Review: Gabe Cuzzillo’s Ape Out Is a Masterpiece of Reactive Play

Indie developer Gabe Cuzzillo’s Ape Out demands some degree of unlearning from the player. Countless video games reinforce habits of poking around every little nook for a collectible, audio diary, or some scrap of lore. They ask players to hunt down the lone opponent they missed, withholding the next scripted sequence until all opposition is snuffed out. At first, Ape Out’s labyrinthian hallways seem designed for just such purposes, winding as they do between laboratories and office buildings for little apparent reason except to be neurotically picked clean. But you play an ape, and apes have no use for video game lore, weapon upgrades, or item checklists. By the time a bullet from an onslaught of gunmen finds your hide, you realize what the twists and turns are for: escape.

Your primary interaction with these aggressors, who descend on you in droves from the moment you punch out of a cage, is actually a shove. They’re in the way, standing between you and the exit with their rifles, their shotguns, and their explosives. It just so happens that when they’re shoved into a wall or another person, these enemies explode into a decorative red paint and perhaps a pile of limbs, smearing nearby walls with evidence of your passage. Grab a gunman and you can use him to fire off a stray shot before turning him into a human shield against his comrades’ oncoming fire, until he either catches a bullet or you toss him aside, perhaps into a wall, another gunman, or an oncoming rocket.

Ape Out never really extends beyond these basic concepts: the escape, the chase, the violent conflict. There’s a simplicity to the game that’s reinforced through an aesthetic that’s redolent of Saul Bass’s work, with the protagonist gorilla as an angry splash of orange across a nonspecific concrete backdrop and the encroaching gunmen an anonymous white.

And there’s literal music to the experience, each action generating a drum beat on the jazzy soundtrack to push your percussive rampage into an instinctual, bloody sort of grace. You have no kill counter, no combo meter, no experience points—only the chase, the fragile tear for freedom that finds you grabbing meat shields, hurling bodies, pounding through doors, and perhaps ducking a flock of shotgun-toting goons to keep moving as you tap into a primal, propulsive sense of purpose. The unlockable arcade mode, which adds scores and time limits to levels you’ve completed, almost feels against the spirit of the game.

Even as Ape Out continues and its limited toolset should begin to grow stale, the game only clarifies its brilliance. Where it initially forces you to cast aside ingrained video game habits, its trickle of new variables—different types of enemies, enemy groupings, and room layouts—eventually has you unlearn habits from Ape Out itself. The move from a lab to a high rise to a bunker borders on transformative, as you go from skulking around corners to blundering through soldier-choked hallways, dealing with spreading fire or people rappelling through windows in procedurally-generated levels. Ape Out is a masterpiece of desperate, reactive play that not only gets you to behave like a rampaging gorilla, it forces you to adapt like one.

This game was reviewed using a download code provided by Tinsley PR.