Invisible Apartment

Invisible Apartment is an interactive cyberpunk visual novel series by Milan Kazarka and Vysoko Anime Production, set in a dark, high-tech dystopian future. The story follows a female protagonist as she navigates themes of hacking, surveillance, artificial intelligence, and societal conspiracies while seeking a normal life, all presented through an anime-inspired narrative style.

Invisible Apartment: Review – A Cyberpunk Visual Novel’s Fractured Genesis

Introduction: The Ghost in the Machine

In the crowded landscape of video games, few titles arrive with as pronounced a dichotomy of intent and reception as Invisible Apartment. Released in 2014 by the singular vision of Milan Kazarka under the Vysoko Anime Production banner, this cyberpunk visual novel presents itself as a free, accessible gateway into a meticulously constructed world of hacking, surveillance, and existential rebellion. Yet, from its very first minutes, it announces itself not as a complete narrative, but as a deliberate fragment—a “teaser” or “introduction,” as its creator would later defend. This review will argue that Invisible Apartment is a foundational curio, a work whose historical significance is inextricably linked to its controversial structure. It is simultaneously a promising debut for an indie creator leveraging modern distribution and a cautionary tale about the perils of episodic storytelling when the first episode fails to stand as a satisfying self-contained experience. Its legacy is not in its gameplay or its story’s resolution, but in its transparent model: a free pilot episode designed to fund and justify a larger, multi-part series—a practice that remains fraught with risk in an era of abundant content.

Development History & Context: The Indie Episodic Experiment

The Solo Auteur and the Bootstrap Model. Invisible Apartment is the brainchild of Milan Kazarka, a developer with a background in industrial design and commercial project management, as he notes on his official blog. The project was born not from a major studio pitch, but from personal financing and a desire to “start releasing my ideas.” The development context is quintessential indie: modest resources, a custom-built engine (initially for iOS, later ported using Cocos2DX for Windows/Mac/Linux, as noted on IndieDB), and a small, collaborative team including Jeroen van Oosten and artists like Camila “Bura” Gormaz. The release schedule is the project’s defining feature. The first part debuted for free on iPad in June 2014, followed by a Steam release in March 2015 after a Greenlight campaign. Crucially, this “Part 1” was always conceived as the first piece of a planned five-part series. As Kazarka stated in a Steam forum post, releasing a short, free intro was a calculated risk mitigation strategy: “if I knew from the very beginning that I could invest a year or two into making the whole thing (all 5 parts in one VN) then I would, but that would be a risk. So I’m releasing bit by bit.”

Technological and Market Context. 2014 was a complex time for visual novels. While Japanese Visual Novels (VNs) had a dedicated Western following, the “Western VN” was still carving its niche, often associated with adult content or otaku aesthetics. Invisible Apartment explicitly positioned itself against this, aiming for a “modern cyberpunk” story “accessible to both genders and wouldn’t be too mature or gory.” Technologically, the custom engine allowed for platform flexibility (iOS, PC, Linux) but came at the cost of standard VN features. The free-to-play model for the first chapter was unusual for a narrative-driven game on Steam, then dominated by paid experiences. It leveraged the platform’s Greenlight community for visibility, betting that a compelling enough hook would generate demand for paid sequels.

Narrative & Thematic Deep Dive: A Teaser, Not a Tale

Plot and Structure: The Art of the Abrupt. The narrative of Invisible Apartment follows Bunny, a teenage girl hacker living in a surveillance-state metropolis. The plot, as described across official sources and user reviews, is minimal: Bunny encounters a mysterious AI named “Alex” and becomes entangled with a figure known only as “Mask,” leading to a conspiracy involving government control. The gameplay, as consistently reported (varying between 21-56 minutes according to HowLongToBeat and user reviews), consists of a linear path with a few choice points. The infamous ending arrives with breathtaking speed, cutting to credits after a short climactic scene. This is not an accident but a stated design choice. Kazarka called the ending a “teaser,” intended to make players “want to continue the series.” For many players, this translated to a profound sense of narrative betrayal, a “fake choice” structure where most decisions lead to immediate game overs, as criticized by user “PublicNuisance” on Metacritic and Steam.

Characters and Themes: Potential Over Payoff. Bunny is a competent but thinly sketched protagonist, her hacker ethos and desire for a “normal life” setting up classic cyberpunk conflicts. The thematic core—surveillance, AI consciousness, the value of privacy—is presented through infodumps and dialogue but never deeply explored within the confines of Part 1. Supporting characters like Alex (the AI) and Mask are introduced with intriguing mysteries but zero development. The story’s primary function is world-building and premise-setting, creating a stylistic and conceptual framework for future installments. The cyberpunk setting is delivered through aesthetic cues—”anime/manga” art style (as per MobyGames), talk of “cybernetic implants,” and a grimy urban backdrop—but lacks the sociological depth of seminal works like Neuromancer or Ghost in the Shell. The theme of “leading a normal life in a high-tech society” remains an abstract promise.

