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.