Bottles not working

Assuming when you created the bottle, you chose "gaming", it will use "soda" as it's default runner, which is based off of proton. Maybe try going into preferences, runners, then click on "Soda", and try messing around with different versions.

According to the latest ProtonDB reports of Ape Out, Proton 8.0-5 was being used. Looking at my available "Soda" runners in bottles, I see soda-8.0-2,soda-9.0-1, and soda-experimental_8.0 as the latest runners available. I would try using those runners as a start.

Also, (I only now just noticed it), under preferences, in General, there is an "Integrations" section. Under that there's "Steam Proton Prefixes", which (I assume) allows you to use Proton prefixes.

Here are the following commands, depending on your installation method of Steam to give permissions to Steam's path if it doesn't have it already.

Steam non-Flatpak:

flatpak override --user com.usebottles.bottles --filesystem=xdg-data/Steam

Steam Flatpak:

flatpak override --user com.usebottles.bottles --filesystem=~/.var/app/com.valvesoftware.Steam/data/Steam

Alternatively you can use Flatseal and add the path: ~/.var/app/com.valvesoftware.Steam/data/Steam

First, go to [three dots] -> Preferences -> Runners -> Proton, click the button next to the newest available version of Proton GE (currently ge-proton-9-7), and wait for it to download.

Then, go to your bottle -> Settings -> Runner, set the runner to ge-proton-[version], and wait for Bottles to configure the new runner.