Hi! It's been three years since this game came out! That's pretty weird! We've made a little patch updating the game engine and tweaking some stuff here and there: -Separate music and sfx volume settings -Better drum volume mixing -Some AI Fixes and tweaks to improve guard search
Hi! It's been three years since this game came out! That's pretty weird!
We've made a little patch updating the game engine and tweaking some stuff here and there: -Separate music and sfx volume settings -Better drum volume mixing -Some AI Fixes and tweaks to improve guard searching behavior -Are you sure confirmation when restarting an album -Better compatibility with new and future devices
I hope you enjoy it! Please leave a comment if you run into any issues. Hopefully updating the engine will have fixed the technical issues that afflicted some computers.
Thanks for playing the game! And if you haven't played it before, grab it this week at 70% off (highest discount yet)!
Hello! We've been working on a new patch for the 3rd anniversary of the games release next week. Some quality of life improvements & a new version of the engine that will hopefully remedy outstanding technical issues. It's live on the public beta branch. Please try it & t
Hello! We've been working on a new patch for the 3rd anniversary of the games release next week. Some quality of life improvements & a new version of the engine that will hopefully remedy outstanding technical issues. It's live on the public beta branch. Please try it & tell me if it works!
Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day, perhaps for all time. There is no part of Ape Out that is not good. I love it. It is perfect and glorious. You must play it. (more…)
Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day, perhaps for all time.
There is no part of Ape Out that is not good. I love it. It is perfect and glorious. You must play it.
Everyone loves a good action game. It’s the driving force behind so many of our favourite PC games, but only a few can lay claim to being the best action games of all time. That’s why we’ve compiled this list – to sort the pulled punches from the bestest biffs that PC has to offe
Everyone loves a good action game. It’s the driving force behind so many of our favourite PC games, but only a few can lay claim to being the best action games of all time. That’s why we’ve compiled this list – to sort the pulled punches from the bestest biffs that PC has to offer. Whether it’s the joy of pulling off a perfect combo, riding the wave of an explosive set-piece or the hair-raising thrill of dodging enemy attacks in slow-motion that gets you going, there’s an action game here for you.
This is one of my favorite promo trailers of all time. The holidays are all about getting free stuff (right?) and so here's some free stuff for you: Ape Out , a top-down tale of a super-powered simian who loves freedom and jazz percussion in equal measure, is now yours for the ta
This is one of my favorite promo trailers of all time.
The holidays are all about getting free stuff (right?) and so here's some free stuff for you: Ape Out, a top-down tale of a super-powered simian who loves freedom and jazz percussion in equal measure, is now yours for the taking on the Epic Games Store.
Ape Out is kind of a silly thing: Frenetic, destructive, splattery, and loud, but in a really good way. The more havoc you wreak on your way out the door, the more gonzo the soundtrack becomes, and that's what really sells it. Ripping a reinforced door off its hinges and using it to turn a shotgun-wielding security guard into a new Jackson Pollock is cool, sure, but doing it to the sound of wild crashing cymbals takes the experience to a whole different level. Tyler said in his 70/100 review that it starts to drag in the second half, but it's "so thunderously stylish and thematically strong that I like it even though it loses its thrust so quickly."
Epic is giving away one game per day until the end of the year, so grab it quick if you want it, because tomorrow it'll be gone. An Epic Games Store Holiday Sale is also currently underway—that runs until January 1.
It’s been an eventful decade for PC games, and it would be hard for you to summarise everything that’s happened in the medium across the past ten years. Hard for you , but a day’s work for us. Below you’ll find our picks for the 50 best games released on PC across the past decade
It’s been an eventful decade for PC games, and it would be hard for you to summarise everything that’s happened in the medium across the past ten years. Hard for you, but a day’s work for us. Below you’ll find our picks for the 50 best games released on PC across the past decade.
