While Ape Escape retains its sense of adventure and fun, it’s also gained a deep and unsettling feeling in the transition to modern consoles. The game is like a patchwork quilt, where the many smaller parts come together to form new patterns and pretty pictures, even as threads start to fray. Every seam is clear – between rock faces, below oceans, and even on monkey limbs. In Ape Escape, every lovingly-placed model draws attention to itself. The secrets of development are usually hiding beyond the reach of the average player. Cameras usually follow the rules, and textures tend to behave. While many contain bugs, it’s rare to see the seams that show how their worlds have been cobbled together. Modern video games tend to give the impression of being finely polished. (The game also runs in PAL format in Australia, which results in a notably lower refresh rate, and jankier on-screen movement.) Your input doesn’t quite feel connected to the visuals onscreen either, with latency making each movement far more unresponsive and terrifying than it should be. The jerky camera, combined with unrefined controls, gives the action a real sense of foreboding, whether you’re just trying to cross a stream, or avoid the terrifying fish beneath the lake. The boat controls also aren’t particularly attuned, and it’s easy to fall off the side if you forget which buttons to use, with the giant fish waiting to fry you alive on every paddle.įor a title marketed as a wholesome game for kids, it’s an extremely panicking experience. The fish takes up most of the screen – and yet always seems to lurk on the edges of your vision, thanks to the game’s sticky camera, which never seems to be where it’s supposed to. In this seemingly placid setting, you can eventually find a giant fish lurking within the dark water, waiting to electrify you if you fall out of your boat. There’s also true horror to be found in one distinct level: Thick Jungle. When you teeter off the edge of a stage, an endless pit beckons above and below – with skies made of textures taken from real-life photographs of forests, jungles and caverns creating another haunting disconnect.
The shrieks of the monkeys are similarly strangled. The strange, compressed sounds of monkey radars and oxygen metres sound like they’re emanating from an empty room. Fire demons leer with bright, frighteningly large eyes. That’s not to mention that moments of outright horror – moments designed to be scary – are amplified tenfold by the rickety nature of the game, which feels barely held together in some parts.ĭark corridors are made even darker and more ominous by blocky shadows. The game tends to load complex textures only within a small radius, meaning that monkeys standing somewhat close by can still exhibit skeletal features, bugged-out eyes, and unsightly, gangly limbs. The odd texturing extends to characters in the game, with monkey character models looking particularly rough. It frequently reminds you that the world of the game is manufactured – and gives the odd sense that the floor may disappear at any stage, plunging you into Tartarus. When you view these textures through the camera lens, they can clip suddenly in and out of view, producing a strange flashing effect that makes even watching Ape Escape a headache-inducing exercise. Get close, and they fade into view – a result of PS1-era technical limitations. At a distance, textures are only partially visible. These sudden camera swings also cause changes to the environment of the world. Clipping through the world reveals hidden parts of stages. These objects are usually blacked out – they’re something players are not meant to see. You can also see these bones if you move the camera too close to a cliff – often, the view clips through to the other side and reveals strangle shapes where hills or towers should be. If you dive too deep underwater, the bottom of the ocean becomes invisible, and you can see all the way to the game’s own version of Tartatus – the gaping pit beneath the world’s polygons.
The rough edges are particularly uncanny, with every camera twitch causing texture glitches and disappearances that reveal the ‘bones’ of the game’s world.
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