'Captain Spirit' is a flawed, admirable game about escapism and abuse
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.
Perhaps 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 Spirit tells 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 Spirit triumphs, as it contrasts the ugly reality of Chris' circumstances with the beautiful fantasy world a kid who needs to escape creates for himself.
Unlike 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 Spirit explores 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 badass Final 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.
DONTNOD 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.
But 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 for Life is Strange 2.
As a video game that embodies the heroics of everyday survivors, The Awesome Adventures of Captain Spirit achieves 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.
Topics Gaming
Jess is an LA-based culture critic who covers intimacy in the digital age, from sex and relationship to weed and all media (tv, games, film, the web). Previously associate editor at Kill Screen, you can also find her words on Vice, The Atlantic, Rolling Stone, Vox, and others. She is a Brazilian-Swiss American immigrant with a love for all things weird and magical.
