The Artful Escape review – press your space face close to mine

The trick to understanding what the The Artful Escape is trying to do, I reckon, is to embrace the fact that this music game doesn’t actually have any particularly memorable music in it. For me at least. It’s certainly lovely to listen to while you’re playing, and the big moments rise to their epiphanies and then die away with great poise, but once the game was switched off nothing really lingered in my mind. I couldn’t hum a leitmotif or whatever they’re called. I couldn’t recall a favourite burst of guitar.

Artful Escape reviewPublisher: Annapurna InteractiveDeveloper: Beethoven & DinosaurPlatform: Played on XboxAvailability: Out now on PC, Xbox (Game Pass), iOS

This is the thing, though: it doesn’t matter. The soundtrack here is a sort of grand, proggy bed of pleasant noise for the solo noodling you do over the top of everything. The whole game is a solo that’s got out of hand. And that’s the trick, the key to the whole thing, I suspect. The Artful Escape doesn’t want to teach you music and doesn’t really want you to play music. It wants to make you feel the way you imagine people feel when they’re playing music for a huge crowd with everything cranked to eleven. Do you think Ziggy, or David St Hubbins, could hear much of what was going on when the crowd was screaming and the earth was shaking? They were lost inside the sensation somewhere. They were freaking out on a moonage daydream.

This is a lovely game, anyway. You play a young fellow who’s related to a local folk music hero and expected to keep playing those songs about coal miners and ghosts of electricity that howl in the bones of a person’s face. But he doesn’t want to be Dylan. Maybe what he wants to be is Ziggy – a catsuited glam rocker banging on about nebulae over screaming cheeseball riffs. What follows from this slow realisation is a journey through prog and glam album covers, from the small town where he lives in shadow, out into space with whales and giant turtles and Blade Runner flying cars, and back in the end to play a show – and to show everyone who he really is.

At first, the sheer density of The Artful Escape can be overwhelming. This is an Annapurna joint, so there’s Hollywood stars doing the voices (Carl Weathers is absolutely – he really does have a stew going), and the town where it all kicks off is a sort of teetering Bruegelian Babel, albeit one with coffee shops that have punning names and a rattly funicular to take you from one street to the next. The game works on a 2D plane, and it has that kind of loose-limbed, cardboard cut-up feel you get from Gilliam animations. It’s absolutely full of stuff: jokes, references, toy robots and old record players. At night the shops in town have a sort of wine-bottle thickness to the glass. Brass twinkles on fixtures and dandies flap around worrying about dandyish things. It’s almost too much, and almost too clever. The danger is that at any second we might pass through some event horizon of clustered penny-farthings and hit the Custardo Singularity. Spaghettification all round!