Some games are like Skinner Boxes, parcelling out rewards for pulling the right levers. Others are like slot machines, ding-dinging serotonin receptors with random victory. Some are like playground dodgeball or an after-school fight club behind the McDonald’s dumpster. Never have I played a game like the intro to a Parliament record: Partying on the mothership / I am the mothership connection / Gettin’ down in 3-D / Light year groovin’.
Funk isn’t a perfect comparison for The Artful Escape, a game specifically about rock ‘n’ roll and a young prodigy’s journey to guitar stardom. But The Artful Escape is also a game about free association, so let’s indulge in some. The Artful Escape is like riding an elephant-sized moth toward the setting sun. It’s like sliding down an endless tree branch in a magical forest. It’s like tuning into another dimension. You actually do all of these things in the game, but they’re also all metaphors, man.
In the vein of David Bowie and his cosmic alter ego Ziggy Stardust, The Artful Escape follows the inception of protagonist Francis Vendetti’s psychedelic stage persona. Francis is a small-town sci-fi geek whose uncle was a folk music legend. On the evening before his first show, a celebration of his uncle’s greatest hits, Francis encounters a series of intergalactic beings who force him to confront his own mundanity, but also, his own prodigiousness. To the public, he’s the ghost of a folk legend, but privately, Francis rocks. As one manic-pixie laser-light artist tells him, “You dress like a drifter but you sound like a space opera.” With pressure mounting from his small-town neighbors to take up his uncle’s mantle, Francis escapes his childhood bedroom into the night, where a brain-in-a-vat alien meets him outside his home to escort him to the cosmic extraordinary, a dreamlike acid trip to the “grey matter between the lobes of the universe.”
“To shred a sci-fi guitar odyssey, hold X,” the game instructs. Francis must shed his former self and generate a new storyline for his life—that of his dimension-hopping, space opera stage persona. Between skating down ice mountains and bouncing off musical bubbles, Francis jams with various intergalactic celebrities, like the terrifying beast known as the Glamourgonn, sometimes to save his life.
The Artful Escape goes down easy. It’s four to five pure, joyous hours of light platforming across vivid, kaleidoscopic landscapes full of alienesque beasts and greenery. Every second of the game is entertaining. In lieu of dry monologue, one side character’s backstory unfurls through an interactive digital museum across a path he once traveled; and instead of basic platforming, Francis can manifest light pillars and swarms of fireflies just by holding X and playing guitar. (And that guitar always resonates with each zone’s dreamy background music.) When Francis performs a show, a music-making mechanic appears—more Simon Says than *Guitar Hero—*that prompts the player to hit buttons or triggers, at any pace or rhythm, in line with a prompt. The goal is to be expressive, not correct.
