Skip to main content

The Awesome Adventures of Captain Spirit review – poignant pipe dreams

PS4, Xbox One, PC; Dontnod/Square Enix
This small-scale game, in which you play a child roaming his house, shows how imagination makes the mundane magical

The Awesome Adventures of Captain Spirit is a short game about mundane things that are imbued with significance by the mind of a child. We play as Chris, a lonely boy with an active imagination and a drunk for a father. Dressed up in a face-paint mask and a costume assembled from cardboard and spray-paint, he is immersed in a superhero fantasy that gives him strength, bravery and telekinetic powers; this being a video game, you wonder whether those powers might turn out to be more than an eight-year-old’s fabrication.

Chris’s imagination takes him on adventures around his rather sad little house on a sunlit, snowy Saturday morning, while his father slowly passes out in front of the TV. A junkpile in his yard becomes a maze concealing treasure; the water-heater in the dark utility room becomes a monster to overcome; after clearing away his father’s beer cans, he uses them for snowball target practice. Exploring their home, we discover things about Chris and his dad through the artefacts of everyday life: documents and photos stashed in the garage, hidden report cards, toys and old trophies and books on the shelves.

Continue reading...

from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2KeQedm

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Knives Out review – Daniel Craig goes Columbo in Cluedo whodunnit

Craig grills an all-star lineup of suspects when a wealthy novelist is found dead in Rian Johnson’s sharp, country-house murder mystery R ian Johnson unsheathes an entertainingly nasty, if insubstantial detective mystery with his new film, Knives Out. Back in 2005, his debut movie Brick (a high-school thriller) paid tribute to the hardboiled noir genre. Now he does the same thing for cosy crime, although there is nothing that cosy about it. Knives Out has a country house full of frowning suspects, deadpan servants and smirking ne’er-do-wells and an amusing performance from Daniel Craig as Benoît Blanc, the brilliant amateur sleuth from Louisiana who annoys the hell out of one and all by smiling enigmatically, occasionally plinking a jarring high note on the piano during the drawing-room interrogation and pronouncing in his southern burr: “Ah suh-spect far-wuhl play!” Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2L0NKO4
Post a Comment
Read more

Tracey Emin decorates Regent's Park and a celebration of Islamic creativity – the week in art

Emin and others survey the state of sculpture, Glenn Brown takes his decadent imagination to Newcastle and artists offer northern exposure – all in your weekly dispatch Frieze Sculpture Park Tracey Emin, Barry Flanagan and John Baldessari are among the artists decorating Regent’s Park with a free survey of the state of sculpture. • Regent’s Park, London , 4 July until 7 October. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2IDCpPV
Post a Comment
Read more

When Brooklyn was queer: telling the story of the borough's LGBTQ past

In a new book, Hugh Ryan explores the untold history of queer life in Brooklyn from the 1850s forward, revealing some unlikely truths For five years Hugh Ryan has been hunting queer ghosts through the streets of Brooklyn, amid the racks of New York’s public libraries, among its court records and yellow newspaper clippings to build a picture of their lost world. The result is When Brooklyn Was Queer, a funny, tender and disturbing history of LGBTQ life that starts in an era, the 1850s, when those letters meant nothing and ends before the Stonewall riots started the modern era of gay politics. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2H9Zexs
Post a Comment
Read more