The Indie Informer

Here’s a not-so-hot take: if a game’s primary goal is to tell a story, then its mechanics should serve that story. Link must rescue Zelda, so he has weapons and tools to defeat his foes. Madeline must scale Celeste Mountain, so she can jump and dash to ascend from one screen to another. Apartment Story, a single-player story-driven experience from Blue Rider Interactive, doesn’t seem to understand this principle. Despite its impressive visuals, many of its systems are simply unnecessary, dragging the story down.

In Apartment Story, you play as Arthur, an unemployed man struggling to pay his bills. It’s up to you to keep him alive and happy, and the game gives you a surprisingly granular level of control over his actions. There are bars for hunger, hygiene, sleep, toilet, and mind (the last of which is a catch-all for mental health), and you’ll have to keep them filled by doing various tasks around the apartment. All five of these stats feed into the overall Life bar, drastically slowing your movement if it gets too low. Arthur can cook meals, watch TV, take a shower, drink alcohol, do drugs, watch pornography, and plenty more. When you add on a timed day/night cycle, it creates an intimate look into someone’s lonely, private life.

All of these actions and animations are showcased using late-90s-style pixelated 3D graphics often associated with the original PlayStation. It’s a distinct look that not only serves the game well – it’s Apartment Story’s strongest element by far. It lends a liminal quality to the space that sets a tone of realism other styles wouldn’t be able to achieve as easily. Individual items (most of which can be picked up and moved) are always identifiable, but abstract enough that the text is illegible and the edges are pointed. It’s symbolic of Arthur’s life in this space, where the hours melt into each other and his only real goal is survival; the details fade into a hazy, pixelated memory.

Sadly, Apartment Story’s visuals aren’t enough to distract from the fundamentally flawed relationship between its story and gameplay. A few hours into your first day, Arthur will get a visit from Diane, a former roommate he hasn’t seen in years. While she’s around, she explains what she’s been up to in recent years, and the story gradually reveals itself to be a tense thriller. That said, the game mechanics still revolve around your character managing his hunger, sleep, toilet, mind, and hygiene bars, so the game leaves huge chunks of the day completely empty for you to walk around the apartment to use the bathroom, eat apples, and keep your meters full. If you fail to manage these systems in between visits, you’re stuck filling them while Diane is around, leaving her mid-conversation to wash your hands and keep your Hygiene bar high enough. It completely kills the pacing. Turns out, there’s a reason why most movies don’t take 10-15-minute breaks to show their characters living their boring lives.

At the end of the first day, Diane went home and I was ready to go to bed to progress the story, but I was surprised to see that this wasn’t an option. The reason? Earlier in the day, I noticed my Sleep bar was sinking into the gray danger zone, so I drank enough coffee to pump it up and avoid the damage it would do to my Life bar. But since the bar was above the halfway point, I couldn’t go to sleep. It’s a logical consequence, but I wasn’t warned about it beforehand, and I couldn’t help but feel punished for engaging with Apartment Story’s systems.

The majority of the game’s playable portions (as well as the consequences for falling behind) are ultimately a waste of time. It’s ludonarrative dissonance at its finest; the conflicts in the gameplay systems have little to do with the conflict in the story, and I’m ultimately left wishing the development team had doubled down on one or the other rather than trying to combine the two. Apartment Story is an ambitious title, but because of this lack of direction, its ambitions fall flat.