There’s a right way and a wrong way to tell a story that’s inspired by urban legends in a video game. The right way is Fatal Frame, which has an entire game and lore built around a simple urban legend: there’s a house where, if you take a picture, a woman appears in it. Then there’s whatever the hell Apartment No 129 is.
Apartment No 129 follows Emir, a YouTuber who is visiting an apartment complex that’s said to be haunted after two teenage girls performed a satanic ritual in 2009. Now, stuck inside the complex, Emir must survive.
Now, onto the game itself! When it comes to the controls, forget everything you know about first-person game controls! Some of the buttons designated for tasks make NO sense and are overcomplicated.
The only good thing about this game is probably the light engine that was used. That’s the only good thing. The assets of the game I’ve found out were flipped from another horror game, which, in my opinion, cheapens the game and its credibility. The voice acting is bland, true, the actors are speaking Turkish, but I’ve seen Turkish movies before and know there’s a hell of a lot more emotion.
Gameplay is horrible. One of the things I hate about this game is that it’s harder than hell to read anything, as the text is so small, and it’s stated in the game that you must read everything as it’s important to the gameplay. Unfortunatly there’s a lot of reading involved, and it does absolutely nothing. Some of the objectives make no sense at all, and I don’t know if I’m bugged, but I’m supposed to be looking for some demonic doctor who is wandering the apartment complex, but I’ve been all over the map and found no one, even after three hours of looking.
Back at the start, I mentioned that this was an example of how not to make a game/story based on an urban legend. The “True Story” this game claims to be based on is, as mentioned, an urban legend that’s popular in Turkey right now, from my understanding, and it’s a piss poor one. The claim is that, back in 2009, two teen girls performed a satanic ritual “using candles”, and they died mysteriously, and this caused a massive earthquake, and anyone who goes into this apartment dies. Quick online searches show that there was no earthquake in 2009; chances are, this story came into being after the major earthquake in 2023.
Overall, if it was not obvious. I did not care much for this game. The controls are hard to master, the flipped assets, poor voice acting, poor story, and the unreadable texts. The game looks and feels rushed, and comes across as pretentious. My advice is to keep away from this. On my scale of 1-10, it’s a 3.
