Cyber Manhunt

There is a lot to like, but overall I wouldn't _recommend_ this game.

First off, in my perspective, timers ruin most everything that could be fun. Life is busy, interruptions pop up. In this game, one cannot pause and there's not a lot of time allowed for dilly dallying. Always seems a silly way of trying to make something challenging, having to do it faster. The timed parts are simple enough, and seem to be re-doable, but they're not enjoyable that way. Nearer the end in particular are some puzzles that would be much more enjoyable without a timer or at least with a pause button.

What possibly contributed to souring my experience
I wound up having to play a bunch of the game over twice, because first I couldn't make any of the boxes on the screen move, during a timed event. After click click clicking all around, I restarted. The game seemed like it was picking up just before the timed part, but nothing I did could trigger the timed part. nothing would happen. So, I restarted from a manual save point. Then, before I caught back up to where I had been, I inadvertently closed a window that then wouldn't open again, and the game proceeded as though I had made a different choice, so I went back to my manual save point again because I didn't want that. Through that experience, I became more aware how tedious the copying and pasting can be.

It is very close to being a game I would recommend and I wouldn't tell anybody not to get it. The price isn't at all bad. I just got too irritated at not being able to pause those timed parts to complete it.

This is a fun game for those of us who enjoy snooping and testing our deduction skills. One thing that really needs to be improved is the English translation of a lot of the text. There were a ton of grammatical errors that made certain things difficult to understand, and a lot of the phrasing came across as stilted and odd. Despite that, it's still an enjoyable experience.

epik

This game had a solid idea, but the execution is a complete disaster. The UI is an absolute nightmare—it feels less like you're playing and more like you're struggling to get it to work as you intended. Instead of immersing you, it just makes you want to slam your head into a brick wall. You're endlessly clicking, hoping for something to highlight and when it finally does? It’s barely relevant to the information you want t look for.

And the worst part? The game presents obvious clues in fragmented parts, but it doesn’t let you connect them until it decides you’ve "earned it". You can see the bigger picture, but it keeps those pieces hidden, forcing you to waste time hunting for stuff that’s already right in front of you. It’s like the game is deliberately holding back info, making you run in circles just to unlock something that should’ve been obvious from the start.

To top it all off, you can’t even explore anything the game doesn’t deem necessary, no matter how much you know it should be. Even when you’re certain something else is important, the game stops you, forcing you to stick to its narrow path. It’s like being told exactly where to stand and when to look, even though you can see a whole branch of information that just "not related" .

Is this just me being picky about how the game should be or should I try to give it another shot?

This game is not a hacking-themed command-based or typing game, but rather a puzzle/visual novel. It has an overarching plot spanning five chapters, each with its own self-contained story. While the main plot felt predictable and leaned on surface level philosophical tropes (which had me rolling my eyes), I found the individual chapter stories far more engaging due to their focused and contained themes.

I burned out before finishing the final chapter. Still, I’d recommend it as a solid experience. it just didn’t quite make an impact for me to continue.

This is a hard one for me, would love to have a neutral option, but after playing it and knowing this games problems, I would still buy it again. I got hooked on this one - I do not play this kind of games and this one was a pleasant suprise. This is not a hacking game - more puzzle, mystery, visual novel kind of game.

I really liked the detective game play and the story. Music is decent, voice acting okish, but sometime the puzzles of the dialogues do not make seanse. But the part that killed a but this game for me was the timed minigames. I hate those minigames and I really do not like the timed sections. But I lived with them. But the were so many minigames and timed sections in the end of the game, that it killed the fun for me. I stopped playing and really do not want to continue. Maybe I will try the dls sometimes.

I will buy part 2 on a sale. I really liked this game, but it can be very frustrating at times, so think before buy.

总体来说瑕不掩瑜。对成就党有些不太友好。

Not fun at all. crappy UI, maddening puzzles, and weak plots.

Cyber Manhunt is a take on an Orwell style game, but it lacks the polish and quality of those titles. Sometimes you can find a piece of information that you need (for example, a character's name) earlier in a chapter, but the game won't let you 'learn' it until you reach a later point because it isn't the specific place where the game wants you to collect that information. Certain dialogue choices are vague and their outcomes are unpredictable. Sometimes the game will ask you to provide specific information that you collected (or information that the game never clearly gave) but won't let you access your 'notes'.

There are a few interesting minigames scattered throughout, but some of them give a strict time limit and vague guidance as to what you need to do. Failure just sets you back a short time, but in some instances you're forced to sit through unskippable dialogue scenes to get back to the minigame.

There are a lot of good ideas here, and the chapters and overall story are fairly interesting, but the overall presentation makes this more of a frustrating experience than a fun one.

Great game, really fun!

Game quality falls off a cliff in chapter 4. None of the puzzles make sense, and rely on information not flagged as significant or just plain not available.

I really wanted to like this game, but it felt like the game was fighting me for that enjoyment. I really liked similar games like Orwell, The Roottrees are Dead, and Obra Dinn, but this game lacks a significant amount of polish. Some of the dialogue options are vague and nonsensical, and some of the clues required to progress are vague and require multiple re-reads to collect information you already know. A lot of this could probably have been cleared up with a better English translation of the game. I think it shows promise, but it definitely needs work.

Benjamin sukisuki

I really enjoyed the story, there is lots of twists and turns! I really liked how the chapters were integrated and built up the story. I bought both of the paid DLCs and I really enjoyed both of them. To get the whole story I think you need to buy the Hello World DLC (It is basically a prologue for this game). The puzzles for this game I would say are very linear in difficulty, and in my opinion do not get harder as you progress through the story, which can either be taken as a positive or negative.

