A Journey Into the Cosmic Extraordinary
As a creator of anything – paintings, books, extremely clever t-shirts – one of the questions you must answer for yourself is: Am I really any good at this thing which I have chosen to do? Possible causes for asking the question include the Imposter Syndrome, the Dunning-Krueger Effect, or even a case of Illusory Superiority, among a host of others.
Even the lowly podcast producer or game creator has to answer the question at some point. If you happen to be me, the question crops up every time you sit down to do anything even incidentally related to the thing you are trying to create. Is this research good enough? How about this script, does it say what I want it to say in the way I want to say it? This sentence, is it as clear as it could be? Is this the right word? Did I leave too many pops and clicks in the narration track? Is the background music too loud? Does the whole thing “work”? Is the description enough without being too much? Is 5:05 AM too early in the morning or not early enough? Is anybody listening? Does anyone care? Should I just stop? Probably I should just stop. It’s not really as good as it could be. I hear all the mistakes. Everyone else will hate it. Nobody really listens anyway.
You can see how difficult that makes it to do anything, which is always the problem I have when I sit down to do the next episode. Every time I have to go through the whole litany of potential failure points before I can get to the end and release each show. My particular hang-ups are a combination, to a greater or lesser degree, of all three of the named effects above, especially since over the years I’ve had to slowly teach myself bit by bit everything needed to get the show to the point at which it exists today. There are days where I can simultaneously feel superior to everyone in the podcast world who occupies a lower position than I, and yet grossly inadequate when compared to anyone higher up the chain. There are those who say your only real competition should be your yesterday self, but my today self is in no better position than yesterday’s because I never let either self off the hook.
Which is why, when I started playing a game called The Artful Escape from Annapura Interactive and arrived at that point in the game where the protagonist, folk guitarist Francis Vendetti, has to try to explain to his traveling companions why he’s afraid to take the next step in his career, weird as it is yet seemingly necessary, I sat up and took notice. Because from the mouth of a kid in a computer game came a truth I didn’t know.
See, Francis is not your typical folk guitarist. In fact, he doesn’t even want to play folk music, though he starts out thinking he does. No, what Francis wants is to play rock music, in the vein of Pink Floyd mixed with Jimi Hendrix and a host of other similar influences. The epic, weird, trippy, guitar solo is his real forte. And folk music just doesn’t let you do that, does it? Francis’ big hang up is that everyone in his hometown of Calypso, Colorado wants, nay expects, him to follow in the footsteps of his world famous, legendary, folk musician uncle, Johnson Vendetti. A man he has never met.
As luck would have it, we pick up Francis’ story on the day of his first concert, a performance of his uncle’s songs on the anniversary date of his uncle’s passing. Tourists and local residents are all eager to hear what they are sure will be a performance that entirely lives up to his uncle’s abilities. They’re not there for Francis, you see, they’re there to hear his uncle reborn through him. A fact ably demonstrated by the posters for the event featuring the large, Bob Dylan-esque appearance of Johnson over a much, much smaller and humbler picture of Francis. Of course, everyone is very supportive of Francis and very free with the positive encouragement. As long as Francis isn’t going to screw up his uncle’s music.
It gives nothing away to say that Francis’ misses the concert. It’s the reason he misses the concert that is by far the most interesting part of the game. See, just as these things usually happen, Francis meets a girl. A girl who turns out to part of the crew of a spaceship captained by an intergalactic musical legend, Lightman, more than ably voiced by actor Carl Weathers. In fact, the whole cast is made up of choice actors. From Jason Schwartzman as the Captain’s number one, Zomm (a brain and spine in a jar atop a set of insect-like legs) to Game of Thrones actress Lena Headley as the Tastemaker, arbiter of who is in and who is out for the entire galaxy, everyone gives a performance that only adds to the game’s very, very deeply weird atmosphere.
And weird it most definitely is. It’s all psychedelically Sci-Fi in the best possible way, but what the style most reminded me of was the YouTube work of Kurzgesagt, they of the colorfully animated explainer videos. Full of vibrant colors and deep field two dimensional animations that react to Francis’ playing even during the simplest of traversals, the whole thing presents a weird and wild atmosphere that feels dramatic, epic, and wholly alive at all times. Flora and Fauna light up and become active as Francis passes as long as he holds down the button that keeps belting out the rock jams on his ethereal electric guitar. Even when the game is presenting what would, in any other game, be a particularly pedestrian location, color pops and sounds make their way in from more active nearby rooms to help fill the space.
The sound on offer is as much a key part of the proceedings as the visuals and each track is an impressive stand-alone rock anthem while also being a cohesive part of the entire presentation. The Artful Escape is the brainchild of Australian rocker Johnny Galvatron, lead singer of The Galvatrons and reflects his experience and influences as a member of an up-and-coming band in Australia. You’ll see resemblances to big names in rock, from his uncle’s Bob Dylan style to Francis’ own start as a Buddy Holly simulacrum, the galaxy is, in its own way, populated by various nods to familiar people, places, and things. There’s an entire 80’s mall hidden inside a ship decked out like the Beatles take on a 18th century schooner, Lightman drags up the memory of Ralph Machio’s mentor Willie Brown in Crossroads, and more than ample commentary is played out against a background of people so fashion forward that to not be fashionable is an arrestable offense. Galvatron must have fully realized his vision for the game as no other explanation presents itself for the levels of cosmic weird and musical majesty used to answer such a simple pair of questions: Who am I? Who do I want to be?
The game is so focused on getting those questions and their potential answers across while providing a visual and auditory feast that it must, because Galvatron wants you to consider them too without the distraction of complicated game mechanics and run ending failure states, skimp a bit on actual game play. You will run right. You will engage in some light platforming. You will battle bosses by playing a modified slightly more complicated game of Simon Says. Literally everything else in the game is about experiencing the universe on hand and focusing on the answers to those two questions.
Even so, the game has its own rewards for doing the mechanical bits well. The more you flow through a level, the more the music builds, passing from Francis’ simple guitar jam at the beginning to a full-on rock god performance by the end. Falter or miss time a jump and the music and game restart from your last safe location, the music once again diminished to Francis’ little jam, interrupted by your failure and leaving you with the sense that you’ve missed the best bits. There are no lives or retries. Francis cannot die. But he can embarrassingly flub a performance for the games level bosses which will earn a reproving shake of the head and necessitate a retry of the sequence. But remember, Galvatron and the game don’t want you to fail, they want you to get the point and consider the questions and maybe come up with your own answers. It takes the whole four-hour experience, practically, for Francis to figure out what his answers are and by then you’ll have recreated him into a new character, one fitted to the new vision you have for him, and he has for himself. There are choices to be made, but they shape the details rather than the possibility of success or failure.
It's an experience game. You really do have to see and hear it to believe it, but it is an experience worth having. It would have been an amazing feature film, but instead it is a game. And, of course, being a game, you may feel a bit more attached to the eventual outcome and to the little truths revealed along the way. Like the one that grabbed my attention. See, at one point Francis is asked why he turned down the opportunity for galaxy wide publicity, offered to him as a reward simply for completing a level and talked to his new agent, all at no cost of any sort to himself. Francis, still finding his feet in the new world presented to him and trying to come to grips with everything that is going on around him, struggling to answer the two main questions of the game, struggling with himself, says, “If it comes easy, I feel like I’m not trying hard enough.”
Yeah. I know that one.
The Artful Escape is available on Steam and various consoles.