It’s not immediately clear if players have control over the music or if there’s a set soundtrack that plays when pressing a button. Francis is shown running through a 2D environment while pressing X to riff. The gameplay itself is still a little hard to grasp as a viewer. While there’s clear visual inspiration here from rock legends like David Bowie, The Artful Escape charts its own course with creative visuals that aid Francis on his internal journey. It’s a Grateful Dead t-shirt come to life. One section has Francis interacting with a being named Lightman, the captain of an Austrian opera house that’s been turned into a ship that traverses the multiverse. The few gameplay snippets I saw were entirely unpredictable.

Later parts of the demo show Francis running through unearthly planets and interacting with alien NPCs. The serene realism of the opening scene quickly takes a turn into the psychedelic, though.

The game is best described as a 2D platformer where Francis runs and jumps around environments while riffing. That narrative arc appears to be at the heart of the game design itself, which goes in some truly unexpected directions. That kicks off a self-discovery story as Francis tries to discover his own rock-and-roll identity, rather than following in someone else’s footsteps. Instead, he walks up to the edge of a cliff, cranks the volume, and starts shredding out a hair metal solo. A button prompt asks players to start plucking out a folk tune, but Francis’ heart isn’t in it. The demo begins with the game’s hero sitting on a bench with an acoustic-electric guitar. The Artful Escape is a narrative adventure about an aspiring rockstar named Francis Vendetti. At a preview event prior to Annapurna’s digital showcase, designer Johnny Galvatron reintroduced the long-awaited game and gave a close look at how the cosmic rockstar adventure works. The Artful Escape is finally hitting Xbox consoles and PC on September 9.

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