The Artful Escape Review
Played on Xbox One (base)
Developed by Beethoven & Dinosaur
Released 9th September 2021
After awarding it the Art Design of the Year, I expected much more from one of Johnny Galvatron's creative efforts.
Story
The story of The Artful Escape is a warming, light-hearted experience that surprisingly doesn't heavily appeal to me. The game follows Francis Vendetti, a young musician who is troubled by which identity he should lead: the rockstar that he's comfortable with, or the follow-up to his famous folk musician uncle that everyone expects him to be. After many self-questioning moments, you can see Francis rocking out across various outlandish worlds in the universe. The whole identity complex that plays out is what grasped me from my daydreaming and back into the game's several cutscene moments in which you can customise your galactic origins. However, the main deterrence I had was world-building. Each land you visit has some nicely fleshed-out backstory and some relatively intriguing narrative set-ups, but they ultimately don't get the job done of making me enjoy these levels. The best way to describe the story behind each one was that they all had solid shells of information, but the core story itself felt lacklustre.
Gameplay
The gameplay takes on three different adaptations. The rock ‘n’ roll, dialogue, and exploration. I don't understand why dialogue is part of this game at all, as it adds little to no flavour to the experience. Its arbitrary nature doesn't influence how the story plays out or anything, instead, it only changes about 2 lines of dialogue per choice. The exploration of the game is mediocre. While exploring the remnants of a refuge city and uncovering its secrets is great and enforces that shell of information, the movement mechanics are awful. The game attempts to tread the line between a walking simulator and a platformer and the results are catastrophic. The jarring shifts and incomplete feel of the jumping and sliding are what bring the exploration down. Finally, the rhythmic action of the game is also sub-par. Instead of being a satisfying collection of beats and instruments that synch to the player's ability like in Guitar Hero or Beat Saber, it guides you by the hand through repeating unsatisfactory music and testing the limits of your short-term memory as you're forced to copy what the game does. The only reason I don't consider it god-awful is because of the fact that you can hold the keys for however long you want, altering the original music to your liking, but even then, it has virtually no difference.
Characters
The characters of The Artful Escape are all eccentric, blooming with a form of personality, yet they're still very forgettable. Despite having strong groundwork on these characters, they all blend into one unmemorable mesh and that might be due to how they treat the main character. Lightman's egotistical showmanship and Violetta's pessimistic view of the world are stark contrasts to each other, but the moment they start babying the character before belittling him and finally treating him like a hero, I stopped caring for them and started forgetting about them.
Atmosphere
The atmosphere of the game is heavily carried by the visuals. It's no secret that this game's main appeal is the intense yet attractive colour palette. The intergalactic purples and celestial blues, provide a representation that could only be shown via the two colours' dynamic and this game capitalises on that. Eventually, the design overstays its welcome and feels quite monotonous but that mostly occurred as the game was wrapping up its encore. Unfortunately, the game doesn't succeed in the music department. Take this part of the review with a grain of salt as it all can be easily blamed on my music tastes. The soundtracks are bland notes of generic 'space' music that honestly bored me while playing. Compared to the incredible cosmic extraordinary of a story and visuals, the music is a shortcoming, to say the least. No noteworthy technical issues or extraordinaires.
Story- 6/10
Gameplay- 4/10
Characters- 4/10
Atmosphere- 5/10
Bad
After serving an unfulfilling story, gameplay that feels like it's in its concept stages and disappointing music, the art design is the only thing it can proudly present without embarrassing itself.
