Follow Genre: Visual Novel, Indie
Developer: Milan Kazarka
Publisher: Milan Kazarka
Platform: PC
Tested on: PC

Invisible Apartment Zero – Review

April 6, 2015 - Elexus - No Comments

Site Score

5.9

Good: The art style is simple yet good-looking, music is very relaxing

Bad: Cliché storyline, short, spelling mistakes

User Score

5.5

(2 votes)

Click to vote

Rating: 5.5/10 (2 votes cast)

The visual novel video game genre has known its ups and downs throughout the gaming history. It’s not a genre that’ll suit everyone but the beauty of visual novels is that they don’t require advanced skills like incredible fast reflexes or the patience of a turtle. The player can just sit back and enjoy the often interesting storylines and neatly crafted pictures on the screen. Invisible Apartment Zero is the prequel to Invisible Apartment and gives us some more background information on the characters.

Story

Meet Kacey, a young and talented IT-wizard who lives in the suburbs and dreams of a life far away from the place she’s in now. Kacey fills here days with computer related stuff and particularly hacking things like security cameras. Like this, she watches people living their lives in the big city and starts dreaming about her own future there. She’s not really on good terms with her mother and a father doesn’t seem to be present in the household. Luckily, there’s still Joel. Joel has been Kacey’s friend forever and together, they share the ambition of making it in the big city. Although the two kids are poor and pretty unimportant right now, they find happiness in the smallest things and care deeply for their friendship.

One day, when Kacey is hacking as usual, she stumbles upon something very disturbing. As she trusts Joel with her life, she tells him what she witnessed and from then, the lovely story about two friends trying to make it turns out in something completely different. Story wise, Invisible Apartment Zero provides a pretty cool plot, although it misses depth and feels rather cliché. We gamers aren’t afraid of experiencing a lot more engaging and complex adventures so somehow, this game feels a bit too simple.

Graphics

Invisible Apartment Zero is a visual novel so of course, the graphics matter quite a lot. The graphical style is young and fresh and together with a nice array of colour, it makes for a great sight to look at. Instead of showering you with stuff to look at, the game keeps the art very clean and simple and that certainly was the right choice to make.

The only issue with the graphics I encountered is when a laptop is part of the scenery. Sometimes, Kacey pulls out her dear laptop and instead of making it fit the picture, the machine is simply pasted in front of the character without caring about positioning or psychics. This feels a bit sloppy as the rest of the objects make sense in how they appear on screen.

Sound

The game is filled with some nice tunes which play on the background while you’re reading through the sentences popping up on screen. Whoever made the music, they have my approval as it makes the game a lot more immersive. In one particular scene, piano music will probably make you feel incredibly touched and sad at the same time as it just hits the spot. In more exciting scenes, the music changes pace to adapt the situation and never feels out of place. The music is also good enough to just listen to it while doing something completely different than playing the game. Just put it on in the background while reading a book or something and you’ll know what I mean.

Gameplay

Visual novels aren’t known for their action sequences or timed tasks that need to be completed. You just sit down, grab a blanket and some tea, read, eat a cookie, and read some more. Yes, this is one of those games that isn’t really a game in the mainstream meaning of the word but more like an experience, a story which is told in the way you want it to be told.

While the game is set up in such a way that everything looks pretty linear at first sight, you do have some choices that make an impact. Choosing the wrong one can end up in a ‘Restart game’ screen and then the whole thing starts over again. You might want to quicksave before making any decisions to avoid having to restart the game completely. Not that it’s such a big deal as it would take but a couple of minutes to rinse through the dialogue one more time. This brings us to the length of the game. The original game, Invisible Apartment, wasn’t too long and you could easily finish it within a couple of hours. Well, this prequel is a bit longer but it’s still not a game that’ll keep you busy for a long time. Here too, it took me only a couple of hours to see the ending. It’s best to keep this in mind if you want to try out Invisible Apartment Zero as it’ll keep you from being disappointed with the game’s length.

Besides reading and making a few choices, there’s not much else to do (which is completely normal for visual novels!) but even as small and short this game was, I still came across multiple spelling errors in the dialogues. Okay, okay, I don’t want to sound like the grammar nazi next door and yes, everybody makes mistakes but in a game, it’s a bit awkward to notice spelling errors like that.

Conclusion

Invisible Apartment Zero tries to be a good visual novel and it sure looks and sounds good but the game in its whole just doesn’t convince enough to make you love it. The art style is neat and the music played in the background makes you instant ‘Zen’ but spelling mistakes and a cliché storyline ruin the party.

Rating: 5.5/10 (2 votes cast)

Rating: +2 (from 2 votes)

Invisible Apartment Zero - Review, 5.5 out of 10 based on 2 ratings