One of the strange, hard-to-grasp questions that quietly haunts a lot of games is whether we are the people we are controlling. Whether we are meant to be those people, anyway. Are we Mario, or are we his custodian for the hours in which we play? Is there one of us involved in these jumps and dashes and Goomba stomps, or two of us, and where are the boundaries to be found? 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’re in sync. And then something will happen – a glitch, a funny movement, a cut-scene – and the gap between avatar and player becomes jarringly visible. It’s odd stuff and tricky to think about for long stretches of time without starting to feel a bit weird.
Apartment StoryDeveloper: Blue Rider InteractivePublisher: Blue Rider InteractivePlatform: Played on PCAvailability: Out now on PC (Steam)
Apartment Story is a short narrative game about a man who lives in a small apartment and is quietly running out of options. His apartment is blandly pleasant but claustrophobic. His bank account is overdrawn and his life in general seems rattly and hollow. Over the course of an hour or so, all of this changes. There’s a woman, another man, and a gun. Things race towards an ugly climax.
And yet race is not the right word at all, because while events pile up swiftly, somehow they do this while you, living as or alongside the man in his small apartment, still have a lot of blandly aimless time to fill. Writing or porn on the computer in the bedroom. The making of small, disappointing meals to eat. When to rest, when to turn off the lights to conserve electricity. When to do a bit of a tidy up and when to think about handling the dishes.
In between the fights and the personal intrigue and the looming threat, this stuff should feel like a distraction, but in fact it’s the other stuff that distracts. I’ll be in the middle of a tense stand-off and I’ll be thinking: gah, didn’t clear the table before all this drama unfolded, that was a missed opportunity!