Apartments

Apartments
Type	Urban
Map Name	c_apartment1-5 c_apartment3sick c_apartment4sick c_doc_apartment3sick c_doc_apartment4sick c_doc_appark
Inhabitants	Faster Drowned Children Slower Stranger* Faceless* Flygare* Sawrunner** Sawer*** * Only on revisit ** Doctor's Story *** Boss

The Apartments refers to a recurring location in Cry of Fear and one of the first areas the player visits. Simon enters the apartments through the scaffolding after receiving a panicked text from an individual. It's also the first nightmare sequence location.

Background

The apartments represent a basic low to mid income European housing structure. The apartments have a worn and lived in feel, and appear to be a touch dilapidated with windows broken, flooding, and boarded up doors, the apartments also have items such as sofas, tables, and other such pieces of furniture blocking various stair passages and hallway doors, giving the apartments a rather oppressive and claustrophobic feel, the blocked up passages also force Simon into a taking a rather convoluted path through the building, essentially turning it into a concrete maze. From notes the player can find, it is evident a serial killer or pedophile lived in the apartments, and whose apartment contains many garbage bags plus the first appearance of the children among other enemies. When the player arrives however, the individual is not present. The apartments also contain a Roped Off Apartment with blood, police tape, and chains adorning it.

When Simon arrives into the apartment, he makes his way to the fourth floor by navigating around the various obstacles preventing him from taking the most linear route. After entering the landlord's office, he obtains his second weapon, and unlocks a hall door that was previously inaccessible. When reaching the fourth floor, Simon finds the person he was trying to help, but the man had died before he arrived. He finds a key to the basement on his corpse, before being ambushed by Fasters.

After finding the dead body of the Unknown Caller, the apartments appear to shift and take on an even more sinister and oppressive feel. Sounds of tools being used can be heard through the Unknown Caller's door, and once Simon escapes his flat and makes it back to the second floor, not only have bars appeared to block some of the landing doors (making Simon once again take a convoluted path through the building), the paint scheme of the Caretaker's office changes and several apartments have piles of furniture and household goods that appear to be stacked in a manner that defies the laws of physics, with some objects appearing to float. Simon makes his way to the basement and finds a VHS tape containing the keycode for the maintenance elevator. When he takes the elevator, he enters a nightmare sequence in which he needs to kill a creature named Sawer. After this, he wakes up in the maintenance area of the basement.

The caretaker's office and adjacent apartment as it appears before and after Simon discovers the body of the unknown caller

Later in the game, Simon has to find two fuses to power a door Doctor Purnell escaped through. One of these fuses is in the apartments, and Simon is forced to return to obtain it. In this iteration, there are a wider variety of enemies than previously, that are more dangerous to the player (the Flygare, Stranger, and Faceless can all deal large amounts of damage quickly), and the apartments are much more twisted in nature than before. Upon re-visiting the apartments the surrealism is ratcheted up even further, with clearly audible screams, moans, and knocking sounds seeming to emanate from the building itself.

Relevance to Simon

Oddly stacked furniture gives the apartments a very startling and oppressive feel

Due to the appearance of the bloodied apartment room, and its similarity to the one seen in the endings, including the relevance to Simon in the Doctor's Story, this is most likely the apartment Simon was living in.

The apartments are unique within the Game's environments, as each time Simon passes through them to face a new challenge (Finding the unknown caller, then escaping with the elevator, then returning to acquire a fuse) they appear to take on a more surreal, warped, and oppressive feel, with the appearance of rooms changing drastically, bars appearing out of nowhere, and furniture in apartments stacked in manners that seem to defy the laws of physics, giving them an incredibly strange and oppressive feel. Whether or not this is meant to imply further significance upon them to Simon, or whether they were just designed this way to set the tone for the game early on is unclear, either way the manner in which they change is unique as all of the other locations that Simon backtracks through maintain a consistent visual appearance.

Trivia

• The apartments are based on a real life apartment complex known as Högbergsgatan 59.
• Although the exit code for the elevator is generated randomly on each play-through, the forth digit is always 9. The exact reasoning for this is unclear, though the most likely explanation is that, while the three numbers on the torso are generated randomly, the 4th digit is on the corpse's collar, and is probably part of the model, and so the team decided not to generate it randomly.