Apartment no 129, review of a disjointed and toothless Turkish horror

Let's be honest: the independent horror landscape is now such a dense jungle that disentangling soulless clones from hidden gems requires a sharp machete and a lot, a lot of patience. However, when I get my hands on a title that proudly flaunts the phrase "based on real events," my eyebrow automatically raises, hovering between genuine interest and that healthy skepticism that years of video game disappointments have taught me to cultivate.

It is with this spirit that I approached Apartment no 129, a Turkish psychological horror, developed by Batuhan Gündüz and recently landed on consoles after its PC debut. The premises, on paper, scream "potential" from every pore – or at least they try. But is an appealing label and an exotic urban legend enough to save an experience that, I'll tell you right away, lasts as long as a movie but weighs like a misplaced boulder? Spoiler: the equation doesn't add up.

Emir, the content creator (and other questionable choices)

The plot, if we can call the common thread that tries to hold together the shards of this approximately two-hour experience, starts from an event that in 2009 allegedly shook Turkey. The legend tells of two girls residing on the top floor of the infamous apartment building number 129, who died under mysterious circumstances during a supposed candlelit satanic ritual. The residents at the time swore they heard a violent earthquake – shattered glass, overturned furniture – but seismographs recorded nothing. Zero. A phantom earthquake for a horror that was all too real, leading to the mass abandonment of the building by tenants and administrators, leaving it to rot with its secrets.

Fast forward to the present day. We play as Emir, the classic paranormal-obsessed content creator who, armed with that unconscious courage typical of someone who needs to rack up views, decides to cross the threshold of the cursed building. Emir starts skeptical, the classic type who "doesn't believe it but tries it," and remains so for much of the adventure. Don't expect a deep narrative arc or inner growth as he wanders through the dark corridors: he is there, a passive and somewhat flat witness to events, more a means to show us things than a true protagonist.

Apartment no 129 relies, in its introduction and conclusion, on live-action footage to open and close the narration. On paper, the idea works, right? Too bad the execution stumbles visibly, because when I say live action, don't expect Alan Wake II-style productions: here we are faced with completely amateur footage, with acting performances that it would even be unfair to call such, often uncertain direction, and color correction whose existence seems completely forgotten. A mix that aims to add realism but ends up breaking immersion, sometimes eliciting an involuntary smile where tension should be.

The weight of narration and divine judgment

If the filmed scenes don't help, the in-game narration does its part to test patience. The story is not told; it is poured onto the player through documents. Not short, concise notes, but actual walls of text. Imagine having to read paragraph after paragraph of supposed lore written in tiny characters (a torture on console, I guarantee you), translated into limping English that makes comprehension an obstacle course. It's an old, lazy way of storytelling that breaks the rhythm in a game that lasts barely two hours and cannot afford to stop you every three steps to make you decipher a poorly translated treatise.

The whole is permeated by a strong spiritual component: verses from the Quran, references to Allah and Islamic mysticism that could be fascinating if integrated with more grace, but which often appear as elements disconnected from the game context.

This disconnection culminates in an ending that is, to say the least, perplexing. After spending time fleeing and surviving, Emir is asked a blunt question: "Do you believe in Allah?" His answer is disarming in its honesty: he once did, now he doesn't. And it is here that the entire experience of that night is called into question, arguing that Emir's salvation did not depend on his abilities or his instinct, but on a higher will. At that point, the game presents us with a stark choice, almost disconnected from everything we've done before: a binary choice that abruptly closes the loop, leaving the feeling that theology was used more as a deus ex machina ending than as a true central theme of the work.

The Illusion of Originality in Apartment No. 129

If the narrative limps, the gameplay unfortunately doesn't run. Let's be clear: tackling the topic of "been there, done that" in 2026 is a minefield. Originality is such a rare commodity as to be almost a utopia, and I certainly don't expect every indie production to reinvent the wheel or rewrite the canons of the genre. The problem with Apartment no 129, however, is not that it rehashes overused tropes – a venial sin I could forgive – but its total inability to rework them or make them even minimally engaging. Here we are not facing a tribute to the classics, but a complete failure across the board.

