Apartment Story’s fascinating puppet show paints the thin lines between player and character

One of the strange, hard-to-understand questions that silently haunts many games is whether we are the people we control. Or at least we are meant to be those people. Are we Mario, or are we his guardian of the hours in which we play? Is one of us involved in these jumps and sprints and Goomba stomps, or two of us, and where are the boundaries? Sometimes the controls in a game are so intuitive that it really feels like it’s us on the other side of the screen. We are in sync. And then something happens – a glitch, a funny movement, a cutscene – and the gap between avatar and player becomes shockingly visible. These are strange things and difficult to think about for a long time without starting to feel a little strange.

Apartment Story is a short narrative game about a man living in a small apartment who is quietly running out of options. His apartment is blandly pleasant but claustrophobic. His bank account is overdrawn and his life generally seems ratty and hollow. Over the course of about an hour, this all changes. There is a woman, another man and a gun. Things race to an ugly climax.

And yet race isn’t the right word at all, because even though the events pile up quickly, they somehow do so while you, living as or alongside the man in his small apartment, still have a lot of blandly aimless time to fill. have. Writing or porn on the computer in the bedroom. Making small, disappointing meals to eat. When to rest, when to turn off the lights to save electricity. When should you do a little tidying up and when should you think about doing the dishes?

Between the fighting, the personal intrigue, and the looming threat, this stuff should feel like a distraction, but in fact it’s the other stuff that’s distracting. I’m in the middle of a tense confrontation thinking, gah, I didn’t clear the table before all this drama unfolded, that was a missed opportunity!

And a lot of this comes down to the way the controls work, and how the player and the on-screen avatar relate to each other. You’re the man in the apartment, but you’re not him either: he’s clumsy and somewhat indirect in getting around, and pressing a button is often met with a purposeful pause that keeps you both separated, both of you under glass and pronouncing words back and forth. Sit down. Okay, I will. To eat. Okay then.

It’s like being a puppeteer, or directing the movements of chess pieces remotely through the ham radio. I say it is, but I’ve never done it either. Either way, it gives the world a wonderfully maddening urgency. By removing yourself a little from the surface of the action, everything in the apartment becomes very important. Gosh, it’ll take forever to shower, to get dressed, to pick up all the CDs lying around. Housework becomes a kind of drama of fatigue.

Ultimately, I think this leads to Apartment Story becoming both a character study and a dense piece of noir. Again: we are this man, but we are also not. We make his choices, but we also observe him. I let him cook dinner or get a beer, but I wish I could ask him about the neon crucifix next to his desk. I make sure he stays showered and neatly dressed, but I also keep an eye on the series of meters on the screen that indicate his mental state, his drowsiness, his urges, and that very act of meter management only increases his mental state seem further away. more unknowable. It all adds up to a game that’s fascinating because it captures a very specific experience of the mundane. It’s a short story, but when I left that apartment at the end, I felt like I had been there for weeks.