You play as Francis, who is haunted by the ghost of his uncle, an iconic Bob Dylan-esque folk singer. It’s equal parts Tim Shaefer, Bill & Ted, and Kentucky Route Zero, with myriad conversation choices and an emotional-yet-upbeat nature. The main focus of the game is actor Michael Johnston’s perfectly-voiced protagonist, Francis Vendetti.Īt its core, The Artful Escape is an easy-to-play, straightforward adventure game with a mythical story about creating your own identity and escaping the shackles of outside perception. It was part of a Kickstarter attempt in 2016 - only to be distributed by Annapurna Interaction, who, in its house-style, peppered out the voice cast with A-list Hollywood talents like Lena Headey, Jason Schwartzman, and Mark Strong. There’s a certain magic to his rhythm platformer The Artful Escape that elides its potential to fully sink into the grip of banal nostalgia, and it comes from the game’s outstanding visual panache, its wide array of characters, and its consistently optimistic, earwormy, and synthy guitar-driven soundtrack. However, when I brought up specific gameplay elements of his ceaselessly entertaining prog-rock-inspired phantasmagoria, The Artful Escape, he lit up like a candelabra. The more I asked him about his pre-games development rock and roll background, the more that he demurred and insisted that it was a largely negative time of his life. Johnny Galvatron, a developer at Beethoven & Dinosaur, describes his former musical outfit The Galvatrons as a band that was “around for a good time, but not a long time.”
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