It took me over 6 months but I have finally completed The Artful Escape. Developed by Beethoven & Dinosaur. Published by Annapurna Interactive. Polygon.com’s 44th best video game of 2021. Metacritic score of 80-81, depending on platform. Currently sitting at a “Very Positive” review average on Steam. This is a game that some people have positive feelings about.
I posted about it on January 1st. I’m about to post about it again.
Here’s a quick refresher for anyone who doesn’t remember what this game is about: Imagine The Last Starfighter, but instead of a gamer getting beamed up to fight humongous space battles it’s Nise Bob Dylan’s nephew. Also this fake Uncle Dylan died in that 1966 motorcycle accident, and was Italian. Li’l Bobby Junior was groomed to be the next folk legend but his true passion is noodling on an electric guitar like he’s in a Sam Ash showroom circa 1989. An elderly Black man from space recognizes this gift, and takes him on a tour of the stars, where the player occasionally gets to hold right for 5 minutes at a time and survey an alien planet. If you hold down X while walkin’ your totally dweebie avatar will play some sweet licks he stole from Steve Vai, which will inspire cartoony flora and fauna to get somewhat jiggy. The widdly-wah is mostly optional though – you can progress through the game just fine without it. Thank fucking God.
OK that wasn’t as short as I thought, be glad I didn’t list more epic guitar gods, I coulda gone on for a couple thousand words on that shit.
In my original post I said I was having a great time with the game and, also, that I was “pretty sure I’m not still drunk from celebrating New Year’s Eve.” Well, guess what: I was wrong, I was still drunk, every single time I came back to this game since I had to bail out after 15 minutes, it’s some real precious bullshit and I hold no positive feelings towards it!!
At some point you get to give your character a stage name. I went with “The Almighty Ollar”. I do not remember why I chose this. I do know it’s a Simpsons reference that I misremembered. It’s a pretty good name though, it really suits this game, it does kinda have the look of a Mad Magazine fold-in if Al Jaffee wasn’t, like, good.
I would never in a million years be able to accomplish any of the technical or artistic feats you see in The Artful Escape and lemme tell ya: I’m fine with that. This is a game that is filled with wonderful colors and effects and ghoulies but not once did it inspire any kind of emotion in me (while sober – it did make me laugh a lot when I was NYE-level blotto*). This shit is just so Spielberg-ian, it’s like someone typed “Yes album cover painted by Thomas Kinkade” into one of those monstrous AI art generators, it’s so fucking soft.
Part of the problem is that all these epic landscapes have that fuckin Harry Potter-lookin’ mother right in the middle of it, this twig with all the charisma of a toilet stain wearing a mocap suit, he spoils absolutely everything. Somewhere near the end you’re finally able to give him a makeover and it is by far the highlight of the game. It is the only bit that feels remotely “rock & roll” in the OG sense, from before the genre became the domain of people whose entire personality can be boiled down to “Knows The Contra Code”. The customization lets you get slightly weird. You can be, like, an 0.05 on the Little Richard scale. That may not sound like much but it’s a massive improvement over the default avatar, God I hate that schmuck, everyone is always talking about how great he is, it’s worse than any Bioware game, stop telling me how great I am and actually let me do something that’s actually great!!
Pictured above is my look, minus the Chessman/Wolfpac Sting facepaint I adopted but was missing when I resumed the game after an “Ugh, this sucks, why am I doing this, I don’t need to see the endings, I could just reclaim 14GB of HD space without wasting another hour of my life, what is wrong with me” break.
At some point your teen gets intergalactic famous. I don’t remember why. It slightly goes to his head. He starts saying things like “I am the best”, but not in a fun Toad-in-Mario-Kart-64 voice. He just thinks he’s the best, while also having impostor syndrome. At one point he is interviewed for some alien radio station. They ask him to list three things that are on his rider. You can see some of the options above. Every single one of them could be charitably described as “wacky”, which is a synonym for “not funny,” but we’re being charitable here. Charitable. None of the choices are things like “cocaine” or “a 720º arcade cabinet” or “Stereolab-style oral sex”. This character desires nothing a teenager who got a taste of 199x fame would have asked for. This is pure whimsy. And I fucking hate it, I fucking hate teenagers, I do not want to be reminded they exist, but if you gotta do a story about teens at least make them gross, at least make them awkward, do not try and trick me into thinking any teen has ever been motivated by anything other than shame or hate or lust. Anyone trying to depict teenagers as virtuous or cool is suspect or wearing the world’s rosiest wraparound shades. I’ll cut the authors of this game some slack, I believe in their case it’s the latter and not just cuz I don’t wanna get sued for libel, might be fun to visit Australia though, I know some cool people down there.
So this is a game about the power of music, it is made by a rock & roller, it also features zero songs, there are no jams, there’s not a single melody you can hum, and to me that is a very interesting choice. Like, I assume this is because they wanted to keep the game simple, they wanted anyone to beat it, I am sure if these folks wanted to they could have easily made a narrative focused rhythm game like Parappa with actual songs and hooks and other things that are, like, pleasant and memorable. But they chose not to do that, all the player generated musical content is just reverb-heavy guitar noodling over extremely funk-less beats that may as well be stock music with original titles like “Basketball Highlight Reel #11” or “Coke Presents: Quiz Time At The Cinema Quiz”. Sometimes things pick up a bit and you’ll have to play Simon with an alien for 40 seconds but those sections aren’t good, they just demand the bare minimum of player attention. The game’s climax has you shredding alongside a giant ghost roach and it’s so incredibly limp, you slowly walk from one platform to another while this muzak version of a Joshua Tree B-side plays, your little avatar wailing away like he’s auditioning to replace Warren DeMartini in the latest touring version of Ratt, then you win and go home to Colorado and all the people who wanted you to be Bob Dylan lose their minds when you finally go electric, you can see it in the youtube video above, it’s like 30 seconds long and it sucks, that’s the ending, I’m done writing about this game.
I was also going to post about a game I actually liked, the game Last Stop should have been, but this post is huge so I’ll just paste all that shit into a text file and come back with it in a few days. I hope Rudie posts about Artful Escape, I think he hated it even more than I did, my bottom line review is: “The Artful Escape is the Eddie and the Cruisers II: Eddie Lives! of video games.”
*This was actually mostly cuz I wasn’t playing it alone. I don’t think drinking had much to do with it. God, playing these things by my lonesome is a drag, I am so fortunate to have friends, I am so, so, so lucky, God.
