LOS ANGELES—French game development studio Dontnod Entertainment didn't make waves with its first big triple-A release, Remember Me. It took scaling down the scope of its projects to achieve real success. That success came with critically acclaimed adventure game Life Is Strange, which we at Ars liked quite a bit.

Dontnod and publisher Square-Enix announced The Awesome Adventures of Captain Spirit this week at E3. It's a two-hour-long, free-to-download game for PS4, Xbox One, and PC that takes place in the same universe as Life Is Strange.

It's not the first Life Is Strange spinoff. Last year, a multi-part prequel series called Before the Storm was released. But while that tied directly into the events of the first batch of Life Is Strange episodes, Captain Spirit is more tangentially related. Still, Dontnod Executive Producer Luc Baghadoust said that there will be hints in Captain Spirit's conclusion about what to expect from Life Is Strange 2.

We attended a 30-minute demonstration for the early parts of Captain Spirit at E3 with Baghadoust as our tour guide. Based on what we saw, there's no reason not to grab this free game when it comes out on June 26 if you liked Life Is Strange's approach to storytelling.

Creating a superhero

The game opens with a boy named Chris in his bedroom, playing with action figures. His active imagination has conjured a superhero named Captain Spirit, and we learn a bit about his vision for that figure through his play. We also learn that Chris dreams of being a superhero; we won't spoil how the game has fun playing with expectations about whether he really has powers.

Square-Enix

Square-Enix

Square-Enix

Square-Enix

Square-Enix

In that opening sequence, Chris begins drawing a costume for Captain Spirit, and the player can pick what he draws—whether Spirit should be colorful or dark, whether he should have a helmet or a mask, and so on.

After that, you can explore Chris' room. There are teddy bears, toy weapons, and a PlayStation 2 to examine. And you can check out the rest of the house, too.

Imagination vs. reality

Once Chris leaves his room, we learn pretty quickly that a tragedy has happened recently. We watch him go through dialogue choices at breakfast with his father and learned they're both going through a tough time. Chris' mother is gone for good, though we don't know if she left or she died—and his father, while loving, has issues. We see him drink three beers for breakfast, for example.

Captain Spirit seems to be a story about imagination and how it helps us cope with reality. Chris dreams of being a superhero in part because that would give him more power over his life.

For the rest of our demo, Baghadoust led Chris through the process of finding the components he needs to make his superhero outfit. The household items that Chris can gather depend on which choices you made when drawing the superhero earlier in the game.

Once the outfit is built, Chris has the courage to go to parts of the house he had been scared of previously. We saw him trepidatiously open a door to find himself in a strange, terrifying landscape that clearly isn't part of his home. In it, a monster called Water Eater makes scary noises.

It soon becomes apparent that this is all in his imagination; "Water Eater" is actually the water heater. This was just one example of the game playing with expectations and blurring the lines between reality and Chris' active imagination.

Just like Life Is Strange, interactivity is not deep in Captain Spirit. It's a linear story that gives you a few choices that customize the outcome and exactly what happens along the way. But that worked beautifully in Life Is Strange, so if you enjoyed that game, Captain Spirit will probably be worth checking out before you hit Life Is Strange 2.