The Artful Escape Doesn’t Reach Escape Velocity

I’ve had to sit on my feelings about The Artful Escape for a few weeks, because I was honestly so put off by it right after I finished that I didn’t trust myself not to be overtly critical. I wanna be clear that I don’t think the game is technically – either in the sense of technicalities or with regard to its technologies – a bad game. You know what a bad game is? Twelve Minutes is a bad game. The Artful Escape shares a few qualities with Twelve Minutes, but the overbearing pretentiousness in The Artful Escape is much different, it takes on a more positive tone, and there isn’t any of that incest bullshit here.

Anyway, I’m not enjoying this trend of specifically-Annapurna Interactive games bringing in big-name actors to voice game characters, but at least with The Artful Escape everyone sounds like they’re at least having a pleasant time. I don’t think my experience with the game would have in any way been lessened if Lena Headey, Jason Schwartzman and Carl Weathers weren’t present here, but their presence doesn’t make the game worse, if that makes sense.

The game itself is kind of an aesthetic hodge-podge, taking its text-stylistic and systemic cues from games like Night in the Woods and OXENFREE while trying to infuse the whole thing with art that takes its cues from Terry Gilliam, Stanley Kubrick and anything from the Yellow Submarine movie. Musically, it’s trying to be a rock opera or at the very least evoke arena rock. If I was feeling meaner I might say that I’ve never encountered a game so ruthlessly in love with the idealized version of itself in its own head, but again: I took some time to really think this through and I don’t want to be that mean.

What I will say is this: Nearly every character in this video game sucks in some fashion. Francis Vendetti, the protagonist and teenaged guitar wunderkind living in the shadow of his deceased folk-singer legend uncle, sucks, for the most part – there’s a peak moment where he doesn’t, and then it’s gone, he just sucks on the other end of the curve from where he started. Lightman pretty consistently sucks. The entire town of Calypso, CO sucks, especially the show promoter putting together the concert memorializing Francis’s dead uncle, but this also includes the mayor and several townspeople. The skiffle band sucks, because trying and succeeding to create a more pretentious brand of hipster than “I’m the expert guitar-playing privileged nephew of my fictional universe’s version of Bob Dylan” is extremely difficult. Even I suck, because I played this game from start to finish despite having a sour look on my face the whole time like someone else shit my pants.

The gameplay is genuinely unremarkable, pulling out of my bullshit for a second. If I had to describe it in one sentence, it’s an extremely forgiving pseudo-rhythm game that borrows more from “Simon Says” than Guitar Hero 3. You run to the right, do some basic platforming, hold a button down to shred the longest guitar solo in the history of guitars, and then press other buttons in a particular order to “solve” a “puzzle” or “beat” a “boss.” This is occasionally broken up by dialogue. There are moments that are clearly supposed to mimic the soaring crescendos on an album like A Night at the Opera, which fall flat. There are other moments that are supposed to be scary, which just aren’t. And throughout I guess you’re supposed to feel the thrill of being in a dangerous situation, which never quite makes it there. Plot threads are picked up and dropped without much of a word, the stakes never feel high enough to match the wall of noise constantly hurtling itself at you. I can say all this and also maintain that I don’t think it was bad because while the game is absolutely not for me, I can recognize its competencies. This isn’t a sloppy game. Just judging from my colleagues who played it nearer to launch, the things that fell utterly flat for me didn’t fall flat at all for them.

So what do we do with this, I guess is the question?

For my part, I think I’m just going to listen to Queen (or SHEER MAG, or Japanese hardcore band PAINTBOX) and forget this exists.