The Awesome Adventures of Captain Spirit – PS4 | Review

By Joe Anderson
| 26th June 2018
| PS4, Review
| 2

A child’s imagination is a wonderful thing, so the fact DontNod Entertainment has chosen to focus on this for its introduction to Life is Strange 2 is no bad thing, although this escape often masks other, more important parts of the story, which is the case in the recently released demo, known as The Awesome Adventures of Captain Spirit.

Captain Spirit centres around Chris, a young boy with a superhero persona. You’ll spend the few hours you’re with him exploring his world, which starts off innocently enough but soon unveils the sadness which both he and his father have had to endure.

As with other games in the series, the more you explore, the more of the story you’ll start to uncover, by finding clues in hidden letters, or just by looking around and putting the pieces together one by one, although you’ll have a lot of fun doing so thanks to Chris’s imagination.

Captain Spirit plays a large part in the demo, With Chris starting off by thinking up this new superhero and having you helping him along the way, making choices as to what his outfit should look like before exploring the house and yard to help bring it to life. As you explore you’ll interact with objects, having the options to take out the recycling, make your dad Mac ‘n’ cheese or try to unblock his mobile phone so you can play a game. There is lots to find and interact with and to add a twist, you can often use Captain Spirit’s powers to interact in a different way; Can you crush a can with his mighty strength?

Chris’s imagination comes into play in other ways too, taking you into dream worlds where you’ll face up to Captain Spirit’s enemies. This offers an interesting take on just exploring the nearby area, instead, taking you inside Chris’s imagination and seeing what he sees. All of this plays into the to-do list which makes up Chris’s Saturday, giving you a number of objectives to complete, although you can still complete the demo without managing them all.

There’s certainly plenty of hints at what’s to come on the first full episode in terms of changes. For instance in the first scene, if you take too long to go downstairs for breakfast you can hear Chris’s dad get angrier the longer you take. It’ll be interesting to see how mechanics like this carry over. It certainly had the effect of making me hurry along a little bit faster. There’s also hints the game may focus on different characters too, which may see us using all manner of powers throughout the upcoming episodes, which could change the way we play the game completely.

Final Impressions

The demo may only take a few hours to complete everything there is to see, but The Awesome Adventures of Captain Spirit is a fantastic introduction to Life is Strange 2. Thanks to new mechanics and abilities It changes the way you approach the game and I have a feeling the best is yet to come. Either way, we know now we’ll be hearing more from Chris and Captain Spirit and that can only be a good thing.

*Code kindly provided by the publisher for review*

Developer: DontNod Entertainment / Publisher: Square Enix
Release date: 26/06/2018
Platforms: PS4
Platform Reviewed on: PS4 Pro