Today's Deal: Save 50% on APE OUT !* Look for the deals each day on the front page of Steam. Or follow us on twitter or Facebook for instant notifications wherever you are! *Offer ends Thursday at 10AM Pacific Time
Today's Deal: Save 50% on APE OUT!*
Look for the deals each day on the front page of Steam. Or follow us on twitter or Facebook for instant notifications wherever you are!
Today's Deal: Save 30% on APE OUT !* Look for the deals each day on the front page of Steam. Or follow us on twitter or Facebook for instant notifications wherever you are! *Offer ends July 29 at 10AM Pacific Time
Today's Deal: Save 30% on APE OUT!*
Look for the deals each day on the front page of Steam. Or follow us on twitter or Facebook for instant notifications wherever you are!
Summer. The heat age. Scorch season. Spring’s hangover. It’s the mid-point of the year and you know what that means. No, not “mojito time”, Geoff, put those away. It’s time we told you what the best games of the year are so far. There are quite a lot of them. Just look how many v
Summer. The heat age. Scorch season. Spring’s hangover. It’s the mid-point of the year and you know what that means. No, not “mojito time”, Geoff, put those away. It’s time we told you what the best games of the year are so far. There are quite a lot of them. Just look how many videogames have escaped from their developers in the past six months and are now running amok through the blistering streets, getting stuck in the melting tarmac, like ants in jam. It’s unsanitary. So allow us to round up these unruly games and trap them in a handy list. Here are our favourite sword swingers and space ‘splorers so far this year (and a couple of DLCs for good measure).
Developer: doinksoft Publisher: Devolver Digital Release: Out now On: Windows From: Steam For: 4, $5, 4 What have those scoundrels at Devolver Digital gone and done now? Oh look, it s Devolver Bootleg , a mixtape of the Punk IPA publisher’s classics that someone left in their jea
What have those scoundrels at Devolver Digital gone and done now? Oh look, it s Devolver Bootleg, a mixtape of the Punk IPA publisher’s classics that someone left in their jeans pocket before a wash and now the musics all fuzzy and the track list is garbled nonsense. Also it s one percent off, yeah, because screw discounts?
So, is this a delightful slice of performance-art-as-consumer-product brilliance? Or have Devolver, in their mission statement to point a funhouse mirror at the game industry s cynical marketing, done a big old cynicism themselves?
From the languid tempo that starts each level, to the frenetic bebop energy driving a series of devastating assaults, the soundscape of the indie beat em up Ape Out is all about contrasts. As the eponymous gorilla, Ape Out lets players exact revenge against a battalion of doughy
It’s a game that goes between extremes, says Matt Boch, an associate arts professor at the NYU Game Center and the composer and sound designer of Ape Out s dizzying soundtrack. We’re trying to give people [the experience of having] these heights of intensity, and then the low points that build suspense.
Hey all, this new patch is aimed at making the game more fair. -Increased size and accuracy of no-spawn zone around starting point -Removed flamethrowers and bazookas from the harder indoor areas of Fugue and Adrift -Removed behavior where guards fired extremely quickly when appr
Hey all, this new patch is aimed at making the game more fair.
-Increased size and accuracy of no-spawn zone around starting point -Removed flamethrowers and bazookas from the harder indoor areas of Fugue and Adrift -Removed behavior where guards fired extremely quickly when approaching corners with guns aimed -Prevented guards from shooting too quickly when grabbed (and hitting the player in some cases) -Slightly increased machine gun guard's reaction time (they take longer to react) -Slightly increased guard reaction time when lights are out (they take longer to react) -Prevented explosions from chaining through walls -Flamethrower guards' now must ready their flamethrowers before shooting -Audio Improvements -Fix for the game running too fast on some systems -Fix for fugue ending playing at the wrong time in arcade mode. -Possible fix for guards sometimes being inside closed containers, and occasionally pushing themselves up against closed doors. -Possible fix for some crash bugs.
