This review contains mild spoilers for the ending of the 2-3 hour demo of The Awesome Adventures of Captain Spirit.
Games that address the hard truths of reality, like child abuse, are a rarity -- to say the least.
So it's truly a shame when games that take this admirable risk too often end with an anxious turn toward the fantastical. And it's a dissonance that almost always comes at the expense of the real-world themes the story set out to explore.
SEE ALSO:'Vampyr' is a decent idea wrapped up in a terrible video gamePerhaps no studio and series encapsulates this more than DONTNOD's narrative adventure game Life is Strange, and by extension, its free 2-3 hour spinoff The Awesome Adventures of Captain Spirit. A precursor demo to Life is Strange 2, Captain Spirittells a story set in the same universe but only tangentially related to the sequel.
You play as 10-year-old Chris, a boy with a huge imagination and not many friends to play with that aren't his make-believe superhero squad. We meet the father-son duo right after they've moved into their wintry, isolating new house following the tragic death of the family's matriach.
You spend an ordinary afternoon completing superhero tasks, like defeating the evil "Water Eater" to bring the hot water back, along with some other wonderfully executed set pieces grounded in magical realism. Charles, on the other hand, spends his day making empty promises to his son, slumped in a chair and getting angry drunk at the basketball game on TV.
The more you learn of their situation through items around the house and brief interactions, the clearer it becomes that Chris is not safe under his father's care. It's heavily implied, whether through the concerning bruise on his arm or pleading letters from grandparents asking to take over as Chris' caregivers, that the young boy is being abused.
And this is where The Awesome Adventures of Captain Spirittriumphs, as it contrasts the ugly reality of Chris' circumstances with the beautiful fantasy world a kid who needs to escape creates for himself.
The complex, abusive relationship at the heart of this "Life is Strange 2" demoCredit: square enixUnlike the first Life is Strange,Chris doesn't have real superpowers, outside his natural gift for finding happiness even in the bleakest mundanity.
In place of Max's ability to rewind time, you can instead perform these mundane tasks in the "superhero" way. Like turning on the TV with a Jedi mind trick -- by holding the remote behind your back.
Also unlike Life is Strange, Captain Spiritexplores the interiority of youth with a certain amount of preciousness but while mercifully avoiding its predecessor's egregiousness (DONTNOD may never live down its unironic use of "hella" outdated slang). On the whole, the caliber of writing is improved, aside from a few hackneyed missteps that namely happen in the final scene.
At one point Chris completes his homemade Captain Spirit costume and it transports him to a badassFinal Fantasy-esque battle animation. The music swells as he shoots fireballs, raising his fist in triumph -- before the camera abruptly cuts back to the reality, where he's just a little boy in a dingy garage, tape on his chest, and a tinfoil helmet.
You cannot help but smile. Not because the game invites you to laugh at Chris, but because you remember the days of taking play that seriously. And the whole game is a reminder of how profoundly worthwhile it can be to take play that seriously.
"Captain Spirit" paints a beautiful portrait of a child's inner worldCredit: square enixDONTNOD even brings some rare and important nuances to its depiction of an abusive father, despite the occasional overreach. Many portrayals, even in TV and film, offer little more than one-dimensional villains for audiences to hate, negating the truly insidious nature of parental abuse.
But Charles and Chris share moments of genuine love, which are soured only by his father's sudden bursts of anger. You're given options to interact with him, like shooting at him with a NERF gun, that left me genuinely afraid and uncertain of how Charles might react.
The game deftly plays into this tension, immersing you in Chris' experience of abuse -- which can hurt even more when your abuser seems at times redeemable and sympathetic. My anxiety over shooting Charles with the NERF gun, for example, ended in a flood of relief when he responded by playfully feigning death.
And that relief only made his unpredictable outburst when I failed to answer the phone in time all the more startling and distressing.
Not all childish play is fun, but it is always valuableCredit: square enixBut its precisely the poignancy of Captain Spirit's realism that makes its ending feel so botched.
Without giving too much away, there is a turn from just touches of magical realism into all-out fantasy. And to a player with a personal experience with child abuses, it reads like an unfortunate cheapening of its very real portrait of how we can turn to play as a way to process trauma, and build a sense of agency through one's own imagination.
Granted, this is a demo, so hopefully it's not the true ending to Chris' story. But regardless, it'll be hard to course correct from what the final scene sets up forLife is Strange 2.
As a video game that embodies the heroics of everyday survivors, The Awesome Adventures of Captain Spiritachieves something difficult, moving, and exemplary. But like so many others like it, this profound achievement is undercut by a seeming lack of confidence to let players sit with that reality.
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