Invisibox

nvisibox is what looks a lot like a mobile app that's been dumped on Steam as if it was a real PC game (it's not)... it's a cash grab from greedy mobile devs trying to cash in on abandoned app store stuff. The mobile app is a simple sliding block puzzle (like the series of Russian asset flips titled "Chocolate Makes You Happy" by Blender Games/Cute Hannah, only this mobile app has a gimmick, you can't see the blocks you're moving around, so you have to guess and plan out your moves. Or just don't bother. Most people didn't, check out the achievement stats below.

Anyway, mobile apps on Steam always suck and this is no exception, it's shallow gameplay that makes 1990's Flash games like Sokoban look deep, rich and involved. So there's nothing of any notable appeal for gamers here apart from trading cards, and that's a shame. PC gamers deserve better than these mobile apps. I can see why Google would have removed this from Play.

From a technical perspective, as a mobile app, this doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard.

While there are options to change the resolution for the mobile app, all this does is scale up the simplistic 2D art assets used to make the mobile app, which makes little or no difference to the graphics quality. Without any other substantial graphics tweaks, it's not possible for gamers to improve the lacklustre 2D visuals.

The mobile app features extremely lazy, minimalist "art", of the type you normally expect to see in low effort Flash/browser games and mobile apps. Considering this is being evaluated as a PC game, having the graphics phoned in like this isn't going to result in a high quality, visually impressive game that PC gamers are used to seeing.

The controls can't be customised because the game has such a dumbed down, simplified interface that it's just iPhone screen tapping stuff. The fact that the interface is this dumbed down might be seen as a problem in itself, however... this is a fairly shallow experience if you're the kind of gamer that likes to play games with deep, rich control schemes and interaction. You'll get none of that here.

Because this is a mobile app, it carries a number of deliberate design deficiencies. Compromises were made to cater to the iPhones that the mobile app was designed for. These are unfortunate handicaps and limitations that PC gamers shouldn't be forced to accept, but it's evident that PC was an afterthought for the iPhone developers who are to blame for this. The mobile app is deficient as a result of these choices, and would have been so much better without the handicaps that designing games for mobile phones forces upon a game. Once more, mobile devs have made gaming worse for everyone. I didn't spend thousands on building a gaming rig just so I could pretend it's an iPhone.

These technical defects push this mobile app below acceptable standards for any modern PC game.

You don't have to take my word about how bad the mobile app is, we can measure the interest in a game by how much people bothered to play it. Invisibox has achievements, and they show us a very clear picture that the mobile app absolutely failed to capture any interest from gamers. The most commonly and easily attained achievement is "Right Decision", starting the mobile app, trivial to achieve, but less than 9 percent of players bothered to get that far before uninstalling the mobile app. That's a tiny, tiny proportion of gamers who even bothered with this. Ouch.

Reviewing SteamDB to check how popular this mobile app was with players reveals a surprise... there's a very healthy spike in player counts for the mobile app. But this only happened once, and isn't consistent with the achievement stats, that show less than 9 percent of players bothered playing the mobile app for any reasonable amount of time. How is it possible for this mobile app to have so many concurrent players who didn't bother engaging with this mobile app? Trading cards. People will use card idling software to collect the cards and sell them, but this won't trigger any achievements in-game.

That tells us people only really bought this mobile app for trading cards, and that's a damning indictment of the woeful quality. A closer look at the numbers shows the mobile app just has a couple of players every week running up the mobile app and idling it for cards, then deleting it. We must ask how it benefits gamers for there to be so many mobile apps like this, with little merit as a serious game, that only generate sales from people idling and selling the trading cards.

So, should you buy this mobile app? Is this one of the best of the 100,000+ games on Steam?

Invisibox is relatively cheap at $2 USD, but it's not worth it. Given the defects and quality issues with the mobile app, coupled with the unrealistic price, this is impossible to recommend. Because this is the kind of game you can just play for free on mobile phones, it's impossible to recommend anyone should pay money for the same experience on Steam. This is also competing with over 11,000 free games available on Steam, many of them far better than this paid product.

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