It is said that the worst enemies are those you can't see... never has this been more true than in Sega Saturn and Windows game Enemy Zero, one of three games in now-defunct WARP's "D Trilogy".
The game has you playing as Laura Lewis, an amnesiac on a space station attacked by aliens. Seems like a fairly standard set-up, right? Well, the aliens are invisible. Not only that, but unlike most Survival Horror games, you only have one life to your name. Yes, one hit, and the game's over.
Whether this is a challenge or a cheap shot is up to the player, and indeed opinions on this game are mixed, but for those interested, it's worth a shot.
This game provides examples of:
- Air-Vent Passageway: Kimberly directs Laura to climb up into one of these to evade a pursuing alien. Certain rooms even include ladders so that she can reach them easier.
- Almost Dead Guy: David, courtesy of his true nature.
- Amnesiac Heroine: Getting jolted out of cryosleep prematurely gave Laura a bit of amnesia. Kimberly implies she has a touch of it as well.
- Anyone Can Die: It is a horror game, after all...
- Artificial Human: David and Laura.
- Barbie Doll Anatomy: If you watched carefully the intro (or the ending), you can see that Laura's breasts are featureless.
- Berserk Button: George doesn't like anyone touching his computers.
- Bittersweet Ending: Laura escapes The Aki, and all the monsters are destroyed... but everyone else was killed. Save for David, who lives on as a program.
- Black Dude Dies First: Parker, who dies during the introduction before you ever gain control of Laura.
- Borrowed Biometric Bypass: Laura has to use a chunk of Mercus' gibbed hand to pull this off.
- Checkpoint Starvation: The Fall Tower on is largely a First-Person Shooter, with only a couple of rooms where Laura can actually save her progress.
- Driven to Suicide: Kimberly ultimately kills herself next to Parker's corpse.
- Dropped a Bridge on Him: Ronny dies offscreen between plot events, leading to a Scare Chord when Laura goes to call them and the feed reveals his corpse sprawled on the floor.
- Dull Surprise:
- The limited facial animation coupled with Laura's sparse voice acting makes her reactions to various horrors come off this way.
- She also always sounds completely deadpan in the log entries, even when recent events include her lover dying and her discovering he is an android, or getting Face Full of Alien Wing-Wong violently.
- Enemy-Detecting Radar: The whole point of the game. All you have to detect the enemies is a soundpiece you put in your ear. The faster the chime, the closer the enemy. Note that picking up this item is completely optional.
- Expy: Laura and George are Ripley and Ash respectively. Only Ash is the human and Ripley is the robot.
- Face Full of Alien Wing-Wong: Poor Laura gets this at one point.
- Giant Space Flea from Nowhere: The giant alien heart in the Fall Tower is never explained.
- Guide Dang It!: In Kimberly's room, Laura has to talk to David twice before Kimberly will react to seeing Parker's corpse in his room. Even though David doesn't say anything new the second time. And then you have to talk to David one last time to trigger the next Event Flag.
- Invisible Monsters: One of the primary gimmicks of the game.
- MegaCorp: Vexx Industries, who manufactured the GPS the player uses and are revealed to be an Expy of Weyland-Yutani.
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Nintendo Hard: Enemies kill you in one hit, they're invisible so you have to rely solely on a bell chime to know how close they are to you, your weapon takes a long time to charge, and you have to be right up in the enemies' faces in order to kill them. Have fun. - No Range Like Point-Blank Range: The best way to ensure your shots don't miss the monsters is listening carefully and firing when they're right in front and coming straight at you.
- Off with His Head!/Your Head Asplode: The monsters' preferred method of killing people.
- One-Hit-Point Wonder: Like actual humans, Laura qualifies for this, as does the rest of the crew...
- The enemies as well.
- One-Woman Wail: Used when Laura discovers Kimberly's suicide.
- Posthumous Character: Since he's killed off right at the start, everything we know about Parker comes from Kimberly.
- Reused Character Design: David, Kimberly and Parker would go on to appear in D2.
- Relationship-Salvaging Disaster: David suggests that the incident could be this, claiming that Laura was rather cold to him before and rarely bothered calling.
- Ridiculously Human Robots: Laura and David bleed and get bruises, for Pete's sake! Granted, the point may have been to let them pass as human, but every single soul on the ship was apparently perfectly aware of their true nature.
- Robotic Reveal: David's true nature is revealed when Laura sees his mangled body in the basement. Laura finds out about herself when she uses the body scanner.
- Save-Game Limits: Saving is presented as making an audio log on a handheld recorder, which starts with 64 charges on its battery. Saving uses up three charges, while loading uses one. Save or restart too much, and you may have to start all over... On top of this, the player cannot save during the First-Person Shooter sections.
- Scenery Censor: In the opening sequence, where Laura wakes up from cryoslumber, the computer and other equipment around her are used to keep her modest.
- Shoot the Shaggy Dog: All Laura accomplishes when she tries to save Kimberly is getting to hear her kill herself.
- Shower Scene: When you beat the game on Normal and started the game on Hard.
- Stab the Scorpion: Kimberly draws a knife, advances on Laura, and slits the side of her throat — freeing the alien worm gestating inside so she can shoot it without killing her friend.
- Standard Female Grab Area: Subverted when George grabs Laura by the wrist. Though the dialogue suggests he expects this to incapacitate her, she shakes him off and flees.
- Suddenly Voiced: When loading a save, the usually quiet Laura will narrate the most recent plot events up to that point.
- Together in Death: This is why Kimberly refuses to leave with Laura when they're both in front of the escape pods.
- Tomato in the Mirror: Laura discovers she's actually an android, and was placed on The Aki to help capture the monsters so the company could sell them to the military for mad cash.
- Trial-and-Error Gameplay: Several puzzles require the player to simply experiment and hope for the best.
- Virtual Celebrity: Laura, who stars in all three of the D games, was designed with this in mind. The rest of the cast were also meant to be 'digital actors' like Laura.
- Voice Grunting: Most of Laura's voice acting (outside of the Loading Logs) consists of sighs, grunts and gasps.
