You Should Play Apple Sauce Apartments

The bulk of Apple Sauce Apartments is drenched in the putrid, nauseating stain of yellowish green. It’s the colour of vomit and rot, a deeply unpleasant mental image that is not usually associated with the idea of hanging out with a lively community of young ‘uns, who are staying together in a small, rented apartment, and whose building is overseen and managed by an omnipresent landlord.

But of course this is a deliberate choice by its creator. After all, Apple Sauce Apartment is about the scornful existence of landlords, a nasty tumour borne of a capitalist society. So lacking of humanity are landlords, that the one in the game doesn’t even seem vaguely human. This is despite them still resembling one of us, in contrast to their tenants, who have somehow mutated into anthropomorphic apples. His dialogue is halting and unnatural, pausing at odd moments, while he drones on at length about his appetite for wealth and his disgust for the tenants. He then requested your help to collect rent from these tenants without disguising his twisted intentions. “Go forth and harvest their labour,” he commands. You can choose to do so. Or not.

Like the landlord, Apple Sauce Apartments is just as plain about its message; it’s a diatribe against our deeply capitalist society, as it rebukes every aspect of such a system, from the parasitic purpose of feudalistic landlords to how it reinforces the unending cycles of poverty and depression. It can be a tad verbose at times, but its unsettling atmosphere—bolstered by the game’s predominant, mouldy shade of green—makes Apple Sauce Apartments a compelling reminder of the shit we’ve unwittingly and collectively found ourselves wading into.

You can download Apple Sauce Apartments on itch.io.