Sit down, kids. It's time for a cautionary tale. Do NOT buy a game on Steam just because it's on sale for $1 and you think it looks cool. Read reviews first. Watch gameplay videos first. Look it up online first. I didn't do any of those things before I bought Apartment 666, and look at where I am now. I'll never get back the 30 minutes I wasted playing through this game or the $0.99 I paid to download it. Truly, it's the tragedy of our time. Alright, let's break this train wreck of a game down. It's basically a "horror" walking simulator. Picture PT but really shitty and made by a 14 year old. That's Apartment 666. The layout of the apartment looks almost the same as PT, as well; just a right angle. You play as a 12 year old kid who can't find his parents in an apartment full of locked doors. When you get to the door at the end of the hallway, you end up in your bedroom again. Repeat this about 50 times, and that's the game. There's a little more to it than that, but it all pretty much involves the two doors on either end of the damn hallway. Every now and then one of the doors along the hallway will open. You'll usually have some newspaper clipping to read or some obscure and infuriatingly specific spot you have to stand on to trigger the door to unlock (because of course it closed behind you on its own). The latter is the part that really killed it for me. There's one particular part where you're in a "storage room" (although that's TOTALLY a casting couch and the kid just had no idea what his dad did for fun when he and his mom weren't home), and to unlock the door, there's a VERY specific spot in front of the couch that you have to stand on. It took me 10 minutes to figure that out; that's a third of the time I spent playing the damn game. The next problem is the voice acting. Jesus Christ, the voice acting. I legitimately think the developer got his 12 year old kid cousin to read lines from a hastily written script one afternoon and called it a done job in one take. They're not even well written. It's crap like "I wonder where my mom and my dad are," "I knew that this was a bad idea..." and "I am back in my room again?" The kind of shit that sure, you might think in that situation but that even protagonists don't often say aloud, and protagonists never say them in that silted a manner. The dialogue is stiffer than a middle school boy spying on his 16 year old sister's sleepover. Also - and here's the kicker with functionality - the game has three achievements, and one of them is bugged. All three of them are story achievements; start the game, get like 10% through the game, and finish the game. The "finish the game" achievement is bugged and won't unlock. The dev says "Look, 2% of people have unlocked it! It works!" and we're all like "Bro, you've got a 15 minute game, and you're telling me that only 2% of people who start it finish it?" All of this in spite of the fact that there are dozens of people on the Steam discussions saying "Hey, I finished it, and it's still bugged." Apartment 666 is fucking garbage, and I'm ashamed of myself for even spending $0.99 on it. The premise is interesting enough, even if it a blatant copy of PT, and it actually does manage to create a fairly creepy atmosphere early on...until its severe flaws become glaring. There's no real options menu, and your only graphical settings are to change "quality" between low, medium, and high (with absolutely no discernable difference between medium and high) and to change the resolution. No brightness setting despite severely needing one; parts of the game are so dark I literally had no idea where I was going and couldn't tell if the game had crashed or just plunged me into pitch black darkness. I almost wish the game had crashed. It sucks. Don't buy it. Go out and play Chasing Dead or rip your fingernails off with pliers before you buy this; both are infinitely more fun. My Rating - F |
I'm a teacher.And I like to play video games. I like to collect video games. I like to talk about video games, and I like to write about video games. During the day, I teach high school history; during the night, I spend my spare time gaming. Then I write about it. Archives
April 2024
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