Happy Monday, a preemptive Happy Thanksgiving, and welcome to the Weekly Video Games Thread, folks! Wolfman Jew here to help give your day a bit of levity.

Thanks to some super-duper Black Friday sales, I’ve wound up with a bevy of games on the cheap. And while I could talk about Downwell or Mark of the Ninja (though expect the latter to show up in a header soon. That thing’s incredible), let’s instead point to Ape Out, the game about an ape to wrecks shop through a lab by grabbing and throwing armed guards. You throw them out of windows, get them to shoot their allies, and toss them into each other to make giant, red splotches. It’s $3.74 on the Switch store; absolutely snatch up it, Mark of the Ninja, and while you’re there, why not get Pentiment and Fire Emblem: Three Houses? All four are on sale. You absolutely owe it to yourself.

Ignoring that my role on the Avocado seems to have turned into video game pitch man, what I want to talk about with regard to Ape Out is its incredible art style. Hallways and debris look more like Mark Rothko pieces than any realistic object. The giant blood splatters bring to mind Jackson Pollack. The entire soundtrack is adaptive, using supposedly “thousands” of different drum beats to actively react to how you play. The whole game has this cool, eerie celluloid filter. And what few words actually show up on screen look like something you’d see from Saul Bass, the legendary artist behind some of the last century’s most iconic posters, corporate logos, and opening title screens. He did the titles for Vertigo and Psycho and Scorsese’s Cape Fear. This makes the whole game feel like a paean to Sixties-era pop art, and I’m pretty sure I’ve never played anything like it.

And thus, here’s where you come in: pull a Roy Lichtenstein, openly steal this jazzy, bassy, stylish art style, and apply it in a different way. Maybe that’s using it on a preexisting franchise, so Mario’s platforming is now built around disconnected arms or splotches of ink. Maybe that’s making a game with mechanics specifically built around it, like something that deliberately cuts up or distorts your perspective. Maybe that’s instead using this as the jumping off point to appropriate a different art style from this era. Maybe it’s drawing other examples that I’ve missed entirely. Whatever the case, Ape Out is a great case study in using art styles and directions outside the gaming mainstream, and I’d love to see us explore that process or the art style itself.

By the way, what did you play this weekend?