A quick note about leaderboards: as a result of some bugs at launch there were some impossible scores posted to the leaderboard. Thos are all fixed now, and I've gone through and pruned all the outlier scores. I can't tell when the scores were posted, so I don't have a great way of culling. If you guys would prefer I totally cleared the leaderboards let me know in the comments
Hey all, this patch has been live for a day or two already, but here are the patch notes: -Added Laptop Mode to the options menu (removes some visual effects to improve performance) -Added Headphone Mode to the options menu (adds binaural ambisonic rendering for a more immersive
Hey all, this patch has been live for a day or two already, but here are the patch notes:
-Added Laptop Mode to the options menu (removes some visual effects to improve performance) -Added Headphone Mode to the options menu (adds binaural ambisonic rendering for a more immersive audio experience) -Added support for resolutions higher than 1080p -Added bespoke drum fills for the death screen on each drum kit -Added 15 seconds to the time limit when playing harder albums on arcade mode -Better sounding transitions in and out of the menu. -Drummer now plays faster as you get closer to the time limit in arcade mode -Drummer now pauses for a beat when you take damage -Slightly reduced number of guards on the hard version of Abandon Ship -Fixed bug where you could complete a level after you die, resulting in things getting weird -Fixed bug where guards were on fire but no fire was visible -Fixed bug that allowed the ape to pass through big doors without ripping them off their hinges -Fix for corrupted save causing menu to not accept input -Fix for crash on exit affecting some players. -Fix for bug causing scores to carry over after death in arcade mode -Fix for crash on startup affecting some players
I'll be posting a new beta patch today with a few more fixes and gameplay tweaks aimed at making the game more fair.
An ape who wants to escape only has a few options, one of which is shoving her human captors into walls so hard that all the blood flies out of their bodies. That's the plan for Ape Out's ape, and it's pretty much the whole plan. After the first human goes splat, the percussive j
An ape who wants to escape only has a few options, one of which is shoving her human captors into walls so hard that all the blood flies out of their bodies. That's the plan for Ape Out's ape, and it's pretty much the whole plan. After the first human goes splat, the percussive jazz kicks in, and the dizzying improv violence session is on—just keep running and always be splatting. While Ape Out starts to drag after the first couple acts, it's hard to put down anyway, because it looks, sounds and feels so consistently cool.
As the ape, you charge across procedurally-generated mazes from a top-down view, shoving, grabbing, and tossing the human-shaped enemies in your way. It's like a twin-stick shooter, where one analog stick controls movement and the other rotation, but your guns are your biceps. I preferred the mouse and keyboard controls, where WASD moves and the mouse controls the direction I'm facing, the same way I played Hotline Miami.
Left click shoves enemies with brutal force. Into a wall and they'll splat, and into another enemy of the same size or smaller they'll both splat. With a right click, you can instead grab and hold onto any enemy. Shortly after, they'll fire their weapon away from you, so you can use them to shoot their friends before left clicking to chuck them into walls or each other.
It's a bit funny to go from shoving people into pillars like a high school bully (who's a gorilla) to deliberate, tactical use of a human shield, and that tension between recklessness and planning runs throughout Ape Out. At times it helps vary the pace, but it also relates to Ape Out's biggest flaws.
Arm race
On the reckless side of things, the ape's power is intoxicating. Nothing ever slows you down, nothing can stop your shoves. The biggest enemies splat just as hard as the smallest. A few opportunities for added style are satisfying, too: In one set of levels, you can push enemies out of skyscraper windows, whipping them toward the street with fantastic force.
There's not much time to admire a well-placed shove, though. Ape Out demands snap judgments: I surprise a bomb guy and shove him toward another bomb guy, exploding them at a safe distance from me. Immediately, I have to grab a shotgun guy before he can shoot, spin him around and chuck him at another shotgun guy to block his shot and double-splatthem. I ignore a couple riflemen who miss me—they won't catch up if I keep running—smash through a glass pane and shove three more guys into splats along a corridor, because sometimes tactics aren't needed, just ape arms.
