Demo Time: Ape Out (NS)

I first heard about Ape Out (developed by Gabe Cuzzillo and published by Devolver Digital) around the beginning of March when #DiscoverIndies was on its way out of the Twitter consciousness as the creation of Indie Gamer Chick to help promote indie games throughout all platforms.  During that #DiscoverIndies of March, I recall seeing a lot of people talking about Ape Out, partly because the game was released on the Nintendo Switch and on PC on February 26th. So, when I (finally?) saw that Ape Out had a demo, I thought it would be a good time to try out this game that I had heard about eight months ago.

I am also featuring this game on Demo Time because along with Cadence of Hyrule: Crypt of the Necrodancer featuring The Legend of Zelda, Ape Out was the other game that helped me to resurrect Demo Time as a featured article.  I think from this point on, I will be covering less well-received games or games that I have never heard about.  But now, let us get to Ape Out.

The basic premise is that you are a gorilla who is escaping from a research facility filled with armed guards and other various security systems. The game is played from a top-down view and the majority of the game is played from left to right.  Your gorilla character is bright orange while your enemies are stark white against the grey background of the facility.  The game is very stylized in that it can get away with having very little detail and seems more about showing where you are in the stage and where your enemies are.  And then there is the blood. Oh, so much blood.  The primary way of dispatching your human enemies is to thrust/smash them up against walls or other guards, shattering their bodies into pulpy masses of meat and bone.  Likewise, when your character is shot, they will start leaving a trail of blood on the floor, with larger splotches indicating that you have taken more and more damage until you are finally killed.

That in-and-of-itself is not a bad premise for the game, but the music for the game, composed by Matt Boch, is easily the other half of what makes Ape Out so appealing.  I for one am not a jazz aficionado, and despite the violent nature of the game, jazz music as a genre works well here because all of the music is dynamic based on what is happening in the game.  I could probably try to further describe jazz music and how it relates to Ape Out, but let us do some showing rather than telling in this instance.

So that is, more-or-less (slightly less because this was only a demo) Ape Out.  The demo consisted of four stages that become progressively more-and-more difficult, but never to the point where it feels like the game is taking cheap shots or cheating.  It does feel like the first four stages are taken straight out of the full game, and even if they are, I would not think that upon playing the full game that I was forced to schlepp through the opening stages all over again, even though that is what you are doing.

When you die, you see the path you took and what the procedurally generated
level looked like. Almost made it out on this run.

I could easily see picking up Ape Out based on how much fun (with a tinge of frustration in stages three and four) I had here, but me being me, I will probably wait for an inevitable sale and until after I have whittled down my Switch Queue a bit.  So good job Gabe Cuzzillo on a fun game and demo, and kudos to Matt Boch for making a dynamic jazz soundtrack that I enjoy (I would be interested to find out if there was a soundtrack, but I am afraid that it would not be as exciting as playing the game, kind of similar to how the music outside of BIT.TRIP RUNNER feels like something is missing despite the familiar melodies).

~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian

Now I Run From You