In concept, it’s not incredibly interesting or challenging.
It’s all so seamless and fun that you won’t be surprised if you’re holding down the shred button the entire game.īoss battles are a game of Simon Says, where the player needs to watch and match the button inputs on-screen. Lasers shoot off into the air, creatures will rise, flowers will bloom, or lights will glow to show you the path forward. As you play electrifying music, the stages around you light up along with you. Feeling a lot like Ziggy Stardust, you can jump and strum an explosive chord, slide down hills on your knees like a rockstar, and pose a wide stance to activate platforms. Despite all these people wearing glasses permanently, you can still sense and feel their emotions through the animation and how the world around them reacts.īy simply pressing one button, you can play elaborate guitar solos across these imaginative planes, mimicking the solo from The Darkness’ “I Believe In A Thing Called Love”. Combining all that with exceptional voices from Michael Johnston, Caroline Kinley, Jason Schwartzman, Lena Headey, and Mark Strong… this is some of the best overall character work in games. Everyone has this cut-out, puppet-like quality to them while moving with so much personality and smoothness. The animation and character work by Tessa Monash complements the environment art all so well. Designing such unimaginable ideas and turning them into incredibly stunning spaces is no easy feat. The world-building and creativity are beyond anything I’ve seen in a game… and it gets even wilder as you go on.Īrden Beckwith is the lead illustrator for the otherworldly backdrops. Immediately, in this first thirty to forty-five minutes, The Artful Escape will have you completely mesmerised. He gives Francis a magical guitar, which he somehow always had within him, and takes him gliding across neon pink roads against kaleidoscopic space backdrops and giant floating robots, onwards to an unimaginable club called The Cosmic Lung.
But what follows is absolutely mind-blowing.įrancis meets Lightman, a multi-dimensional musician voiced wonderfully by Carl Weathers, who takes him on a journey into worlds unknown. It’s not unfamiliar territory in a narrative, sure. Everyone can think back to a time when they felt closed-off, like they were putting on a façade or wanted to be someone they were not. Straight away, the character is relatable. This typical folk kid is simply trying to get by, but with underlying true colours yearning to get out. In this short opening sequence to The Artful Escape, we learn a whole lot about Francis and who he isn’t. “The world-building and creativity are beyond anything I’ve seen in a game… and it gets even wilder as you go on.”
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