Ape Out

Ape Out is a top-down action game about one thing and one thing only: a great ape smashing through waves of armed guards to get free. That sounds reductive, but the entire design philosophy is built around that single violent, beautiful idea. You grab enemies and fling them into walls. You use their bodies as shields until they absorb enough bullets to explode. You sprint through corridors and the percussion track slams a cymbal crash every time you kill someone. The game and the music are the same thing, and that fusion is what separates Ape Out from every other twin-stick-adjacent brawler on the store. The visual language is silhouette and color. Flat, bold shapes in deep oranges, electric blues, and stark whites. It reads like a 1960s jazz album cover that someone animated and filled with blood. Gabe Cuzzillo built this mostly alone, and every element feels like a deliberate choice rather than a compromise. The camera shakes. The screen flashes. The soundtrack, built from live drumkit recordings, adapts dynamically to what you are doing on screen. When you get on a roll, the music swells. When you die, a scratch and silence. It is theatrical in the best low-budget sense. Gameplay is divided into four LPs, each with its own color palette, enemy loadout, and escalating density. Guards can carry pistols, shotguns, and flamethrowers. You have no weapons of your own, just momentum, grip strength, and the willingness to treat a man with a shotgun as a temporary projectile. Routing is semi-procedural, so layouts shift between runs, which keeps the muscle memory honest. The whole experience runs around two hours on a first clear, maybe ninety minutes once you know the rhythms. That runtime is not a flaw. This is a game that knows exactly how long it should be, and it ends before you are tired of it. Where it stumbles is in the narrowness of that loop. There is no build variety, no unlocks, no branching path. You are always the ape, always escaping, always hitting things. Players who need systemic depth or replayability hooks beyond score chasing will bounce off quickly. The difficulty can also spike unevenly in the later LPs, particularly when flamethrower guards appear in tight corridors with little warning. And while the procedural layout adds freshness, some generated configurations feel unfair in ways that a handcrafted level would not. But for the audience this is aimed at, those complaints are almost beside the point. Ape Out asks for a short, focused, emotionally intense session. It delivers something that genuinely sounds like nothing else in the genre, a game where the soundtrack is not background ambiance but a second mechanical layer responding to your play. If you have ever described a piece of music as violent, this is the game version of that.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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