As I improvise my way through levels, the jazz percussion improvises along with me, rising to the action and throwing crashes and squeaks and snares and bells in to mark each kill. Ape Out is divided into four eight-level 'albums,' each with its own rhythms and instruments and themes. Together with the stark, unstable color fields that make up the levels, the weird perspective, and the nonsensical, randomized maze layouts, the high-tension music induces the anxiety I imagine in the ape: being an animal in an unfamiliar environment, lashing out against what's hurting me, scrambling and circling back and shoving everything.
Blue notes
Your ape isn't unstoppable, though. When an enemy has a clear shot on you, they'll pause to load and aim, and then take the shot if you haven't dealt with them or turned a corner. It doesn't take many hits to take you down, at which point you have to start over at the beginning of the level.
There are 32 levels, plus one bonus level, and while they aren't exceptionally long, they aren't bite-sized, either, so it's frustrating to die just before the end of one. Completing every level only took me a few hours, but Ape Out felt sluggish by the time I got to the third album. From there, the difficulty feels too dependent on randomization, and many of the levels are disappointingly similar to each other.
I wasn't too impressed when Ape Out added exploding barrels.
There's not much new to learn at that point, either. After my delirious early experimentation, I wondered where this strange game about splats and snare drums was going to go, and I wasn't too impressed when it added exploding barrels. More variety comes from new enemy types, but they're mostly just annoying: flamethrower guys are best avoided, and rocket launcher guys ruin everything if they spawn in too large a number or at an awkward spot. I'm meant to use their weapons to my advantage, but staying alive is hard enough without trying to fancily tease rockets into other enemies.
The procedural generation doesn't help. I can end up at the top of the screen only to find a barrier that extends all the way down to a little gap at the bottom, and then learn on the way there that an inordinate number of enemies spawned along the wall, with too little cover to manage them—another run ended, frustration building. Like Super Meat Boy and Hotline Miami (the first one), Ape Out takes pride in killing you, but dying rarely feels like the learning experience it is in those games. It's just something that happened because I went the wrong way—without any way to know what the right way was, because the level changes every time—or when a rocket squeaked by a corner from behind me.
That focus on failure hinders Ape Out's theme of jazz improvisation. I wanted to be reckless all the time, to play out the angry ape's revenge like an angry ape, but when frustration set in as the levels became more difficult, I started playing more like Solid Snake in an ape costume: cautious, timid, afraid of dying just feet from a level exit again. I'm not sure that strategy worked better, but the distance between checkpoints and my fragility pushed me toward hesitation, especially in the war zone-themed album, where those barrels love exploding in chain reactions. I felt relieved when I finished later levels rather than triumphant, especially when I breezed through one because the randomization was on my side.
Ape on
Now that I've beaten every level and I'm a bit better at making the right decisions, I find Ape Out more enjoyable than I did when I was first trying to progress. I can easily run through the early science facility and skyscraper levels, and with less of my attention dedicated to staying alive, I'm more present for the music, which is fun to tap my keyboard along to.
My favorite level is a special one, though, where the pressure almost completely lifts and I get to run around smashing everything I see, as if my brain has tuned into whatever frequency of background radiation is angry at humanity's crimes. It's a great pay off after the punishment before it, though I'm not convinced it's great because of that punishment—it's more that it was something different when I was craving difference. I wanted to see this simple control scheme and fantastic art applied to lots of different scenarios, not a bunch of ship decks.
Ape Out is so thunderously stylish and thematically strong that I like it even though it loses its thrust so quickly. It evokes anxiety and fear with brutal efficiency, so if you've ever wanted to feel like a cornered animal—or me whenever someone asks me a direct personal question—here's your chance. Those uncomfortable feelings just aren't balanced with quite enough triumph.