Gameplay Mechanics & Systems: The Skeleton of Interaction

Core Loop and “Choices”. As a visual novel, the core gameplay is reading text and clicking to advance. The interaction is almost purely narrative, with choices presented sporadically. The implementation is widely panned. The “three options, two are game over” pattern, noted by multiple Steam forum users and reviewers, is seen as a lazy way to create the illusion of branching without the commitment to writing divergent paths. This creates a frustrating gameplay experience where the player feels punished for exploring, funneled into a single, abbreviated narrative track. There is no substantive branching; the story is fundamentally kinetic (non-branching) disguised as interactive.

User Interface and Technical Execution. This is the game’s most consistent point of failure. Across platforms and reviews, the absence of basic quality-of-life features is glaring. The Steam store page and user reviews (notably from Linux users) confirm there are no options menu whatsoever—no volume control, text speed adjustment, text backlog (ability to review past dialogue), or even a standard “exit” button, as humorously noted by HowLongToBeat reviewer “Shellsh0cker.” Saving is limited to six slots, with no quick-save or auto-save. The custom engine, while functional for basic display, lacks the robustness and user-centric design of established engines like Ren’Py. This technical austerity directly impacts accessibility and replayability, making the short experience feel even more barren.

World-Building, Art & Sound: Style Over Substance

Visual Direction and Atmosphere. The game’s strongest asset is its consistent anime-influenced cyberpunk aesthetic. Character art, while simple, is clean and expressive for a low-budget project. Backgrounds convey a dystopian urban environment sufficiently. The visual style successfully evokes a specific mood—bleak, tech-saturated, isolating. However, the world itself remains largely unseen. We get snippets of a city but no sense of its scale, history, or social stratification beyond Bunny’s apartment and a few locales. The “Apartment” of the title is both a literal and metaphorical space of invisibility, but this potent concept is under-leveraged.

Sound Design. Official sources credit musician Sebastian Bach (not the famous one, but a collaborator) for the soundtrack. User reviews consistently praise the music as “well done,” describing it as atmospheric and fitting the cyberpunk tone. The sound design, however, is likely minimal, given the visual novel format and indie scope, relying on music and basic sound effects. The audio does its job in enhancing the mood but does not compensate for the narrative and systemic shortcomings.

Reception & Legacy: The Free Premise and the Paid Promise

Critical and Commercial Reception at Launch. Invisible Apartment‘s reception is a study in fractured expectations. On Steam, it holds a “Mostly Positive” rating (70% of 411 reviews as of early 2026), a figure that masks the profound division in sentiment. The positive reviews often cite the intriguing premise, solid art, and the potential of the series. The negative reviews uniformly target the abrupt, non-ending, lack of content, and poor UI. The Metacritic user score averages around a middling 6/10, with reviews like “PublicNuisance’s” detailing specific flaws: rushed storytelling, faux choices, and missing features. The fact that it was free softened initial criticism but also lowered the threshold for what constituted a “complete” product.

Evolution and Influence. The game’s legacy is defined by its episodic model and developer communication. Kazarka was unusually active and transparent in Steam forums, directly explaining the “intro” nature of Part 1 and announcing the production of Invisible Apartment Zero (prequel) and Invisible Apartment 2. The series continued, with all subsequent parts released as paid DLC or separate purchases on Steam and itch.io. This model—free first chapter, paid continuations—is high-stakes. It builds a community (as seen in the 40 players who “collected” it on MobyGames) but risks alienating that community if the follow-ups are delayed or if the first part feels like an un finished product rather than a trailer. Its influence is likely minimal on the broader industry but serves as a case study in indie VN distribution. It demonstrates the viability of the “free demo as full first chapter” model but also the reputational danger of misrepresenting a product’s completeness.

Conclusion: A Flawed Prologue in the Archives of Cyberpunk

Invisible Apartment is not a good game by conventional metrics of completeness, player agency, or technical polish. Its narrative is a skeletal premise, its gameplay is frustratingly rudimentary, and its abrupt conclusion is a deliberate gamble that backfired on a significant portion of its audience. Yet, to dismiss it entirely is to ignore its role as a purely functional prototype for an episodic narrative. It is the digital equivalent of a pilot episode that aired without a network commitment—ambitious in scope, rugged in execution, and ultimately a bet on future investment.

In the canon of cyberpunk games, it holds a minor, almost footnote-like position. It does not challenge Deus Ex or Shadowrun in systemic depth, nor does it match the literary complexity of Black Cloud or The Red Strings Club. Its contribution is stylistic and structural: it presented a female-led, hacker-centric cyberpunk story through the accessible lens of the visual novel, using the “free first chapter” as a marketing and funding tool. For historians, it is a valuable artifact of the mid-2010s indie boom, illustrating the opportunities and severe pitfalls of crowdfunding-adjacent development (note the Kickstarter for Invisible Apartment 3) and the direct-to-consumer feedback loop via Steam forums.

Final Verdict: Invisible Apartment is a historically interesting failure. It is essential only for completists of the series, students of episodic game development, or those analyzing the economics of free-to-play narrative games. As a standalone experience, it is difficult to recommend beyond a cautionary example. Its place in video game history is secured not by its quality, but by its transparent embodiment of a risky, community-dependent business model for narrative-driven indie games—a model where the first “apartment” built was invisible not in a thematic sense, but in its lack of concrete, finished value for the player who entered it. The series that followed may have fulfilled its promise, but this inaugural room remains largely empty, a echoing foyer leading to doors that, for many, will never be opened.