The Apartment is an indie game that has me questioning absolutely everything, including the fish
In my opinion, the best demos give you just enough information about how the game works for you to come away feeling like you understand the mechanics, but not enough of the story to leave you thinking that playing further wouldn't reveal anything new. It's a delicate balancing act, and some demos nail it, while others give too much away. Then there's The Apartment, which apparently decided that leaving me with a hundred questions was the best way to make me want more.
The Apartment is a psychological horror game that puts you in an apartment where everything is so far from right it somehow stops feeling wrong. The neighbors are watching you, the world beyond the windows seems to be in complete chaos, and the demo hooks you on its premise using intrigue and WTF moments as bait.
Meet the neighbors
I think we've all experienced something similar: you move into a new place, the neighbors are peeking through the curtains to see who's making their way into the neighborhood, and you spend a few weeks exchanging awkward hellos every time you leave the house. It's a common experience, and The Apartment takes that concept and dials up the weirdness by approximately 1,000% with very little explanation. Frankly, I feel a thorough explanation would remove a huge chunk of the bizarre charm of the game.
The Apartment presents the kind of move-in day experience that would leave anyone regretting their choice of residence. The neighbor doesn't even give you a chance to settle in before he's at the weirdly jail-esque door, demanding increasingly specific items as the days progress. Some milk and bread is one thing, but a knife and some cooked chicken might be a step too far for most people.
But it's not like you have a choice; if you don't give the neighbor what he wants, he comes inside and kills you. You're being timed, too, and if there's one thing that really helps to pile on the pressure, it's a blaring klaxon that signals you only have a minute left to cook the chicken and retrieve the knife from wherever the hell it ended up. Thus far, mine has always inexplicably been found in the washing machine.
The news of the day
At the end of every weird day, you get to sit down with the friendly local news anchor, Joey, to hear about what's happening beyond the four walls of your home. He's as strange as everything else in your life now, bringing news of blunt scissors and the apparent mass misdelivery of parcels that you'd think would be a good thing but only makes finding your actual order a bit of a headache.
Once the news is over, you order items for the next day to meet the demands the neighbor has made. If you buy the wrong thing, you can't progress; you end up dead, and the day restarts. It's like being trapped in an endless loop of obedience while desperately wanting to break all the rules and knowing you can't.
You can, however, take out a particularly sketchy loan from an unknown lender to buy the world's most expensive single-use lockpick. I did this, used it to unlock the bathroom door before realizing it was single-use, and quickly figured out that the door would have opened anyway and I'd wasted the lockpick. Lesson learned, $50 wasted, but at least I got an early look at the bathroom, I suppose.
So. Many. Questions.
Why am I trapped in the apartment, providing food and entertainment for the neighbor? Why is there a security camera following my every move? Why does a note say the fish can help if I feed it? And how on earth do I get fish food?
These are just a few of the many questions that went through my mind while playing through the six days available in The Apartment's demo, but the most pressing of all is: where does this go next? Am I going to be stuck in this apartment forever, fulfilling the increasingly unhinged demands of my neighbor? Or will I eventually figure out how to escape and survive?
Those questions remain unanswered, leaving me wanting so much more than the demo has to offer. That's what makes it so good; I'm left wondering “WTF” while itching to get my answers, but I also want to go back and play the demo all over again to see what secrets I might have missed or what other routes I could have taken.
The Apartment is in development at Ultima Thule Labs and doesn’t have a release date just yet, but the demo is coming to Steam soon. This bizarre psychological horror is one to keep an eye on.
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