Blue Rider announces Apartment Story release for September 26

Blue Rider Interactive today announced a release date for its upcoming narrative thriller-adventure game, Apartment Story. The game releases on PC via Steam on September 26. The developers have also released a trailer showing more of what the game entails — a third-person title that features life sim aspects intertwined with a mystery.

The player character is Arthur, a video game journalist who is visited in his apartment by two other characters and at some point a gun is revealed to be hidden somewhere in the apartment. Players have to navigate an increasingly tenuous social situation while also tending to Arthur’s daily needs: They have to eat, shave, use the bathroom, sleep, shower and tidy up the apartment while the game uses a real-time day-night cycle. There’s also the option to not engage with the story and outside characters at all, though they won’t engage with the outside world at all if they do.

Apartment Story is one of Blue Rider’s first titles, and is created with a PSX-style aesthetic. According to the developers, the game can be completed within a single (real, not in-game) night. Game designer Sean Wenham described the game on the Blue Rider website as such: “This is a Videogame about life now; it is about not having money, the way we value our home spaces and the craving of narratives we were raised with instead of the monotonies we find ourselves in.”