The Artful Escape Review Vibrant Loud and Empty

The Artful Escape Review: Vibrant, Loud, and Empty

Annapurna Interactive’s new galactic rock musical adventure is a loud but lifeless platformer with some snazzy visuals, and only vaguely about music.

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The Artful Escape Review Vibrant Loud and Empty

Beethoven & Dinosaur’s new chilled out adventure platformer The Artful Escape was in development for six years, with colorfully loud vistas hundreds of guitar licks to show for it. The game wrangles a number of related themes, including identity, self-invention, the capricious and elusive nature of rock’n’roll, self-deception, and youth, but ultimately can’t transform this heady material into a interesting and substantive experience. Even with Annapurna Interactive on publishing duties, a partnership which prompted some eye-popping voice talent (similar to the recent Twelve Minutes in this respect), The Artful Escape has trouble mustering extended attention.

Lanky, bespectacled, and notably privileged Francis Vendetti frets on a cliff in preparation for his folk concert debut. A few strummed acoustic chords quickly transitions to the distorted rock noodling The Artful Escape’s protagonist prefers. This is the central conflict: His dearly departed uncle was a well-known folk singer-songwriter, reportedly the biggest thing to ever make it out of this strange little fort town of Calypso, Colorado, a community who expects Francis to be Johnson Vendetti v2.0 while the nephew aims for alternate quarry.

As it turns out, this makes for a fundamentally weak narrative hook. There’s rarely a point where Francis is duly challenged on this central rebellion. The boy likes what he likes, ancestors be damned – but that query leads him to some lovely environments. A roadie/special effects wiz named Violetta spurs him on to dare and dream higher, while an alien voiced by Jason Schwartzman bequeaths a holographic guitar and connects him with spacefaring soloist Marc Lightman (resonantly played by Carl Weathers). Soon Francis is recruited to The Cosmic Lung spaceship, beaming out to shred alongside alien wildlife throughout The Artful Escape’s “musical multiverse.”

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The Artful Escape Review Vibrant Loud and Empty

That cliff scene asks the player to press a button which will effectively shred distorted scales to whatever The Artful Escape wishes to conjure at any given time. On the game’s different planets, the guitar stimulates backgrounds to explode in color and alien creatures to shimmy in luminescent ecstasy as Francis roams past. He’ll gamely noodle these solos ad infinitum at the drop of a dime, but it’s purely mechanical fluff. Even the occasional playable rhythm game component – where “musical key” symbols appear in thin air or are built into an alien’s face – is dismissively easy, brief, and minimally interactive.

Curiously, this stock-simple routine never affords an opportunity to just goof around. There’s no studio to engage or creation elements to reconfigure; The chords and notes simply change automatically depending on the song, and, well, there’s never really much of a song at all. Maybe the point is that Francis isn’t a songwriter, but a lead guitarist? If so, it makes this supposed musical adventure lifelessly superficial and, for a game which centers on music and carving one’s path, The Artful Escape never really investigates musical creativity at all, just performance and pomp.

The Artful Escape Review Vibrant Loud and Empty

Of course, this would align with Francis’ primary interstellar pursuit, to craft a galactic rock persona to debut at his Calypso concert. There’s very little rhyme or reason to The Artful Escape’s questline, and a few different options in the game – name, place of origin, outfit – allow players to create their own “original” Francis, but none of these choices seemingly matter. In the end, Francis is whoever he’s decided that he is and, outside of one specific sequence where this façade is directly and finally challenged (before being quickly discarded), it’s as superficial and weightless as the rest of this content.

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It’s as if The Artful Escape’s interest in toying with storied rock mythology can’t come up with a coherent statement. Much of it is visually beautiful, but that beauty is tempered by relentless copy-and-pasting; nearly every locale is packed with identical creatures and assets repeated in the foreground and background. It’s attractive and overwhelming but tiresome to stare at. There were also times in the late game where the desire to press the aforementioned “jam with the environment” button wore thin, as it accomplished nothing but the same droning, endlessly variating guitar solo, beautiful and cavernously empty.

It’s a description which broadly fits The Artful Escape. When characters are suddenly reintroduced in the finale, it’s noticeable how little a dent they made in this feather-weight narrative. The story can be completed in a few hours, and there’s occasional amusement and distraction in those hours, but absolutely no catharsis or narrative satisfaction, or even any interesting platforming. For such a visually boisterous experience, The Artful Escape feels more like a chilly museum after closing hours.

Link Source : https://screenrant.com/artful-escape-review/

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