From the moment you first smash your way out of your cell, pulping a guard against the opposite wall, it's clear Ape Out is going to be a lot of fun. The next thing you realise is that you're actually playing a kind of rhythm game. One where all you know is murder. Ape Out has a
From the moment you first smash your way out of your cell, pulping a guard against the opposite wall, it's clear Ape Out is going to be a lot of fun. The next thing you realise is that you're actually playing a kind of rhythm game. One where all you know is murder.
Ape Out has a very simple conceit and is very easy to pick up. You, that is to say a honking great gorilla, want to escape. Lots of armed guards stand in your way, so it's probably best to brutally murder them on your way out the door. You have only two buttons to contend with - one to grab and one to smash. Hurling your enemies into the nearest wall or grabbing them for use as a meat shield makes you feel tremendously powerful, and the weird shuffling movements of the gorilla have been so well realised that movement is a delight - as long as you're playing with a controller, that is. Playing Ape Out with a keyboard and mouse is perfectly doable, it just lacks the same flow afforded by twin analogue sticks.
Really though, as captivating as its murderous gorilla is, the true star of Ape Out is the music. Each level pulses or ticks or rattles or quakes along with its jazz soundtrack - the music ebbing and flowing depending on how well your rampage is going - and each enemy kill is punctuated by a noise, whether that be a cymbal hit or the shriek of a trumpet. At first, these noises feel like a punchline - a bit of slapstick to round off the vibrant, bloody visuals. The more you play, however, the more you open yourself up to the music and realise just how integral that soundtrack is. Suddenly those cymbal crashes and bits of brass don't seem like throwaway jokes any more - killing enemies almost feels like improvising. I really didn't expect a game about an ape dashing people's skulls against the wall to turn out to be a meditation on jazz as a medium yet here we are, and the effect is quite brilliant.
Truth is the first casualty of first-person shooters, said the philosopher Ian Videogames. Time has proven him correct. Not a game is developed without some use of smoke and/or mirror. But this week on the RPS podcast, the Electronic Wireless Show , we shall not be lying to you.
Truth is the first casualty of first-person shooters, said the philosopher Ian Videogames. Time has proven him correct. Not a game is developed without some use of smoke and/or mirror. But this week on the RPS podcast, the Electronic Wireless Show, we shall not be lying to you. We are journalists and we stand for the Truth with a big ‘T’. No more tricksy use of code and polygon, we say. No more lying!
APE OUT is Now Available on Steam! APE OUT is a wildly intense and colorfully stylized smash ‘em up about primal escape, rhythmic violence, and frenetic jazz.
APE OUT is Now Available on Steam!
APE OUT is a wildly intense and colorfully stylized smash ‘em up about primal escape, rhythmic violence, and frenetic jazz.
APE OUT is a wildly intense and colorfully stylized smash ‘em up about primal escape, rhythmic violence, and frenetic jazz. Build up nearly unstoppable momentum and use your captors as both weapons and shields to crush everyone on your procedurally generated path to freedom.
APE OUT is a wildly intense and colorfully stylized smash ‘em up about primal escape, rhythmic violence, and frenetic jazz. Build up nearly unstoppable momentum and use your captors as both weapons and shields to crush everyone on your procedurally generated path to freedom.
Developer: Gabe Cuzzillo, Bennett Foddy, Matt Boch Publisher: Devolver Digital Release: On: Windows From: Steam, GOG, Humble For: TBC Once I went to the zoo in San Diego, and a load of people were banging on the glass at an orangutan and its baby instead of just being appropriate
Developer: Gabe Cuzzillo, Bennett Foddy, Matt Boch
Publisher: Devolver Digital
Release:
On: Windows
From: Steam, GOG, Humble
For: TBC
Once I went to the zoo in San Diego, and a load of people were banging on the glass at an orangutan and its baby instead of just being appropriately (quietly) awed. One man in particular was hollering at what was a very sad looking ape, and honestly if there was justice in the world the orangutan would have smashed free and liquified that man s limbs like a bouncer squeezing an uncooked sausage. In Ape Out, there is that justice. And jazz. And it is glorious.
