The Artful Escape review friv game - A game for good headphones

The Artful Escape is woven from images and metaphors, permeated with dreams of space and amazing music in its most diverse manifestations. Is from an online game developer site Friv2Online there really a game behind this? Find out from our review.

Francis Vendetti is a guy from the provincial town of Calypso, in Colorado. He dreams of the stage, dreams of a successful musical career, but there is something dead weight lying on his shoulders: the impostor syndrome and the feeling of insecurity associated with the success of his uncle Francis, a famous folk artist. Everyone is waiting for the hero to take the same path as the eminent relative, and he himself is torn between the desire to meet expectations and the desire to choose his own creative path.

One day, on the eve of a music festival, where Francis is going to perform with a folk program, the guy meets an unfamiliar girl who promises him big changes. And they happen the same night, with the arrival of aliens who take the hero to a large-scale space jam, where he is assigned the role of the main star. This metaphorical journey through the galaxies will help Francis throw off the shackles of public opinion and finally find his calling.

The Artful Escape is hard to recommend as a friv game. There is a minimum of gameplay here: in different episodes, you either wander around locations and communicate with characters, then run from left to right and jump over obstacles, as in a simple platformer, then perform simple QTEs, playing in a duet with space creatures. That's all the project has to offer, and even these tiny bits of gameplay can be tedious, for example, in scenes where you don't have to do much more than run across vast areas.

On the other hand, as soon as Francis picks up a guitar, you quickly forget about this shortcoming. The Artful Escape is a stunning audiovisual show that dazzles the imagination with its richness of imagery and variety of landscapes. You personally participate in painting the game with bright colors, traveling through the worlds and playing the guitar: the music makes everything around glow, pulsate and sing, forming an incredible ensemble of a boy, his guitar and many alien creatures.

At such moments, you just want to enjoy what is happening on the screen, watch and listen - you need to play this friv game with good headphones in order to feel every sound. There is a lot of music in The Artful Escape, and the louder it is, the deeper you plunge into an unusual world woven from hundreds of galaxies, where, like on Earth, rock and roll is revered and large-scale concerts are held with deafening sound, dazzling pyrotechnics and hundreds of thousands of fans.

The friv game runs for some three hours, but during this time it manages to evoke a lot of emotions. She combines a psychedelic world, good jokes and the coolest guitar solos, thanks to which she can be forgiven for the lack of intelligible gameplay. If you like unusual games with a strong personality, then The Artful Escape is made just for you.