I give Cyber Manhunt a middle B. It's a fun investigation game that is similar to Orwell and Analogue: A Hate Story where you piece together the plot by using "hacking," or really Hollywood-style hacking in between social engineering.

The gameplay suffers a bit for its loop, in which the majority of your time is spent looking through in-game social media logs of your subjects. That's a fun premise, but the game proceeds by having you click on relevant lines of text. When you hover your cursor over lines you can "collect" to add to your case file, the lines turn red, but otherwise there is no indication which bits are relevant. There are many times early on I just missed the lines in question, and so I spent the last few chapter meticulously mousing over EVERYTHING so I didn't miss anything, but I STILL missed things. It was a little frustrating and I had to use a guide a couple times to find what I had overlooked, even though I read everything.

More frustrating than that though are the mini-games. Usually when doing something more intense than reading, you're playing a mini-game to hack a system or reason out a situation. For the most part these mini-games aren't difficult and I appreciate the variety. However, in later chapters the mini-games start getting time limits, and some of these are unnecessarily harsh. A particular hacking mini-game in Chapter 5 nearly made me rage quit, and even with a video tutorial from YouTube, I was really struggling to get past it. Maybe I'm just a slow reader, but I think it's just less-than-good game design.

The developer seemed to understand those criticisms too because in the Home Sweet Home DLC there aren't any time limits, and in Hello World there is only one mini-game with a time limit that's incredibly generous. Also in the DLCs, the mini-games can be straight up skipped. I wish that had been in the base game.

Luckily, all mini-games and gameplay loop tedium are absolutely overshadowed by the excellent story. All seven chapters (DLC included) had great twists and turns. All the cases are connected in subtle ways, and almost no one ended up how they began. All the characters were complex, and the writers absolutely nailed social media posts, including strangers of all genders uncomfortably randomly hitting on strangers in their own feeds. And what starts off as a "simple" matter of investigation eventually spirals into sci-fi and metaphysical questions. I loved it.

The English translation is unfortunately wonky, and there are typos or "just doesn't sound right" issues in just about every other sentence. There's also some polish issues where the voice acting doesn't quite match up with what's on the screen, like the script changed after the line were recorded. Even so, the translation is good enough that you can follow what's going on and there's nothing more egregious than mixing up pronouns. But man, if the story had been run through a native English speaker/writer before being released, this would have been an incredible story.

The music is awesome as well, and really sets the mood, but the story really caries the game. I'm excited to try the sequel now, though I'm hoping the gameplay loop for Cyber Manhunt 2 is less tedious.