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

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

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

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