Less a full game, more a teaser for what's to come, The Awesome Adventures of Captain Spirit introduces the next setting and potentially a few of the characters from the upcoming Life is Strange 2, due to be released in a couple of months from the time this blog goes up. It's a completely free adventure game too, which as far as short-form interactive advertisements go is definitely my preferred delivery method. The entire game takes place on a single lazy Saturday in the Eriksen estate in a small town somewhere in Oregon, as the 9-year-old Chris imagines various superhero adventures as his telekinetic alias Captain Spirit while his father Charles mostly just drinks hard liquor and yells at a basketball game. Some sadly inevitable interplay occurs between these two characters throughout the course of the day, finishing with a dialogue scene that can go one of several ways and a cliffhanger (cliff-floater?) ending that will no doubt be addressed when Life is Strange 2 finally shows up.

Anyone who has played either of the Life is Strange episodic adventure seasons so far will be right at home here, as much of the aesthetic direction and user interface remains intact here. Captain Spirit has a bit more a classic adventure game focus than its predecessors, with a number of goals to pursue and puzzle items to find, but it's still couched in quiet moments and incidental storytelling through various documents you can find that work to fill in the missing pieces of backstory. The game's very straight up about how both Charles and Chris are in bereavement for their wife and mother (respectively) and that Charles is coping less well than his sensitive son, but additional little snippets of subtext come through courtesy of the letters and news items that Chris finds while exploring the house. Missable details like the criminal nature of Emily Eriksen's death, Charles's dire financial situation, or the relationship between the Eriksens and Chris's maternal grandparents. How much of this will play a part in Life is Strange 2 remains to be seen, however.

I keep wanting to liken this game to Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes, in part because it was released to build hype for a much larger game with the same mechanics and atmosphere, but also because it doesn't require you to accomplish the already meager set of goals it presents: the actual story part of the game, and the part that'll no doubt have the most relevance in what's to come next, takes less than twenty minutes of interaction. You have a list of "awesome superhero tasks" to accomplish, but you can complete the game without concluding any of them. It's more that the game is inviting you to take a deeper dive into Chris's world of heroes and villains if you want, but if not here's a few succinct cutscenes that provides the handful of relevant details about his character that you'll take into Life is Strange 2. Personally, I'm always into adventure games that let environmental storytelling and exploration do most of the narrative legwork - it's why I liked Gone Home, lack of "excitement" notwithstanding - and though Captain Spirit is a deliberately slight game there's a lot of those incidental details to find across the Eriksen home. You can even play a Flappy Bird game with Hawt Dawg Man if you'd like, though good luck figuring out that phone password without googling.

All in all, it's hard to give Captain Spirit too much credit without seeing the final product it relates to. Some part of me wanted to wait until LIS2's season was already out in full and in my possession, treating Captain Spirit like an "Episode 0" to better get a sense of its connections to the main game, but FOMO won out in the end and I just can't say no to a free game as elaborate as this one. Be sure to take the final rating with a grain of salt: there's little chance you haven't already played this if you enjoyed Life is Strange, and it's free to try regardless.

Rating: 4 out of 5.