From indie developer/publisher I Need Play comes Apartment 666, a short horror experience that sets out to simulate the Silent Hills PT, but this time through the eyes of a 12 year old boy named Julian. With his father and uncle gone, the young boy has been left alone in his new apartment. It's left up to Julian to find out, through a series of newspapers, what has happened to his family.
I find that people throw around the term "Silent Hills PT clone" too frequently and loosely; Silent Hills PT had a very deep psychological horror aspect to it that these "clones" fail to carry over. Simply because a game takes place in a repeating hallway doesn't make it a Silent Hills PT clone. Although, out of these "clones" I do find that Apartment 666 is the closest cheap experience, while the genuine and great experience would be Layers of Fear.
Apartment 666 lasts just a little over the 20 minute mark, and during that time nothing particularly significant happens. You wake up over and over in your room, and wander the same hallway. Sometimes new doors will open that usually lead to a dead end room, sometimes the hallway has lights that burst or "creepy" little voices. Overall, nothing that is exactly frightening; there are also no jumpscares, which is fine by me, but take that for what you will.
I will say that this title does have decent optimization, and it ran at a solid 144Hz for my entire playthrough. However, even though that was what the FPS counter indicated, the game does feel choppy at times. As well, despite numerous patches to attempt to fix the problem, one of the three achievements still does not work. Another couple of down points are the stock assets that've been used which makes the entire experience feel generic, and the low grade sound effects and overall audio. However, the lighting is well done and does attempt to give the game a "realistic" feel.
That's pretty well all there is to say about Apartment 666. The developer did listen to the community enough to lower the initial price point from around $9 CAD to $3.29 CAD, which is the only reason I decided to purchase it after going through the crapshoot that was Strange Night; a game with a similar concept, length, and initial asking price. It's definitely not the worst horror game ever, but it's not the greatest, either.
Rating: 2.0/5.0 - It's not awful, but it's not great.The Horror Network
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