Review 1
Purchased!
Pros-
-Short game, 30-60 minutes.
-The first chapter is free to play and serves as a trailer for the rest of the
story
-Good artwork and music.
Cons-
-Less user friendly layout.
-Abrupt changes.
Recommended for a good time pass.
Review 2
Purchased!
5/10. Above average art, an okay premise, and some interesting character
interactions are marred by poor UX and a pretty bad story. This barely skirts
the edge of acceptability.
Invisible apartment is technically one (prohibitively short) VN, but is also the
name of the series, with a prologue and two sequels being folded in as DLC to
the original. It's recommended by the devs to buy the other games as DLC, so
that's what I did, and I'll be reviewing all of them here together because of
that.
The "presentation" or UX of this VN immediately stands out as...atrocious. It
was made using a custom-designed engine for some unknown reason (Ren'py has been
free and widely available for years, first created nearly 15 years ago according
to Wikipedia), and lacks some really, really basic features that I could put
together in a freaking WinForm application in less than a day. These features
include things like a "backlog," configuration settings (text speed, audio
levels), skip/auto functionality...these are all extremely, extremely basic
things that even other VNs using really rudimentary engines (like Himawari)
support. About 10 minutes into the first story (IA 0) the game crashed on me
repeatably, and I found through the forums that this was because of the music
being on. I turned it off and never decided to turn it back on. You get a set of
saves per game, but it's only six each--not enough to cover all of the choices
available for the last two stories.
The art's a bit better than the standard for OELVNs. As you can see from the
main page it's set in a futuristic world, so the clothing designs are usually
interesting. The artist also clearly has a penchant for hair, because the main
character goes through like 5 different styles (usually at least 2 (sometimes 3)
during a story). It's a nice touch in a medium where a character frequently has
one outfit, two if they have a route.
"Gameplay mechanics" are standard VN fare--you pick choices. It treats "wrong"
choices very strangely however: during the earlier VNs (and possibly during the
later ones, I didn't go through every permutation), when you pick a wrong choice
you travel down that path for a little bit, then when it ends poorly you're
immediately booted back to the point of the original choice, with the "right"
choice already chosen for you. It's very disorienting. The story has a habit of
disorienting scene shifts during the regular story as well. Speaking of which...
There are a few different elements to the story that are worth separating: the
writing quality itself (things like grammar and syntax), the plot (or the
sequence/design/logic of events that you go through), and then the "execution"
of story elements or a character's portrayal.
The first is substandard ESL, and I apologize if that sounds harsh, but as a
writer it's always been very obvious. It makes the experience feel stilted and a
little unemotional. After a scene shift, frequently a character will
painstakingly describe the process that brought them to their new location in a
manner that doesn't at all fit an "internal monologue" a person might have.
The second is mediocre to poor. If you look at the entire plot across the
series, it's made up of a bunch of actors putting each other into situations and
then doing nothing when they're there. Entire swaths of time where a character
has the ability to act, but does nothing. Their actions belie their motivations.
The main character comes off as...I can't think of the word right now, but
several times she takes an action and then, 5 minutes in real-world time, she
goes back and does what she was avoiding with her first action. One character is
said to have been "building a personal army," but they do absolutely nothing
with this so-called army so this (also) feels half-baked. Spoilers here, but the
entire "conflict" is resolved by a third party with no interaction with any of
the "main" characters until the last 5 minutes or so of the final VN--he's
acting largely of his own volition, and he has no reason whatsoever to resolve
the conflict.
The final aspect, the portrayal of these events or characters, was okay. At one
point a character spends a bit of time interacting with a surveillance AI in the
shape of a parrot, and for some reason I found these sections pretty funny. Most
character interactions feel okay, though a couple times they're deliberately
molded to fit a plot contrivance and feel bad. The specifics of certain scenes
also work okay-to-well, tying back to things (characters or events) across each
VN.
All in all this was a very weak experience.
I don't always do this, but considering the play time and the price for
everything, I feel compelled to caution against getting this at full price. It's
not worth it. I would say 50% off at max, personally. Even though this is
incredibly short, for the majority of the experience I really was not
interested. A few moments during IA 2 produced some intrigue that engaged me,
but even that fell away with the lackluster ending.
Review 3
Purchased!
Good visual novel, but the ending is extremely abrupt!
Invisible Apartment 
