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.