The Artful Escape
Developer Beethoven & Dinosaur
Publisher Annapurna Interactive
Format PC, Xbox One, Xbox Series (tested)
Release Out now
Well, it certainly knows how to put on a show. Beethoven & Dinosaur’s spectacular space oddity is an artful escape indeed: part side-scrolling platformer, part Ziggy Stardust origin story, decked out in the most vivid palette of any videogame this year, if not the past decade. As you guide Francis Vendetti – a young musician desperate to escape hometown pressures to follow in the footsteps of his famous folk singer uncle – across a succession of extraordinary otherworldly landscapes, his nimble fretwork causes flowers to alien, and not just bipeds with vaguely humanoid features. Or voices, for that matter – one speaks with the tone of a jazz saxophone, another via harmonious bursts of brass. Such is the force of its showmanship that it’s easy to be distracted from the fact that, as you hold X and another extended solo wails out, you’re largely playing the same notes from beginning to end.
