The Artful Escape (Xbox Series X)
Francis Vendetti was born in the shadow of his uncle. Johnson Vendetti was a folk rock superstar who brought prosperity to the small town of Calypso, Colorado, but when he passed on, he passed down a burden to Francis. Everyone in the town wanted it to be reinvigorated by a generational encore via Francis, but they can’t believe he’ll achieve it through anything but replaying the hits like he was just a living record player. Francis does love music, but the folk anthems of his uncle do not resonate with him, and after a fateful encounter with a strange woman, he finally finds The Artful Escape from the humdrum path he was put on.
The Artful Escape is a video game experience more about rocking the body electric than facing some adversity. It is a story told through passionate sound and extravagant visuals, through creative expression rather than mechanical complexity. Despite a side-scrolling presentation and some portions where you need to play the guitar in a specific manner, it is only a platformer in so much that jumping is how you travel through the world and the music you play is not some challenge to keep the rhythm. The Artful Escape is a story game through and through, but Francis Vendetti’s tale is one made compelling not only through a grounded relatable internal struggle juxtaposed against surreal and bombastic visuals and sound, but through a layer of interactivity that ensures he is not merely moving from the mold of his uncle’s career path to the mold of a concrete course of events.
Francis’s journey of self-discovery begins when a fateful alien visitation late at night leads to him traveling to the Cosmic Extraordinary, a realm of sight and sound that is exuberant, extravagant, and outrageous, a far contrast from the humble settings of folk music. Francis immediately feels this galactic expanse and its embrace of psychedelic rock and roll is closer to his musical identity, but a radical life change is not so easily made. The journey in The Artful Escape takes Francis from planet to planet in a spaceship called the Cosmic Lung, Francis building up his new self but also struggling on how to deal with his old insecurities and obligations. Parts of the experience are clear metaphors for his reinvention and the obstacles to it while others are indulgent feasts of alien design and sometimes absurdist humor. A tight runtime keeps it from losing itself too much in the ecstasy of its sensory extravagance and there is some cohesion to this slice of space that tries to break away from conventions with its alien designs and environments. You will first encounter a species on the Cosmic Lung only to later come across their homeworld, and there’s an ongoing visual motif across the universe involving the five button indicators used to play music that appears both in the moments you must play and on creatures and objects who never need hear your song if you elect not to play.
However, rocking out on your electric guitar is constantly encouraged as you traverse the alien worlds. The sound of your riffing brings many environments to life and blends well even into areas with different tones. It can sometimes swallow the background track or start to sound a little repetitive, but the harmony with the environment makes constant strumming satisfying despite its simplicity. You don’t have much else to worry about while walking between important locations so you can relax and take in the intertwined sights and sounds, areas rolling out new reactive parts of the environment to keep you impressed as you absorb the wondrous sights. Some are explosive colorful bursts, but the game achieves some contrast with unusual acidic flats and a sprawling desert as well. It is a cosmic tour where there’s always something new where you touch down next to play your odd form of concert, as Francis was abducted primarily to be the opening act for the legendary talent Lightman.
Lightman, voiced by prolific actor Carl Weathers, and Violetta, the strange woman you meet near the start, are the backbone of your personal interactions as Francis, the human anchors to an out of this world experience who snap him away from his sometimes indulgent or awkward interactions with the aliens he encounter. The human trio all have their own personal reason for playing this interstellar concert and face some radical complications to their personal goals, but it’s not quite the concert tour one might expect on Earth. Rather than standing in place and playing, you must traverse hostile planets as you play and come in contact with specific creatures who will judge your sound. There is no true danger in The Artful Escape though, failure not really an option even during the moments where you are expected to play a certain way. When a series of five symbols appear, they’ll begin to glow in a certain order representing different notes. These can manifest as a creature’s eyes or markings on a wall and are the odd cosmic constant mentioned earlier that feels less contrived because it doesn’t always lead to a play session, but the interaction with them when it occurs is a quite simple test of sound-and-repeat. You’ll see the symbols light up and need to press the right buttons to play the sound back, although the game encourages you to put your own spin on it with how you space the notes so it’s somewhat your sound despite following the instruction. Mess up a note though and the sequence will helpfully be repeated again, the game less concerned with a challenge and more giving you a means of participating in the creation of sound rather than too passively observing this tale unfold.
