izigame.me

Really fantastic premise! The idea of a thriller that conveys everyday mundanity via Sims-like life meters is inspired. I appreciate a game where a certain amount of friction is key to the experience, so the slow pace worked for me. Apartment Story also manages to create an awful lot of tension within its comparatively short runtime of about an hour and a half -- this leads up to one of the more genuinely panicky moments I've ever experienced in a video game and I'll be thinking about it for a while. Also the aesthetic is really on point and super evocative of a very specific place, and I'm a sucker for games that are able to pull that off.
Now for some criticism: I do wish we got to see more interaction between the characters; I expected more opportunities to speak with each of them and possibly impact the outcome of the story based on your choices. I'm actually not really sure whether any of the meters I maintained/didn't maintain impacted the narrative at all (I see other reviewers mentioning moments when characters reacted to their choices, so it must be possible). The way the game is marketed as heavily dependent on narrative events combined with the way it ultimately plays out had me thinking that surely there *must* be multiple endings, so I loaded a save after I finished the game and messed around for a while to try and find out. Sadly I think there's only one outcome, and while I'm all for a focused linear experience, in this instance it feels a bit like a missed opportunity to me. I do appreciate the ending overall, but I would also love to see a version of this game that lets you really dig around in the lives of its three characters more than it ultimately does. It's hard to expand on why I think this without getting into heavy spoiler territory, and Apartment Story is definitely a game best played knowing as little as possible about it, so I encourage anyone reading this to play it for themselves and try it out!
All in all I definitely recommend this -- though it's not exactly the experience I thought it'd be, it's still a very neatly told story and a wonderful expression of the unique conveyances of narrative design. I would love to see more games experiment with mechanics this way! And for what it's worth, I do love how effectively this tells a story in under two hours. More narrative-heavy short games, please!