The Artful Escape Review

A wonderful story of a young musician dealing with the expectations of others around him. Highly recommend playing through it without a guide first. Takes around 4h to complete and has no missable achievements.

Approximate amount of time to 100%: 4h
Estimated achievement difficulty: 1/10
Minimum number of playthroughs needed: 1
Is there a good guide available: Yes, there are many but I used this one
Multiplayer achievements: No
Missable achievements: No, there is chapter selection
Grinding Achievements: No
DLC-Only achievements: No
Speedrun achievements: No
Time-gated achievements: No
RNG-achievements: No
Does difficulty affect achievements: No difficulty option
Unobtainable/glitched achievements: No

The Artful Escape is a wonderful game. Before I started playing I didn’t know what to expect and I didn’t feel any connection with the theme. I don’t play any instruments, and I would never dare to step up a stage and perform, but maybe somewhere that last part is a small connection I had with the main character in this game.

You play as Francis, a young musician that is the nephew of a famous artist that died before he met him. He always gets compared to his uncle and there are always expectations from him to perform, and what style of music to make, and stuff like that. In this journey, Francis will try to find himself, but it is told in a wonderful way and gladly it doesn’t come in an instant. You’ll be there also for the part where Francis starts to chance but when he gets asked to come out for who he is too early in his journey, he will back down and that is wonderfully portrayed. It felt a bit weird in a video game and I was like “What did you do?” but looking back… chance doesn’t come by instantly.. it takes time and courage.

The gameplay itself is a combination of a light version of platforming and some sort of “Simon says” game where you have to repeat button presses the game gives you. Those start out easy and get a little bit challenging, but not too much, and making a mistake doesn’t have any consequences except for doing that part again. The focus of this game is clearly the story and the gorgeous visuals.

Achievement-wise the game is very easy, most of the achievements are for playing through the story. A small few are for doing something not required by the story, but there is chapter selection and the chapters are very short, so first playing through the game without a guide is highly recommended.

This review for The Artful Escape was written on 5 September 2022, based on the current Xbox version of the game which has 12 achievements at the time of writing this review. This information can be outdated, for example, when the developer adds or removes achievements or releases (new) DLC.