For many years, if you asked me what my favorite game series was, I probably would've said Splinter Cell. This is like you sent a team of scientists to develop the polar opposite game.

It is unabashedly loud, stylish and raucous. There is no stealth, because you are a fuck-huge monkey. You are given no tools but your hands and the speed to run at them, because you are a big, fuck-off monkey. The tutorial is three button prompts. There's music to accompany you on your quest for freedom, battling with you to see who can best embody this frenetic energy. You don't need more.

Aren't you tired of being nice? Don't you just want to go apeshit?

Playing Ape Out for thirty seconds should be all the time it takes to immediately grip you. Each subject in frame is washed entirely in their own striking, single colors, setting the stage for a primal Us vs. Them with little more than a choice of art style. Dynamic, jazzy beats punch up every scene as you run through tight, sterile hallways. Horns squeal as private guards, cops, and soldiers get flung into walls and pasted in a shower of monochrome gore. Each heavy, plodding step of your ape is another beat of the drum. It's an unending song, urging you to keep pushing forward, fast and hard, all in service of getting the ape out.

Controlling the ape feels amazing. They're bulky and slow, but never sluggish. Strafing from side to side makes them stalk, and moving straight ahead causes them to break into a fist-over-fist charge on all fours. One button is all it takes to toss a gun-toting enemy into level geometry that makes them explode. Unique level layouts mean that your kills also get their own little updates; a level that takes place in an office building can see you punching a cop through a glass window several stories up while a shrieking wind instrument mimics his screams. Something about this tickles an ancient corner of my brain, covered by millions of years of evolutionary cobwebs. Defending yourself from predators feels good.

As much as I might be reading too far into it, there's an air of revolutionary rage swirling around Ape Out. There's the obvious pro-environmental message ⁠— don't take undeservingly from nature ⁠— but the manner in which you liberate yourself is what turns you from a gorilla into a guerrilla. Your freedom, stolen from you so readily, cannot be taken back peacefully. Your enemies speak only a language of violence, and it is one that Mother Nature has taught you to be fluent in. The humans who have kept you captive are inevitably brought down by their own hubris, unable to contain that which they believed they could. It's a feel-good story that's bathed in blood.

There's a significant amount of variety here through all of the levels, with most of them offering fun and interesting gimmicks to keep things fresh. The gameplay loop itself rarely evolves; the circumstances you're in may change, but the way you interact with these setpieces is going to largely remain the same throughout the runtime. A few segments are tread into unfair and unfun territory. It's a little too easy in the more open levels to catch a few stray bullets from enemies you couldn't possibly have enough time to react to, and a lot of these levels end up being just a bit too long when you're forced to keep starting from scratch over what feels like something completely beyond your control.

Holistically, though, Ape Out is a fun, cathartic experience. Running through a crowd of soldiers and knocking them over with the others like a bowling ball down a greased alley offers a primordial hit of dopamine. It's a special game, and one that I'm shocked to see such a lack of discussion of three years after its release. Whatever made this not stick with people is beyond me. I want to be monkey.

Unbelievably good flow and momentum on display here. A proper game, ye know? Sometimes you just need a game.

It feels incredible putting headphones on and getting lost in the blood and dynamic jazz. The crash of cymbals as these strong primate arms fire a dude into the wall at 200mph without even slowing my trot. Drums steadily following the rhythm of knuckles and feet pounding the ground as I approach the next victim. Body after body collides with concrete and glass, the volume increasing all the time.

I am the ape, and I want out.

The brutality of Hotline Miami but totally recontextualized as slapstick comedy. Gabe Cuzzillo and the gang made this game specifically for me but also for everyone that has ever had the innate primal urge to go monkey mode. Doesn’t outstay its welcome, controlling Mr Ape is simple yet fluid, the pop-art inspired graphics and dynamic jazz percussion soundtrack really make this thing shine. This whole thing really clicked for me during the office level where you can just toss dudes out of windows and have them plummet to the cityscape below. Really addicting, captivating stuff. I love monky

THE APE
by Herbert, age 6
The Ape
He destroyed his cage
Yes
YES
The Ape is out

Very short, but very enjoyable game! Played on Nintendo Switch as one of the recommended indie games to get on the system. I highly recommend this game for the Switch as the controls feel very nice and the playstyle in general feels almost from the golden phone game era which really is heighten by the Switch's portability. Got this for $1.99 during a sale and feel this was well worth that amount. Would not pay the $15 for this though, as again, it feels mostly like a mobile game. A fun mobile game, but not a $15 one lol.

Parecía una imitación de Hotline Miami, pero no.

En Ape Out no podemos avistar a los enemigos desde lejos. Un efecto de profundidad hace que las paredes tapen nuestro ángulo de visión hasta que nos asomamos por ellas. Esto lo cambia todo, porque evita que planeemos nuestros movimientos con antelación. Además, la posición de enemigos y otros elementos del escenario cambia tras cada intento, no vaya a ser que tiremos de memoria. Vamos, que el diseño propicia un estilo de juego reactivo: que el jugador no se acomode, que opere sobre la marcha, que improvise.

En Hotline Miami entrabas al edificio, observabas la situación y operabas en consecuencia. No es que trazásemos un plan, pero existía cierto cálculo, cierta táctica. En Ape Out tiras pa'lante y te adaptas a lo que surja. Y tiene todo el sentido: uno es un juego de asaltar, el otro de huir. En uno vas armado, en el otro estás indefenso.

Por eso Ape Out tiene tanto que ver con el jazz, por eso encarnas a un primate (en vez de a un humano) y por eso el objetivo es escapar. La acción ha de sentirse improvisada, urgente, desesperada incluso. Y lo consigue.

