Some games are like the Skinner boxes, which separate the rewards for removing the proper levers. Others are like slot machines, ding-ding serotonin receptors with random victory. Some are like the backyard dodgeball or an after-school wrestling club behind the McDonald’s bins container. I’ve never played a game like the introduction to a Parliament record: Partying on the motherhip / I am the motherness connection / Gettin ‘down in 3-D / Year light groovin’.
Funk is not a perfect comparison for The cunning escape, a specific game about rock ‘n’ roll and the journey of a stranger on the guitar of a young prodigy. But The cunning escape it’s also a free association game, so we’re pleased with some. The artificial escape it’s like riding an elephant-sized moth toward the setting sun. It’s like sliding down an endless tree branch in a magical forest. It’s like tuning in to another dimension. In fact, you do all these things in the game, but they’re also metaphors, man.
In the line of David Bowie and his cosmic alter ego Ziggy Stardust, The artificial escape follows the beginnings of the psychedelic stage character of the protagonist Francis Vendetti. Francis is a science fiction geek from small towns, uncle where he was a legend of folk music. The night before his first show, a celebration of his uncle’s great successes, Francis encounters a series of intergalactic beings that force him to confront his own worldliness, but also his own prodigiousness. To the public, he is the ghost of a popular legend, but in private Francis rocks. As one maniac-pixie laser light artist puts it, “You dress like a drift but it sounds like a space opera.” With increasing pressure from his small town neighbors to grab his uncle’s cloak, Francis escapes from his childhood bedroom at night, where an alien brain finds him in front of his house to escort him to the cosmic extraordinary, a dreamlike acid journey into the “gray matter between the lobes of the universe.”
“To break a science fiction guitar odyssey, hold X,” the game states. Francis has to abandon his previous self and generate a new story for his life: that of his space opera stage character who makes leaps in dimensions. Between skating through ice mountains and bouncing musical bubbles, Francis hides with various intergalactic celebrities, such as the terrifying beast known as the Glamourgonn, sometimes to save his life.
The artificial escape easy down. They are four to five hours of pure, cheerful light appearing through vivid kaleidoscopic landscapes full of alien and green beasts. Every second of the game is entertaining. Instead of the dry monologue, the story of a secondary character unfolds through an interactive digital museum through a path he traveled; and instead of basic platforms, Francis can manifest light pillars and swarms of light worms just by holding X and playing the guitar. (And this guitar always resonates with the dreamy background music of each area.) When Francis does a show, a mechanic makes music. Simon Says what Guitar hero—To ask the player to touch buttons or triggers, at any pace or rhythm, in line with a request. The goal is to be expressive, not correct.