The entire structure of the condominium suffers from what is colloquially called an "asset flip": the feeling is not that of exploring a real, lived-in and then abandoned building, but of walking inside a catalog of 3D objects bought in bulk and placed randomly. The apartments lack any residential logic: rooms that repeat identically, senseless floor plans. It's the triumph of the "carbon copy": a fundamental repetitiveness that kills any ambition for realism at birth. If the intent was to create spatial disorientation, justifying it with the excuse of a "paranormal trap," the result was only to create deadly boredom. While playing, I tried to do the screenwriters' job myself, telling myself: "Well, maybe it's like this because Emir is trapped in a paranormal distortion." But the truth is that the game never supports this thesis; there is no real force blocking us, nothing happens to justify this chaos. It's simply a bland, trivial, and terribly lazy level design.

The apartments are empty boxes, all identical, placed there for quantity. The only way to understand which rooms are "useful" for the plot is to notice that they have different furniture from the others. You understand that this kills exploration: there is no thrill of discovery, but only the boredom of discarding the "copy-paste" rooms to find the only ones where we really need to go.

Gunplay and survival: I wish I could but I can't

Without much surprise, the action – understood as combat – falls disastrously. Emir can defend himself with an axe or a pistol, but calling this system "gameplay" requires a lot of imagination. The hitboxes are completely wrong, enemy movements make no logical sense, and all those finishing details that distinguish an indie production made with heart and effort from a sloppy and lazy one are missing.

Then there's a colossal error in resource management, which should be the pillar of a survival horror. We are literally inundated with bullets. The enemies, however much they try to look aesthetically different, all have the same approach and go down with a certain number of shots, without much fuss. There's no strategy, no scarcity. The same goes for healing. We have plenty, but the user interface decides to get in the way. It's never clear on screen how much health we've lost; when using a cure via the quick menu (associated with the D-Pad), there's a total lack of visual feedback to confirm healing. The result? You'll often find yourself spamming cures in doubt, wasting them. The weapon itself, the pistol, provides no feedback: shooting is like throwing confetti, without any sense of impact or power.

The game tries to patch things up by focusing on tension, but it does so in the worst possible way: the abuse of jumpscares. I have always been against this mechanic when it becomes the developer's only crutch. A jumpscare is not fear; it's an unconditional reflex: I jump in my seat because there's a sudden loud noise, not because the atmosphere has terrified me. It's an immediate yet momentary scare that vanishes a second later, leaving only annoyance.

Frustration reaches its peak in the mission structure. We are guided by a mysterious figure who communicates with us via notes that magically appear around the map – a lazy narrative device, as the notes appear out of nowhere after performing certain actions. This forces us into tedious and boring backtracking: a continuous back and forth between apartments in areas already cleared, where there is no longer any danger, no tension, nothing. It's the classic "thinly stretched broth": trivial puzzles (which are not worth the candle in terms of satisfaction) placed there just to force us to walk back and forth and stretch out the longevity.

A tired port

To complete the circle of an insufficient experience, there's the technical conversion from PC to console, which I would describe as terrible. Beyond the camera speed – which needs to be reset immediately in the menus to avoid nausea – there are usability problems that are disheartening. Take the puzzles with numeric keypads: moving the cursor to select numbers is an exasperatingly slow operation, an absolutely unjustified test of Zen patience.

Solid commands for fluidly entering and exiting menus are missing, and the interface itself crudely betrays its PC origin: the quick selection menu still indicates "Slot 1, 2, 3, 4" as if we were using the keyboard, completely ignoring that on console we are using the D-Pad. It is this general "crudeness," this lack of care in the transposition, that confirms the feeling of being faced with a product that has no respect for the player's time and intelligence.