A more interesting element of the interactivity arises in the moments where you can pick Francis’s dialogue and choices. While the main path of the narrative is set in stone, there is still a good degree of divergence based on how you reply or act in key moments. Whether it’s on an alien talk show or in the odd mall-like closet of a fashionista’s desert-skimming vessel, you do get to take the reins on how Francis’s sci-fi electric guitar shredding persona takes shape. Building up a mythology like a supposed home planet and various escapades and customizing your look with new outfits with an accommodating range of colors makes this path not the one developer Beethoven and Dinosaur created for all players to experience, but one with its own identity that is likely to be different from most any other player’s experience just by way of the many moments you can choose your core self. Every bit of dialogue is spoken as well meaning that you’ll hear Francis reiterate the identity chosen down his path of self-discovery, affirming moments all the more impactful because you weren’t just spoon-fed the shape Francis will be by the end of the adventure.
Admittedly, there are times you can crave a bit more substance to the way the adventure actually plays. There can be moments where you are encouraged to free style on your guitar as you bask in the splendor of a moment, but even if you drop down a pit while jumping about it just sets you back nicely to where you jumped from. Interrupting the music could perhaps hurt the flow of the experience as such drops can already lead to a track cutting out a bit, and with the evocative sound coupled with the gorgeous imaginative sights you encounter, it is nice to be able to drink it all in without having to manage some demanding task. The story holds things together so it’s not just a sensory treat. There are humorous moments worth a laugh despite a few times straying into outright randomness to try and emphasize the ethereal nature of life across the stars, and there are emotional payoffs and interesting developments to the journey so it’s not a run of the mill tale of coming into one’s self placed in front of fancy visuals. It pulls your focus to the mild action at times like the sound-and-response exchanges, so it’s not hard to crave something a little more substantial or at least impactful in regards to how it can shape your journey. If you built your sound as well, or heard later it resonating in the music of others, it could do so without needing to be a challenge still, but the gameplay simplicity also avoids being demanding so that the aesthetics and writing can take the stage instead as they so deserve.
THE VERDICT: The Artful Escape offers fantastic sights across a universe of creative alien life and environments while still tying to a very human journey of learning to find one’s true identity underneath the societal pressures placed on them. Francis’s space opera contains superb sound that drives an electric journey onward as interesting story developments are joined by you tailoring the identity Francis is stepping into as he finds his sound, an indulgent but delicious embrace of music and visuals bringing emotional highs with their composition alone. The actual gameplay is often just a vehicle for moving about a space save for some brief musical tests that are rather basic, that choice meaning its game elements aren’t always as effervescent but thankfully not so intrusive that they diminish the audiovisual experience.
And so, I give The Artful Escape for Xbox Series X…
A GOOD rating. The Artful Escape can provide a compelling emotional journey through your awe at seeing the reactive alien worlds and listening to the crescendos of evocative music, but the gameplay does feel like it needs something to better energize the traversal and music tests to match. The interactivity in terms of crafting Francis’s new sci-fi persona is wonderfully done as it remains consistent and well-integrated while having the range that can make it feel truly personalized, and those moments where you are just told to get on the stage and play as your heart desires feel more in line with that. Doing simple sound and response feels like a barrier placed there so that the music has something of substance you must overcome, but there was room for a more creative approach if the game is going to empathize breaking molds and straying from the marked path with its narrative. Naturally it shouldn’t reward cacophonous directionless sound, but The Artful Escape’s soundscape could use a bit more of the player’s touch to make it feel like an even more personal connection to this tale of self-discovery. The dazzling environments and swelling musical compositions make the ride one where you’re not too bothered by the simple obstructions though, and the narrative and vocal performances bring it together into something meaningful rather than just being a host to neat art and music.
The Artful Escape both feels like you can have a lot of its excellence wash over you simply by watching it unfold but would be missing out on a pivotal part of the experience by not holding that controller yourself. Francis is finding himself through the choices you make even if the story doesn’t stray off its core path when you make them, but it builds up a persona that ensures the tale doesn’t lose it’s deeper meaning. The splintering fate of Francis Vendetti is in what he becomes, not how he becomes it, and embracing that new path, the highs and the lows, are paired well with a journey across the cosmos. For the few hours it lasts, The Artful Escape is a joyous audiovisual experience.