Apartment No. 129 – A Haunting Premise Lost in a Broken Xbox Port

Apartment No. 129 arrives on Xbox with a premise that should be irresistible to horror fans: a Turkish urban legend wrapped in religious folklore, a cursed apartment block, and a protagonist drawn into a mystery steeped in tragedy. There’s an immediate sense of atmosphere as you step inside the decaying building, with unsettling sound cues, claustrophobic corridors, and a cultural lens rarely explored in mainstream horror. You can feel the ambition, this is a game that wants to unsettle you not with jump scares, but with the weight of its mythos and the quiet dread of being somewhere you absolutely shouldn’t be.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uKio0Lz2qJI

Apartment No. 129 follows a young content creator who travels to a derelict apartment block after hearing rumours about a disturbing incident tied to one specific unit: No. 129. The building has been abandoned for years, but it’s become the centre of a local urban legend involving a tragic ritual, missing girls, and a wave of unexplained phenomena that supposedly drove the last tenants to madness.

When you arrive, the place feels wrong from the moment you step inside. The corridors are silent, the lights barely work, and the apartment itself seems frozen in the aftermath of something violent and unresolved. As you explore, you uncover fragments of the building’s past in religious texts, personal belongings, and unsettling clues that point toward a ritual gone horribly wrong. The deeper you dig, the more you realise that the haunting isn’t random; it’s tied to a specific event involving a young girl and a misguided attempt to invoke protection that instead opened the door to something far darker.

Unfortunately, the Xbox version struggles to deliver that experience in a playable form. The moment you take control, the camera sensitivity swings wildly, making basic navigation a battle. Even after adjusting settings, movement feels erratic, and the control layout never quite settles into something intuitive. The lighting compounds the issue: the game is so dark that the flashlight becomes essential, yet its battery drains quickly and replacements are scarce. In some areas, environmental writing that should help guide the story is either too dim to read or fails to appear at all, leaving subtitles floating without context.

The deeper problem is that core interactions simply don’t function reliably. Drawers, cupboards, and containers that should hold key items often refuse to open, creating progression blockers that halt the game entirely. Scripted events misfire, tutorial prompts flicker in and out depending on where you’re looking, and combat lacks any sense of feedback or clarity. These issues don’t feel like rough edges, they feel like missing pieces, as if the console build shipped without essential functionality.

What makes this so frustrating is that the atmosphere underneath the technical problems is genuinely compelling. The apartment interiors are oppressive in the right ways, the FMV framing device adds a scrappy charm, and the cultural specificity of the horror gives the story a unique identity. You can sense the game that Apartment No. 129 wants to be, and on PC, it reportedly gets closer to that vision. But on Xbox, the experience is dominated by bugs, broken interactions, and design issues that make it nearly impossible to appreciate the narrative or the world.

Pros

• Strong, unsettling atmosphere with tense sound design and claustrophobic environments

• A culturally distinctive horror premise rooted in Turkish folklore and religious myth

• FMV framing adds personality and gives the story a unique texture

• Moments of genuine dread when the atmosphere is allowed to breathe

Cons

• Core interactions frequently fail, causing progression blockers

• Camera sensitivity and movement feel unstable even after adjustment

• Extremely dark lighting makes navigation difficult and obscures key information

• Flashlight battery drains quickly with few replacements available

• Scripted events, prompts, and combat feedback are inconsistent or broken

• Overall technical instability makes the game feel unfinished on Xbox

In its current state, Apartment No. 129 on Xbox is a game defined by its unrealised potential. The ideas are strong, the atmosphere is effective, and the cultural perspective is refreshing, but the technical execution undermines everything the game tries to achieve. There’s a haunting story here, buried somewhere in the darkness of that cursed apartment, but on Xbox, it’s almost impossible to reach it.

XPN Rating: 1.5 out of 5 (BRONZE)

Apartment No. 129 is available now!