2.5/5 ★ – PhatBaby's review of Cyber Manhunt.

My rating does feel mean, but man, this game is ROUGH at points. I like the concept a lot. I want the fantasy of being the little gremlin guy hunched up in a chair in any modern movie, busting out lines like: "Can I get into this mainframe? Pfft, I sure hope so. After all, I wrote the code myself ⌐▨_▨". But the game is so damn specific on what it wants. It's a thinly veiled visual novel that entirely focuses on you inputting everything as it intended. Looking for a web page and enter a slight variation of the intended search result into Google? The internet browser's like, sorry buddy, internet has nothing on that. Find out a key piece of information early? Nope, game can't acknowledge you understand that key piece of knowledge unless you find it in the exact place it decided you should find it. Sometimes it's just like, nah, you can't progress to the next objective until you find a direct copy of the evidence that you discovered somewhere else like an hour ago. And by being so restrictively linear, it draws you out of the entire fantasy frequently. I've been kind of obsessed with these desktop simulator games recently, and playing this made me realise how damn good some of them are at immersion. Hypnospace Outlaw lets you freely search anything and find your way to most of the main information sources through a gazillion different routes. And this needs that freedom. The freedom to search an endless void for information because that's the true puzzle. The idea of these games is to test how good you are at finding, scanning and tying together data, building a case in your head and then revealing the truth unlocked by aligning the clues. But this largely boils down to scrolling your mouse across a page until stuff is highlighted in red, then selecting it and waiting for an 100% bar to fill in the top right corner. When you add to that the wild difficulty spikes on the puzzles, it all forms into this messy little glob. But, I will give huge props; the storytelling is really clever. The overarching narrative was a bit too Watch Doggsy for me, but there are some really awesome reveals in here tied to the cases themselves and unveiling who certain characters are, what happened and why. I've heard the sequel is miles better, so I'm hoping if they keep the cool character reveals, deepen the gameplay and reduce some of the frustrating handholding, this could be something really damn cool.