The Awesome Adventures of Captain Spirit Is the Free Video Game That Will Break Your Heart

Here’s a pitch: What if I told you that right now, you can download a video game that will rip your heart out and leave you crying on the couch? No takers? Well…what if I told you the game is 100 percent free?

Hear me out. The Awesome Adventures of Captain Spirit is available to download now—again, for zero dollars!—on Windows, Xbox One, and PlayStation 4. (Weirdly, Captain Spirit is listed as a demo in the PlayStation Store, but don’t worry—the full game is included.) And it’ll only take one or two hours of your time to experience everything the game has to offer.

Captain Spirit puts the player in control of Chris Eriksen, a 9-year-old boy living with his father in Eugene, Oregon. (Chris’s mother is out of the picture, for reasons that become clear if you play the game attentively.) He is a particularly whimsical kid. The first thing you do is design the costume for his imaginary superheroic alter ego, Captain Spirit, and Chris resolves to spend the day as a crime-stopper.

Once you leave Chris’s bedroom, the game gives you a series of charmingly low-key tasks—confronting a busted water heater in a dark garage, doing a little snowball target practice, finding a "buried treasure" Chris himself clearly buried—which he imagines as epic feats of heroism for Captain Spirit to tackle. (One piece of advice: Just go online and look up the solution to unlocking Chris's dad, Charles’s, cell phone, which is so obtuse that there’s basically no way to solve it without a helping hand.)

But in the middle of this carefree Saturday, there are plenty of signs that Chris’s home life is far less idyllic than his imaginary version. If you dawdle too long in the bedroom, Charles will become increasingly angry, screaming at Chris from the kitchen. When you go out to greet him, Chris will notice that his father is already on his third breakfast beer, spouting vague, buzzed promises about taking him to pick out a Christmas tree. And the conversation eventually turns to the bruises on Chris’s arm, which his father apologizes for.

So yes, fair warning: Captain Spirit is ultimately a game about how a child copes with both loss and abuse, and the game is pretty unflinching about it. There’s a legitimately nerve-jangling moment early in the game when Charles sits down to watch a basketball game—done with his beer, and moving on to whiskey. Chris notices a NERF gun nearby and has to decide whether or not to fire a dart at his father. I’m the kind of player who scours every room in a game, anxious to make sure I don’t miss anything interesting. But in that moment, I hesitated—afraid that Chris’s attempt to play around with his dad would lead to a sudden outburst of violent anger. Video games are a uniquely empathetic medium, and in that moment and others, Chris’s pain, confusion, and fear felt like my own.

Captain Spirit is wise to balance the tension of these interactions with Chris’s charming, playful missions as Captain Spirit. None of these quests is particularly complicated, and there are no achievements or trophies for figuring everything out. Captain Spirit’s rewards are more subtle and internal, as Chris wanders around the house, allowing attentive players to comb through old pictures and documents and piece together all the details about what happened to Chris’s family. My favorite moment was entirely optional, as Chris puts on one of his mother’s old records and lies on the bed, staring quietly and thoughtfully at a water spot on the ceiling.

Captain Spirit was developed by the studio behind the excellent episodic game Life Is Strange, and it takes place in the same universe (though you don’t need to know anything about Life Is Strange to play and enjoy this). The team has a unique talent for identifying the tiny, intimate moments that most video games would skip right over, which makes a game like Captain Strange a meditative, emotional, and—if you’re anything like me—legitimately heart-rending experience.

It certainly has flaws—but Captain Spirit is telling the kind of story these mediums rarely explore, and at a bite-size length that makes it more digestible than your average video game. The game ends with a promise that Chris’s story will continue in Life Is Strange 2, which arrives in September. But even if it’s technically a prologue, Captain Spirit is a compelling, self-contained short story in its own right—worth experiencing even if you never touch a Life Is Strange game. The next time you find yourself scrolling aimlessly through Netflix, looking for a movie that might be worth two hours of your time, give Captain Spirit a shot instead.