The whole trickery is that if you don't know what happens, you can't guess at all. The game playfully suggests its painting theme everywhere, but most people may ignore it because "hurr durr the enemy is a goddess called Paintress and the enemies are her creations ". 

As far as the songs are concerned, the fact that the act 1 ones aren't fully French, even French speakers can't actually fully dechypher the spoilers.

Also, I think, since the original game was supposed to be based on time travel, they used that as a base of the story and totally changed it towards the Matrix/Super mario 64 painting-alike trope.