![]() ![]() ![]() The trouble with The Artful Escape is ease. It is a subject that Dylan himself dug into with relish. This is not a bad premise, the steel-strung airiness of the older generation, both solid and beyond reach, versus the plugged-in anxiety of youth. As someone points out, “You dress like a drifter but you sound like a space opera.” In other words, Francis is going electric. Francis has a lot to live up to, then, and he is due to play a gig celebrating the anniversary of “Pines.” But there is a problem, brought on by a simple twist of fate. Whippy, he is clearly modelled after a young Bob Dylan. With his black sunglasses his harmonica, fixed within a neck brace and his dark tangle of hair, like a mound of chocolate Mr. The hero is Francis Vendetti, a young musician whose uncle, Johnson Vendetti, was a folk legend-his album “Pines” adorns the pause screen. ![]() A few minutes later, another command pops up: “To shred a sci-fi guitar odyssey, hold X.” And there you have it: the plot, the appeal, and the perils of this strumming-of-age tale. With The Artful Escape, Galvatron summons the magic of space glam rock without dwelling on the particulars of musicianship.“To strum a folk ballad about the toil of a miner’s life, hold X.” So begins The Artful Escape, a side-scrolling adventure with a pinch of mild platforming. He later told NME that being a musician wasn’t as glamorous as he’d imagined: “It’s not a life of grandeur and luxury, it’s a life of 10 people sleeping in the same hotel room in regional Australia and people asking you to play old Australian rock songs and throwing bottles at you.” What he loved about the band was its concept-the visuals, the packaging, the lore. “I started writing this concept of a game that was my fantasy version of what I thought the music industry and being a rockstar was going to be when I was seventeen,” Galvatron told Shack. Probably, that’s because its core is plucked from a specific person’s fantasy: that of Johnny Galvatron, former head of rock group The Galvatrons and now the creative director at Beethoven & Dinosaur (the name is a Transformers reference). The Artful Escape follows its own rule about impactful art it reminds me less of other games and more of dreams I’ve had. Its understated but potent writing sticks the landing. Despite the dripping earnestness, The Artful Escape’s cheesiness is limited to its guitar licks. It’s a game full of surprisingly deep messages about what it means to be authentic (sometimes, blending truth and aspirational truths), to make impactful art (create things people don’t even know they want yet), and to prove others’ expectations of us wrong (excellence cannot be prescribed). It would be trite to say The Artful Escape is a game about finding yourself. 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 “gray matter between the lobes of the universe.” To the public, he’s the ghost of a folk legend, but privately Francis rocks. 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. Francis is a small-town sci-fi geek whose uncle was a folk music legend. 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. You actually do all of these things in the game, but they’re also all metaphors, man. It’s like sliding down an endless tree branch in a magical forest. ![]() The Artful Escape is like riding an elephant-sized moth toward the setting sun. But The Artful Escape is also a game about free association, so let’s indulge in some. 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'.įunk 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. Some are like playground dodgeball or an after-school fight club behind the McDonald’s dumpster. Others are like slot machines, ding-dinging serotonin receptors with random victory. Some games are like Skinner boxes, parceling out rewards for pulling the right levers. ![]()
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