Sunday, September 26, 2021

The Artful Escape: I Highly Recommend It

 Good afternoon everybody,

Last night's stream featured a game that came highly recommended, The Artful Escape, in it, you play the nephew of a famous folk artist who is conflicted about what they should do, should they be what everyone wants them to be, a copy of his famous uncle, or should he find his own path. Needless to say the tone of what our hero should be is set real early when he shreds on his guitar, making it clear his true calling is that of a rock star. Things take a unique turn when an inter-galactic guitarist recruits our hero to be his opening act, setting him on the journey of self discovery and breaking from his chains of the shadow of his famous uncle. 


Game play wise there are a handful of stages of light platforming, but even if you miss a jump, don't worry it just resets to the last check point, so you can try again. Since I was playing using an Xbox Controller I found myself holding the X button to constantly be playing the guitar which meant a lot of things lit up along the way. The A Button jumps, pressing it twice gives you a double jump, pressing X after jumping gives you a nice leap forward. B is the guitar slide button if you want to just be cool and Y is your interact button. There are jam sessions at various points where you must you the X Y and B buttons plus LB and RB to match a series of commands, very similar to the game SIMON. If you mess up, don't worry, who ever you are jamming with just repeats the sequence... but the better you do, the quicker you react, the more awesome the jam sessions are.

When it comes to sound and graphics, the music and artwork more than deliver, as everything just flows together. There are some serious awesome scenes through out the game, so if you're like me and love to get screen shots, you'll be spoiled for choice. During the game you will have the opportunity to turn our hero into a rock start with a fairly decent amount of customizable options... I went with the obvious Glam Rocker look... and also gave him the stage name of Zaggy Clouddust... as an obvious references to David Bowie's Ziggy Stardust!


Overall, this was a great game to play, it took me about four and half hours to reach the end at a fairly casual pace, picking up 9 of the games 12 achievements a long the way, which was pretty cool. Most of them are tied to reaching certain points, but the remaining three do require specific actions to be performed. Since this game does have a chapter select I was able to go back and grab the three that I missed.

If you are looking for an light game to experience, I highly recommend The Artful Escape to everyone!

The Artful Escape Achievements

  1. Made it home: Arrive at Francis' house
  2. Light It Up: Light up every building and area of Calypso
  3. The Journey Begins: Leave Lightman's workshop
  4. Complete Heliotromms: Jam with Tromms
  5. New Threads: Create a custom outfit
  6. Amp Jammer: Complete all amp landa jams
  7. Complete Hyperion: Jam with the GlamourGonn
  8. Guitar Legend: Complete the game
  9. Complete GlimmerDimm: Jam with Glimmer
  10. Stage Fright: Don't do anything for 3 minutes during a jam
  11. Snowman: Jam with the snowman
  12. How'd you get up there?: Land on top of the archway after the big jelly

Twitch Clip Links

After the stream we raided RoeShamBoe_ at twitch.tv/RoeShamBoe_ who was also playing THe Artful Escape. They seem like a good dude!

I did change the look of the stream a bit, adjusting the bit boss bar and moving the community chat box to the far right of the screen so everything appears stacked. The game capture display is also larger as well, not quite at 16:9 ration, but it gives folks more to see than how I had it as of late. I did have to tweak the web cam display some as well, so it should look better for tonight's stream.

It's Sunday which means we have a highlight reel featuring Twitch clips from out the week, which featured Overwatch, Life is Strange 2, Forza Horizon 4, Street Fighter Alpha: Warrior's Dreams, Smite, Paladins, Gears of War 3, Tales from the Borderlands and The Artful Escape!

Arriving in the mail all the way from Japan was a copy of Marvel Super Heroes vs Sreet Fighter for the PlayStation. This was the fourth fighting game Capcom released which featured Licensed characters from Marvel (The first three being X-Men: Children of the Atom, Marvel Super Heroes & X-Men vs Street Fighter). Since this is the Japan version of the game, we'll have to use the modified PSOne to play it.  

Finally sat down to watch episode one of Clarkson's Farm, Jeremy Clarkson as a farmer is just... awesome, the world's most impractical man doing farm work is really something to see. I'm looking forward to seeing the seeing the other seven episodes! 

Joked about shaving the last couple of nights, and finally shaved off my scruffiness.


Today's Fitness Boxing 2 Daily Workout lasted 28 minutes and featured Hook Combo #2, Beginner Combo #1 and Front-Back Step Combo. The estimated calorie burn was 444. kcal. Achievement progress has me that 289/300 for the Ten Month's Hard Work and Transcendent Stamper achievements, 27/30 for the Hiro's Contender achievement and 404040/405000 for the Monster Weight Puncher Lv. 3 achievement. We should nail that last one tomorrow depending on exercises the game picks.

For tonight's stream we will of course be playing Overwatch as we begin a new week of nonsense, the big focus of course will be on playing Quick Play matches as we have fun and tolerate the questionable decisions of random teammates! 

And on that note we'll see you later over on twitch.tv/fredcasden!

Overwatch 2 and other notes

We were joined by PandaSweet for many matches in Overwatch this evening, and I branched out a little playing as a wider variety of character...