A space-rock celebration of live music

The Artful Escape is a rock & roll dream, a journey across the cosmos, and an opportunity to serve as a midwife in the birth of a wailing guitar god. A space-rock concept album molded into an interactive audiovisual smorgasbord.

It’s a wild fuckin’ ride.

This is the kind of video game where you’re not meant to fail, and in fact, can’t. Miss a jump and the game sends you back a short distance to try it again. Screw up one of the many Simon Says-style note-matching puzzles, and whatever fantastical alien you’re facing off against in a guitar duel patiently plays through the pattern again and again until you get it right. The Artful Escape is invested in nothing less than your complete and total success.

Some might be tempted to define it as more of an interactive novel than a video game. I lean toward “playable concept album” myself. But labels are for the birds, man. The Artful Escape‘s inescapable and reverberating central message is simply that in rock & roll you make your own destiny. More than that: It’s up to you to define that destiny.

But who is our “you” here? That’s an open question right from the start, and one you’ll answer piecemeal along the way. The story opens in the sleepy Colorado town of Calypso, home of the late Joseph Vendetti, a Bob Dylan-esque great American songwriter who’s survived by his sister and her son Francis, Joseph’s nephew. That’s you. Sort of.

Francis Vendetti is an up-and-coming young folkster whose connection to music blossomed in the daunting shadow of a famous relative he never met. But on the eve of a celebration of Joseph’s life — that’s also meant to serve as a debut performance for Francis — the young man is presented with an opportunity: Come to literal outer space, rock out, make a name for yourself.

So begins an epic journey “across the dilated pupils of the cosmos.” That’s how Francis’ new friend, Lightman, describes it. Voiced by the forever-delightful Carl Weathers and styled like a glam Geordi La Forge, Lightman is himself a space-rock god who’s the captain and eternal headliner of a galaxy-crossing spaceship-slash-opera house called the Cosmic Lung.

If you haven’t caught on yet, The Artful Escape is trippy as hell. Francis’ journey into the Cosmic Extraordinary crashes through an eye-searing lineup of psychedelic planetscapes. Each domain you visit has its own musical and visual theme. It’s all prog-rock, all the time, baby, but the notes you hear and the colors that wash across the screen shift with each new stop on this galaxy-spanning tour.

You’ll carve out sweet licks as you pass through the purple-hued, frosted-over Heliotromms, a living monument to Lightman’s greatness, in a seemingly fruitless search for a booking agent. Later, you’ll ride an airship across a desert wasteland and assemble your own rock star wardrobe in the hopes of impressing the fickle and deeply superficial authorities of outer space’s top fashion destination, Glimmer City.

All along the way, Francis encounters a lineup of strange and wondrous beings. Some are there to help, and the idle chatter you make with them is instrumental in transforming Francis from bespectacled, acoustic guitar-wielding hipster into whatever out-of-this-world form you want him to take. You’ll choose a name and a wardrobe, but you’ll also make choices in conversation that, over time, frame out an origin story.

My own Francis adopted the name Starr Kosmos. I draped him in an ostentatious and neon-lit wardrobe consisting of a studded leather jacket, gloves straight out of a cyberpunk dystopia, and loose-fitting orange-and-green-patterned pants. You even choose your axe; for Starr, I went with a curvy and sharp-edged number that resembles licks of fire impossibly frozen into the shape of a musical instrument.

‘The Artful Escape’ is a space-rock concept album molded into an interactive audiovisual smorgasbord.

Each stage of the journey is also marked by encounters with beings that just want to hear your legend-in-the-making play. These simple pattern-matching puzzles — you just watch a sequence of lights unfold and then match it on your controller by hitting the corresponding buttons — see you trading notes with whatever entity you’ve encountered in a sort of musical duel/duet. If each place you visit is analogous with a video game level, these showdowns are your miniboss and boss encounters.

That’s a shaky comparison, though, given The Artful Escape‘s approach to challenge and gameplay. This is a simple experience at heart. Its mechanical joys are intentionally constrained inside straightforward left-to-right movements. You can jump and then jump again in mid-air. You can slam yourself down onto the ground, landing in an epic superhero/rock god pose (and, in certain spots, activating a holographic stage). Most importantly, you can wail.

One entire button in The Artful Escape is devoted to whipping out your guitar and just shredding the day away. A lush prog-rock soundtrack that’s somehow and against all odds defined entirely by soaring crescendos responds dynamically when you hold down the “wail on my axe” button. And at any moment, you can leap off into the air and press the wail button again to let loose with a definitive power chord as an explosion of light envelops your intergalactic rock star-in-the-making.

“Dazzling” feels like an understatement. The Artful Escape is fundamentally someone’s deep and abiding love for music and live performance rendered as a beautiful journey through space. That someone is Johnny Galvatron, creative director at developer Beethoven & Dinosaur and lead singer of the Australian electronic rock outfit, The Galvatrons. If I didn’t know any better, I’d think Galvatron conceived The Artful Escape as a concept album, a la David Bowie’s transformative work, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars.

The “album” label doesn’t fit here, though. (There we go with labels again.) The music that plays from stage to stage is defined more by tone and overall feel than composition — each one is effectively a rock-infused tone poem, for lack of a better definition. So The Artful Escape is less an album than it is a celebration of albums that tell a story; it’s a concept album about loving concept albums.

The audiovisual splendor is so front-and-center that the fully-voiced cast featuring more than a few bona fide Hollywood stars seems unnecessary. Yes, it is wildly cool to hear Lena Headey’s voice emerge from a giant, floating head seemingly built out of hands, alien landscapes, and, somehow, outer space. But that example is an outlier. I challenge you to identify the roles played by supporting stars Mark Strong and Jason Schwartzman without looking them up.

That’s not a bad thing. Francis’ arc through the story isn’t meant to be surprising; likewise, the celebrity contributors aren’t here to steal the show. All the extra hooks like story and cast serve to underline what’s really important here: The music, and the experience created within that music.

You’ll stage an epic tour across the cosmos and guide Francis into his new identity as a guitar god. Before the night is over, you’ll carry that identity forward into life on Earth and dazzle the people of Calypso in the process. Even rock & roll dreams must end, however. But as “The End” flashes across your screen and the credits begin to roll, the hope is that The Artful Escape has made your life a little more beautiful, a little more magical, and a little more musical.