The definition of "oozes style". The art is vibrant but simple, easy to read, and at specific level transitions really impressed me with visual flair. The star of the show is obviously the jazz drum. It beautifully and organically adapts to the actions happening on screen. The gameplay is pretty simple, the first few moments of that ultra violent blood splatter as you hurl enemies at the enviroment (and each other) felt great, but that's basically it. You don't get any new abilities or learn new tricks. The enemy variety and numbers are what the gameplay revolves around. Length of the game is roughly 3 hours to see credits, so there really isn't a lot of meat on the bone, but what's here is really good.

My main complaint is the game feels a bit unfairly punishing towards the end. Sometimes I couldn't quite tell if I was rushing or dragging. The mix of enemies and the later levels kind of funneling you down to choke points lead to many frustrating deaths that I felt I had little to no way to avoid. I wonder if at some point the game had static levels with set enemy pathing before changing to the randomized levels the game has now. I feel like I would've encountered less frustration if I could find my own static path like an action stealth puzzle to solve rather than the frantic race to randomly Plinko yourself to the end it is now.

I don't think I'll ever return to this one, but if it's a game you can get for $5 or less it's worth picking up.

I wish more games were like this one.

Simple objective, easy and intuitive controls, great art direction, challenging-but-fair(ish) difficulty, an incredibly rewarding ending, and the title tells you everything you need to know about the whole game.

Ape. Out.

I feel like in the 2010s we were all playing stuff like this and being very smug about it, but by 2019 (and especially now), that kind of "clever mechanic + an art style + game feel" style of game, had started to feel a bit quaint and dated.

I dunno, this is ok. It's unique looking and the jazz sound design has its appeal.

I completed "Disc 1" and I'm not sure if there's more to it. The ending menu made it look like there were more "Albums" to unlock, but pressing play on the main menu just starts the game all over? Probably won't go back to it to figure it out tbh.

Having a great soundtrack is a common reason for games to be considered memorable, but what “great” really means in this context can be complicated. There’s the obvious quality of being catchy and fitting for the action on screen, but music can also be evaluated for its mechanical conveyance. If a player is dropped into a graveyard with a gun, the sound of whispering wind and mournful violins will probably make them walk slowly and cautiously, but the player who hears heavy drums will start swiveling around looking for the demons to pop in. While that’s an obvious example, the principle of using different tracks in this way applies even within a singular game to help players understand the pace. That’s where Ape Out succeeds with its soundtrack, even in the absence of music that most people will find catchy. It’s dynamically generated jazz, where the loud, chaotic, all-percussion soundtrack reacts to the player’s actions by changing the intensity, adding crashing cymbals, and matching the speed based on the player’s own pace through the level. While it doesn’t lend itself well to listening to individual tracks, the freeform nature of the music encourages players to take the same approach, and rely on improvisation more than the methodical iteration common to top-down action games. Most other titles in the genre have your character dying to one bullet, but Ape Out lets you take a decent amount of punishment before facing a restart, recognizing that as soon as players stop feeling like a rampaging ape and start tactically checking corners, the energy of the music and flow of the gameplay would immediately become discordant. It’s a fascinating little system to experience, but in a way, the interactive nature of the soundtrack is let down by the limited options you have to actually experience it. Running through rooms and smashing people as a gorilla is a silly enough little concept, but your entire agency boils down to punch, grab, and move. I was left wanting gameplay that was fittingly special for a game this unique with its visuals and sound, even while understanding that it makes sense to give players a simple bedrock to ground the more unfamiliar aspects. It’s good enough to hold up its hour-and-a-half runtime, but not enough to turn the stylistic successes into a true great.

Nearly perfect! Oozes style and relentless energy.

The procedurally generated levels don't do the game any favours sadly as difficulty spikes up and down seemingly at random. The drumbeat keeps you energised and nudges at you to move fast and loose but the levels sometimes favour a slow and steady approach. I feel like a curated hand made levels could have solved these issues.

Still, it's just an observation, I didn't ran into a wall I didn't manage to solve after some thinking or some sleep.

Ape Out resonated with me a couple levels in when I realised my mercy is a weakness that these easily breakable humans will exploit. If I wanted out I needed to be primal, a force of nature - My violence was justified.

It's a clever design that contrast meta games like Hotline Miami or Super Hot that belittle you for relishing the carnage.

Great game, great lenght

Do not dare to think. Think for a fucking second, and you're dead. Do you honestly think Ape Out is a game about strategy? You're fooling yourself. SMASH open that fucking glass, GRAB that guy with the gun, and THROW him into another guy. It's that simple.

There are many rules to Ape Out that the game never outright explains to you. You can take three hits before you die. No blood trail means three hits left, little blood trail means two, BIG blood trail means one. Throwing a little guy into another little guy will kill both of them, but throwing a little guy into a big guy will only kill the little guy and stun the big guy. Explosions kill you in one hit, and if you grab a guy who has explosives and another guy shoots you, you're dead. The little green pistol guys usually run from you, but try to shoot you when you have a human shield. If you're on fire, enemies will run away from you.

Why would the game explain all that to you?! You'll figure it out on your own anyway! It's just the lay of the land that you need to become accustomed to if you're ever gonna make it to the end of the game. It all seeps into you at a base level, drilling deeper into your subconscious until it becomes basic instinct. You forget you're playing a game and lose yourself to the rhythm. The incredible jazz percussion soundtrack eggs you on constantly, begging you to go deeper and deeper and become one with the beautiful chaos. It's an exercise in aesthetics that shocks you into oneness with madness. It's a feeling I've only ever experienced with games like Thumper or Sekiro. You're constantly on the edge of dying, and yet the best way to overcome is to forget about the danger and just do.

Keep fighting, throwing, and raising hell until you're finally an Ape Out.