Apartment Story
Review
A Tale Of Two Stories
by Quinn Levandoski
reviewed on PC
Staying Alive
While Apartment Story can be quite intense, the game starts players off by introducing them to the sim elements of the journey. While living in Arthur's apartment, players have to manage a multi-faceted status bar tracking hunger, sleep, mind, toilet, and hygiene constantly tick down. They all collectively combine into a "life" bar. If it gets below 1/3 full, the character becomes slow and lackadaisical. If it drops to zero, he dies.
How are these bars maintained? Well, exactly how you probably think. Arthur can put food on a cutting board to prepare a meal and then eat it to satiate hunger. Doing so decreases his toilet meter, and using the toilet lowers his hygiene. Sleep and Mind constantly degrade unless he drinks coffee, naps, or partakes in leisure activities like smoking and watching TV. It's all interconnected, and it's pretty neat... for a few minutes. Unfortunately, these bars tick down way too fast. Worrying about eating, resting, and going to the bathroom amid the central story is fine, but having to cycle through them constantly becomes incredibly banal, incredibly quickly. I ate so much spaghetti. I peed about 75 times. I smoked enough weed to set off every alarm in my apartment complex.
For a game that attempts to instill elements of real life to humanize and ground the story, these activities do the opposite. The life bars are a fine system but feel incredibly out of place with the short, tight, violent tale the game tells. More than just being logically dubious, it's also just a narrative miss that I need to interrupt tense situations by quickly munching a bowl of cereal so I don't keel over and die of hunger.
Narrative Beats
However, when the story beats hit, the story is indeed interesting. The general set-up is that Arthur's friend Diana has a stalker, and he doesn't take kindly to the fact that Arthur is meeting with her. A break-in leads to more intense measures being considered, and things play out fairly dramatically from there. These parts are good! However, after each story beat, the game simply pauses and has the player spend some time milling about in the apartment. In theory, I'm okay with giving these stretches of downtime in between the intense situations to let things sink in. The issue is that there's not actually anything interesting to do. It's a circle of doing the same tasks on repeat to stop Arthur's life bars from dropping to low, over and over and over again.
Moreover, there's no indication at all of what you're supposed to do when there is a specific objective to be done, so if you look away at the wrong moment, you're pretty much screwed. My (real-life) doorbell rang at one point fairly early in the game, and I stepped away for about two minutes and forgot to pause. When I got back, I was supposed to search a bedroom for something, but I had absolutely no idea what. I spent an honest-to-goodness 20 minutes moving every single item in the bedroom out in the hallway to figure it out, and at the very end, I happened to move my mouse to the right place to highlight a flooring panel I was supposed to remove. A simple description of what should be done in the pause menu seems like a no-brainer.
Experiencing Some Glitches
However, not every long pause was my fault. Also, relatively early in the game, I was waiting for company. I got a text message saying Diane would be there at 2:30 and spent the hours (in-game) cleaning until her supposed arrival. Except she didn't come. A whole day went by, and she never arrived. I ate a dozen times, smoked a bunch of weed, and tried to sleep, but the game said my attention was needed elsewhere (but wouldn't tell me where). I tried to go to the door countless times to see if I just missed a notification, but nothing. I tried to shower, but the game told me I could shower while someone was in my house. While this instilled some unintentional dread, being told someone was in my apartment while there actually wasn't was incredibly frustrating. Finally, after over 30 real-world minutes, I tried the door for the 50th time, and my guest simply appeared. Incredible.
This wasn't the norm, but I did experience some smaller glitches as well. The game didn't seem to recognize where my cursor was to properly interact a few times, and more than a few times, the game either inverted my movement controls (left and right moved me forward and back, and forward and back did nothing) or locked me into a phantom button press and had me continuously walk in a random direction.
Apartment Story is two ideas mixed together, and one of them works really well while the other drags the experience down quite severely. I can't help but imagine that the core concepts of an interactive home invasion that asks the player to make choices and deal with the consequences couldn't have made for an enjoyable and tense experience if it weren't for the confusingly repetitive and out-of-place sim elements that necessitate walking and waiting in-between everything interesting. At the end of the day, the good parts don't quite seem worth the bad, and it's difficult to recommend the title when technical issues are also holding things back.
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4.0
fun score
Pros
The PlayStation 1 style graphics have retro charm and the central story is engaging when the plot moves forward
Cons
The sim elements are dull, repetitive, and hurt the overall experience; glitches caused someone significant frustration
