Argentine Video Games: Horror, Mutations, and Apples in Applecalypse

Obsessions can be defined as sets of thoughts that invade our minds intensely, preventing us from thinking about anything else for hours, days, or even longer. They can be intermittent or continuous, occurring when we are about to perform a certain everyday action or something more unusual. Without help (of various kinds) or training, there's not much we can do against obsessions. They trap us, leaving us feeling alien to ourselves, yearning for a breath of fresh air, no matter how small it may be.

In Applecalypse, the residents of the town of Rojas, Buenos Aires, share a collective obsession: apples. This forbidden fruit is sought after by almost all the characters we will meet on our journey, and for some reason, we will have an interesting stock just by spending a few pesos. The red apples don’t seem to have any extraordinary features: they have the shape and texture you’re imagining as you read these lines. However, something is off.

Recalling H.P. Lovecraft stories and the recent Look Outside (Francias Coulombe, 2025), in the video game by Pablo “Pupicrap” Hollmann, we will discover that there’s a giant apple in the sky. The reasons? Unknown. The effects? In addition to the aforementioned collective obsession, transformations occur in each person who consumes apples.

Coincidentally, we are the ones who can offer apples to eat. Whether we are part of the problem and accomplices of the forces operating from the shadows is something to consider later. Right now, I’m being confronted by Fernanda, a young woman who looks like she was made with cut-out animation, asking me if apples are really the forbidden fruit or if God put neon lights on them for us. To stop her, we have to grab one apple at a time, hold the left click, and move the mouse as if we had a slingshot, launching the apple into her mouth.

In Pablo “Pupicrap” Hollmann's video game, we will discover that there’s a giant apple in the sky. The reasons? Unknown. The effects? In addition to the aforementioned collective obsession, transformations occur in each person who consumes apples.

The thing is, like any good obsession, one apple isn’t enough. We have to fill a bar in the upper right corner of the screen with points. We increase those points based on how many times we bounce our apple off the walls or ceiling, but if the red object misses the hungry mouth and hits the ground, we lose them. We have few apples, although we can spend coins to acquire more. Those coins, along with bullets for our revolver, appear randomly when we achieve combos: that is, when we successfully hit Fernanda with several apples in a row.

A big part of the magic of Applecalypse lies in the logic of these battles. Once we get the hang of it, we can make shots with multiple bounces and generate a lot of points at once, in addition to creating combos. This would be easy if Fernanda didn’t mutate once we 'defeat' her in her normal form, appearing as a new version with a new characteristic: in this case, moving from left to right, making it easy for her to dodge our shots. Luckily, by spending a bullet from the revolver, we can freeze her in place for a few seconds.

Combo rewards don’t exist during mutation phases, so we need to be well-stocked with coins and ammunition, or we’ll have to start the fights from the beginning. The obsession that colors everything in Applecalypse manifests a bit when we feel compelled to achieve the highest number of bounces possible to get the best score from a throw. But we need to recalculate: when we’re in a combo, we can make rewards appear with a direct throw, even without bounces. There’s a tension between not filling the target bar and advancing to the next phase (to collect more items first), while at the same time spending apples on useless shots, fearing we’ll run out of stock and lose.

It’s fascinating how new variables with clever obstacles appear in every encounter we have. Almost as much as the fact that (almost) always we are facing women. Women asking us something, making comments about something mundane that has been lost with these apples, like Kimberly, a Human Resources worker. Women with mouths open in terror, sometimes in very exaggerated or impossible grimaces. What would the horror genre be without them is the easy question. But, of course, we can ask ourselves others: mostly young women, apples, 'transformations', the forbidden…

While it’s the mutated forms that present the novel obstacles and force us to try new angles, it’s these 'normal' faces that caught my attention the most. When you’re about to throw an apple, a line appears for a few seconds, projecting the trajectory. That line cuts across each woman’s face, passing through her nose, eyes, neck, eyelashes, and allows us to better calculate the effectiveness of our throw or, at least, its initial direction. I couldn’t help but bring a bit of my own obsession into the game: there’s no part of the human body that interests me more than faces, the size and shapes of noses, the grimaces of our lips, and the looks our eyes give. I can’t help but pause at their compositions. How irrelevant discussions about everything else seem to me.

The mysteries don’t end in the battles, as between those shooting sessions, there are brief point-and-click segments where we will visit certain streets of the town. In them, we will have to solve a short exploration sequence, search for key items, and also find mysterious objects that give us upgrades during battles, although it’s never explained what kind. Like the combo system. It’s not a complaint; the darkness suits the game well.

The scenarios are created with real photographs, and if there’s something I would have liked, it’s for there to be a bit more of all that. They last just a few minutes in an experience that can take us an hour and some coins. Perhaps they last just as long as they need to.

With influences close to strange horror and that everyday life that corrupts and alters insidiously, Applecalypse is an experience that abandons the spectacularity that the genre can have to make us part of a group of people who can’t stop thinking about themselves, yearning for things they’ve lost or what they can’t obtain. It gives us moments of uncertainty and also laughter at the absurdity, and many apples, of course.

You can find Applecalypse on its Steam page and follow Pupicrap on X.

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