he fights the "enemies" of Captain Spirit. These are cinematic rather than playable sections, but they are nonetheless visually inventive and entertaining, serving as metaphors for Chris' sorrow and fears, and they give a glimpse of how the boy's mind works. The game is also terribly timid as to whether Chris has some sort of power similar to Max's ability to go back in time in the first game. The line is cleverly scrambled because Chris is often shown doing what looks like telekinesis for a withdrawal to reveal that it was something much more banal – a remote control tucked in his hidden hand when he turn on the TV, "to give an example. But there is a strong indication that there is more than what we see. In a charming way, these moments – and the fantastic sequences – are labeled as "heroic" choices, which can be triggered when Chris wants to do something that looks like a hero.
Between these moments of imaginary bravado, you'll be brought back to earth when you search through boxes and find letters and drawings from Chris's mother, or discover things that her father did not want to see. Captain Spirit moves surprisingly, and the Sufjan Stevens track mentioned above is used a few times to have a devastating effect. I ended up playing three times with Captain Spirit to test all the different dialogue options, and even though I could not affect a really meaningful change – the end was the same each time – pick up the game and find it all that was hidden there was a satisfying experience.
As Chris enjoys his morning, his father sits on the couch watching basketball and drinking, occasionally giving compliments or barking as his mood – and sobriety – changes. Without, once again, spoiling the details, Charles is a fundamentally bad father, a heavy drinker with a series of violence that, presumably, worsens with time. We see it through his son's eyes, however, and Chris's naivety – who only sees his father's efforts and is too young to fully understand how badly things went wrong – is heartbreaking. At some point in the game, you can discover beautiful things that Charles has planned for his son, and Chris is very vocal about how much he loves his father.
The first Life is Strange was often quite broad with the characters, especially when you first met them, but there was an underlying complexity for them. It's even more true here and the important thing with Charles, at least in this short episode, is that he's a more complex character than a pure and simple monster – however, it never seems that writers excuse how awful it is. It is a hard line to walk, but the game successfully condemns the man in a realistic way, recognizing that the attackers with a bit of humanity are still, at their core, aggressors. The script is tight too, with a dialogue without terms or incongruities. Some exchanges begin to ring once you have played several times and have an idea of how all the pieces fit together, but it may be inevitable.
Life is Strange has gained a huge cult, and whether you're a veteran or a newcomer, Captain Spirit captures much of the original game's appeal. No matter how you rank Captain Spirit's Awesome Adventures – be it a standalone adventure, a demo or a prologue – it's a beautiful game, and that makes you all the more excited about Life's Strange 2.
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