Gabe Cuzzillo’s “Ape Out” or What If Experimental Jazz Was A Game?
Indietail #5 — The Violence of Freedom And The Flow State of Video Game Murder
Sometimes you have a crazy idea and maybe — just maybe — you also have some game design knowledge and a few equally crazy colleagues who are willing to help you turn your fever dream pitch into a reality. We have seen such a story play out countless times in video games, particularly on the independent side of things and during the medium’s beginnings, when experimenting wasn’t frowned upon in favor of live services and instead of greedy executives you had young geeks huddled around computers, which to modern eyes look as if H.R. Giger-inspired art projects or an homage to the tail-end of Serial Experiments Lain (if you know you know). Gabe Cuzzillo’s “Ape Out” is no different.
The project, helmed by Cuzzillo with help from the legendary Bennet Foddy for the art and Matt Boch for the game’s superb sound, was released in 2019 to plenty of interest. Bennet Foddy is well known for his 2017 creation “Getting Over It With Bennet Foddy”, a game which many did not, in fact, get over — likely requiring therapy afterwards.
In the game you play as a monochromatic, orange gorilla, fighting for its freedom through gauntlets of levels, escaping from ever more absurd captivity scenarios and through a primal interpretation of what a hellscape created by Andy Warhol would look like. Though, truthfully, perhaps the game owes more to the late French painter Henri Matisse in its predilection for the waxing and waning cacophonies of vibrant — almost neon — color, as Matt Boch underscores it all with a BAFTA Award-winning emergent score, which seeps and squirts Buddy Rich or an alternate timeline John Coltrane — where Coltrane picked up the drums instead of a saxophone — out of its minimalist hyper-violent gouges, gashes and splatters.
The game’s top down perspective immediately puts any seasoned independent games connoisseur in mind of the Hotline Miami duology by Dennaton Games, a franchise which has only gained more widespread recognition throughout the years, aging like a fine wine, as the senseless violence of our real world begins to paint the series’ messages in a glumly ever-more prophetic light. Another thing which both games share in their DNA is the publisher, Devolver Digital, undeniable enjoyers and avid supporters of independent gaming’s oddities throughout the years.
Where Hotline Miami covers a fictive array of pustules growing on our world’s underbelly, laden with depravity and criminality in spades, Ape Out invites players on a journey into the flow state of video game violence. As much as we may love or hate to admit it, fictitious violence can be deeply enthralling — without the horrific connotations of real world violence, which is more akin to the modern day adage of a “car crash you cannot look away from” — the violence in games like Hotline Miami, My Friend Pedro, Katana Zero or, indeed, Ape Out in particular create a frenzied set of experiences, designed to invoke a real head rush and doing so with flying colors.
Ape Out, in my estimation, attempts to show the real violence of freedom and the hubris of attempting to chain that which hates nothing more than chains. It conveys a clear, animalistic desire, by casting the player in the role of the rampaging gorilla, careening through faceless guards and military men, crumpling them against walls like blood and viscera papier-mâché. I found myself in a subconscious dialogue with the gorilla, through my act of guiding the hulking giant — and our biological cousin — through high contrast highrises and military bases steeped in stark shadows from the surrounding jungle foliage, I found myself understanding the true parallels between the plight of this animal and that of the modern man.
Conclusion
The catharsis of Ape Out’s violence doesn’t come from just its superb artistic direction and frenetic emergent, percussive soundscape (not unlike Distasterpiece’s stellar work on 2013's Mini Metro, which I am sure to cover some day), but it also comes from the enslavement of the modern man. Who of us doesn’t, at times, feel a bubbling primal urge to hulk out through the highrise where our boring 9 to 5 is located, or wreak havoc on the violence-proliferators of our local navy and/or military? The human is a free being of self-imposed chains, of a ceaseless chrysalis, where the sublime promise of change keeps us unknowingly locked and enchained in a stasis of our own culture’s design, awaiting a passive shift that will never come. Freedom is a violent act, a senseless chaos, unbound by the strict dogma of righteousness and proper courtesy and I think Ape Out is precisely exquisite in how it chooses to attract us, pull at our primordial, deepest code, to invite our thoughts to wander and revel in its hyper-violent dreams of freedom through its many wildly differing levels (or “albums”, as the game calls them).
If you enjoy what I do here and want to support independent journalism like this, be sure to subscribe to my newsletter (found at the bottom of my profile), to be notified whenever new articles release and support me on Ko-Fi here (this link can also be found under “Give a tip”, next to the “Follow” button below this article).
