APE OUT

APE OUT commits to a single, ferocious idea and gets out before it wears thin: you're a gorilla breaking out of captivity, smashing through waves of armed guards across four settings, with every impact, throw and gunshot slotting into a live, reactive jazz-drum score instead of playing under a fixed soundtrack. Devolver Digital published it on 28 February 2019 from a tiny team — Gabe Cuzzillo, Bennett Foddy (of QWOP and Getting Over It) and Maxi Boch — and it's held an Overwhelmingly Positive 95% across 2,763 reviews ever since, with recent sentiment (94 of the last 100 English reviews) landing almost exactly on that lifetime number. This is a game whose reputation was made in its first weeks and hasn't moved since.

The randomisation argument, made specifically and repeatedly

APE OUT's levels are procedurally reshuffled on every attempt, and its small negative corpus converges on a single, well-argued objection to that choice. "Why the hell would a game like this have generated levels?" asks one 10-vote negative. "Trying to practice and perfect a run is the whole point of these types of games, you ruined it." A longer, 35-vote review makes the same case with more detail, arguing the game "seriously suffers from its procedural generation" because it removes the ability to learn a specific layout and improve against it — the loop that games like Hotline Miami, which several reviewers name directly by comparison, are built around. This isn't a complaint about difficulty or content; it's a specific, structural argument about what randomisation costs a game whose core appeal is supposed to be masterable execution, and it shows up independently across enough reviews to be a real design conversation rather than one person's pet peeve.

Two concrete technical complaints worth flagging

Beyond the design argument, two specific, reproducible technical issues surface in the corpus. An 82-vote review pins down a PC-specific frame-pacing bug in detail: the game defaults to your monitor's full refresh rate while its simulation is capped at 60fps, so any refresh rate that isn't a clean multiple of 60Hz stutters — measured at an effective 48fps on a 144Hz panel, with a windowed-borderless-at-60Hz workaround the reviewer had to find themselves. Separately, at least two independent reviewers report a bug that blocks progress past the very first level or "disk," with one saying Steam support couldn't resolve it and the refund window had closed by the time they gave up trying. This review found no way to confirm whether either issue persists in the current build years of patches later, so both are reported as documented historical complaints rather than confirmed live bugs — but they're specific and reproducible enough to be worth a buyer's attention regardless.

What lands even for the critics

Nearly every review, positive or negative, agrees on the same strengths: the audiovisual identity is genuinely singular, the "grab, throw, smash" moveset feels immediately good in the hand, and the whole thing is short enough that even its harshest critics tend to finish it rather than abandon it — the completion-tier achievement sits at 26.3%, a notably high figure for a hard action game, and far above what a long, grind-heavy title would show. Reviewers who push into the optional Arcade Hard modes hit a real wall, though: those achievements cluster at 0.5-0.7% completion, a steep cliff after the relatively accessible base campaign.

Final verdict

APE OUT is a confident, compact, audiovisually distinctive smash-'em-up that earns its Overwhelmingly Positive score through sheer identity and feel rather than depth or longevity — and its own detailed critics make a genuinely good-faith case that the procedural generation meant to keep it fresh instead undercuts the genre's usual sense of mastery. Buy it for a couple of hours of something you won't have played before, note the refresh-rate workaround if your monitor isn't 60Hz-friendly, and don't expect a level you can learn to run perfectly, because the game won't let you try the same one twice.