![]() The visual inventiveness is almost gratuitous: one minute a level is Heironymus Bosch, and the next it's more migraine-during-a-team-lunch-at-the-Rainforest-Cafe. The game pings between long, generous platforming runs through wild locations, and a series of hubs where you can wander back and forth and chat to people and be groovy. Run and jump and double-jump, sure, but look at everything else that's happening because of you. In vividly coloured woods it brings flowers to full bloom and sends fireflies buzzing. When you cross pink mountains it ricochets off the snow and ice. Back in town your solo brings all the street lamps to life - a properly memorable videogame moment. All the notes you could ever want, but just press X and hold! The art looks particularly wonderful on a big telly.Īnd when you play the guitar wonderful things happen. But while you do all this you hammer the X button and play your guitar - a wailing solo that pretty much rushes out of you like silly string. You slide down slopes and clamber up ridges and avoid dropping yourself into the abyss. The game is very simple: it's a 2D platformer with a double-jump and a sort of float move. This never happens, because soon you're off on your adventure, cruising the lurid iconography of seventies rock. The danger is that at any second we might pass through some event horizon of clustered penny-farthings and hit the Custardo Singularity. It's almost too much, and almost too clever. Brass twinkles on fixtures and dandies flap around worrying about dandyish things. At night the shops in town have a sort of wine-bottle thickness to the glass. It's absolutely full of stuff: jokes, references, toy robots and old record players. The game works on a 2D plane, and it has that kind of loose-limbed, cardboard cut-up feel you get from Gilliam animations. This is an Annapurna joint, so there's Hollywood stars doing the voices (Carl Weathers is absolutely sensational - he really does have a stew going), and the town where it all kicks off is a sort of teetering Bruegelian Babel, albeit one with coffee shops that have punning names and a rattly funicular to take you from one street to the next. The Artful Escape trailerĪt first, the sheer density of The Artful Escape can be overwhelming. What follows from this slow realisation is a journey through prog and glam album covers, from the small town where he lives in shadow, out into space with whales and giant turtles and Blade Runner flying cars, and back in the end to play a show - and to show everyone who he really is. Maybe what he wants to be is Ziggy - a catsuited glam rocker banging on about nebulae over screaming cheeseball riffs. ![]() You play a young fellow who's related to a local folk music hero and expected to keep playing those songs about coal miners and ghosts of electricity that howl in the bones of a person's face. They were freaking out on a moonage daydream. ![]() Do you think Ziggy, or David St Hubbins, could hear much of what was going on when the crowd was screaming and the earth was shaking? They were lost inside the sensation somewhere. It wants to make you feel the way you imagine people feel when they're playing music for a huge crowd with everything cranked to eleven. The Artful Escape doesn't want to teach you music and doesn't really want you to play music. And that's the trick, the key to the whole thing, I suspect. The whole game is a solo that's got out of hand. The soundtrack here is a sort of grand, proggy bed of pleasant noise for the solo noodling you do over the top of everything. This is the thing, though: it doesn't matter. ![]() Availability: Out now on PC, Xbox (Game Pass), iOS.I couldn't recall a favourite burst of guitar. I couldn't hum a leitmotif or whatever they're called. It's certainly lovely to listen to while you're playing, and the big moments rise to their epiphanies and then die away with great poise, but once the game was switched off nothing really lingered in my mind. The trick to understanding what the The Artful Escape is trying to do, I reckon, is to embrace the fact that this music game doesn't actually have any particularly memorable music in it. We've gone back to a few real gems, so for more catch-up reviews like this one head to the Games That Got Away hub, where all our pieces from the series will be rounded up in one convenient place. A lurid and generous trip through the iconography of seventies rock.Įditor's note: Hello! Over the next few days we're running a "Games That Got Away" series, where we finally get round to reviewing games that released at some point in 2021 but, for various reasons, we couldn't quite manage to cover at the time.
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