Overall, the main story + Hello World + Home Sweet Home DLCs gave me around 13 hours of playtime, which for the price is around a pound an hour. Even though I really enjoyed the puzzles, I would recommend the game based on the story alone! And I will be buying the sequel, so take of that as you will.

Probably should have played this before Cyber Manhunt 2, which is much more polished in terms of the UI, art, translation and voice acting. But this was still a worthy predecessor in general, and it was fun to retroactively come across familiar characters and uncover snippets of their pasts, though I liked Van much better in CM2. In any case, the detective/hacking parts were still among my favorite aspects, even if the minigames are harder here, and the story was solid. If the developers ever make another of these, I'd still absolutely play it.

[Side note: While playing the DLC "Home Sweet Home" watch out for the final minigame crashing. Not sure if it was just me, but halfway through logging into the Bird's Eye system the game stopped responding for ~15 min so I had to exit, preventing me from getting the final achievement. Hopefully this will be fixed soon, but I don't feel like replaying the entire chapter just to try and get those last 2 minutes back.]

太多东西都想吐槽，先不提这些作秀一样的所谓黑客手段，弄一些莫名其妙的解谜小游戏。就说每一次打开游戏都有所谓的免责提示，可不可以只有第一次打开显示或者可以跳过。
你们做了英语配音，能不能不要和显示语言绑定，给一个选项不好吗。你们又不敢把背景设定在国内，再听中文配音只觉得很尬和出戏。
剧情上说教意味也很浓，你们只需讲好故事就行了，不需要最后跳出来说家庭教育什么（刚打完那个DLC），当玩家是傻子。每个人都有自己的见解，不要用你们以为的深远的立意来强奸玩家的思想。
最后VAN这个反派设定真的又尬又傻，还什么AI黑客更是扯淡。这个游戏明显更适合写实的背景。

I think the mechanics of this game, such as collecting clues, is the games biggest flaw since it can be frustrating or straight up non-functional at times, but overall it is an engaging and fun game

It's a good idea, but it's a frustrating game to get through. Orwell and Mainlining have a similar idea but are far better executed.

What the game sees as pertinent is sometimes innocuous, while obvious evidence is not able to be collected. Pertinent text is not highlighted by default making gathering evidence tedious and unrewarding. The game doesn't want you to think or solve any puzzles. Gameplay boils down to searching for evidence in a very linear and unrewarding manner. Most of the links in the search are blank. This game lacks the world building you find in similar desktop detective titles/

Attractive plot, serious content which reflecting social reality. I can feel the emotion the developer really wanna tell.

I really wanted to like it but there's too much thing that make it so frustrating to continue playing.

Cannot rave about this game enough. Love the investigative style and connections- story rich, casual, but just active enough with the mini games. I bought both DLC as well and loved them, can't wait to play the second game.

Tl;dr: game good. fake internet is fun to search and solve puzzles in. Minigames can be annoying, but are made up for by the unique style and strong storytelling.

What an incredibly unique and engaging game this is. I would normally advise anyone who is even a little interested to simply go in blind, but if you want a short description of the moment-to-moment: imagine a point and click adventure game, where you must locate certain information to progress, using internet search engines and personal e-mails as your setting.

If there is a flaw in the 7 hours/2 chapters that I've played, it's that sometimes you will be timed while searching for "key information" in a designated area. You often aren't told exactly what you're looking for, leading to, essentially, a pixel hunt where you sift through all the data as fast as you can, hoping you get lucky before time runs out. It's actually pretty effective at building tension, but failing often means a reset to a checkpoint that's JUST far back enough to be annoying, but not ruinous. Given this, for the love of all that's holy, leave the "hints" option turned on in settings. As far as I can tell, it doesn't hold your hand or spoil any deductions you need to make. It simply highlights relevant text when your mouse hovers over it, which I find invaluable.

Honestly, this hiccup is a small blemish on an otherwise fascinating and truly cool game. The gameplay is a form of social information gathering and hacking that I've never seen done in this way, nor organized as well as it is. You have all the info you need to deduce your next step at any time in your onscreen folder, and getting stuck, in my experience, is due to a lack of thoroughness on my part. Also, the stories really deliver some truly good gut-punches (again, of the two main chapters I've played). Maybe I'm a sap, but the conclusions always left me feeling bad, in the "best" way possible. On a related note, the translation is pretty solid. Some phrasing can come off as odd or unnatural, but the meaning of the sentence is never confused. Awkward from time to time, but perfectly understandable.

I don't want to give spoilers, but Chapter 2 is very bugged. I did all the main tasks and somehow the tasks on one of the sections doesn't go all the way to 100% which means you can't progress the game. It's a shame because the atmosphere and story of the game isn't bad and if I could continue, I most likely would have recommended this game.

Great almost casual game with engaging story and fun mechanics. I finished it, which is the greatest grade I can give to any game.

This game is honestly one of my favorite games I have played in a while. Very time consuming especially after they stop helping as much as they did in the first chapters but worth it. This game is definitely something I would recommend if you like detective games with a bit of hacking and spying.

The first 3 chapters are pretty straight forward and super fun the more you play the harder it gets to figure out exactly what they want you to do, but just use what you already were doing in the chapters before and you should be fine. Chapter 4 is where it starts to get a bit hard as they stop "guiding" you to find clues, you have to manually find them. Takes a bit longer but all in all still pretty much what you were already doing.

As for the mini games the only one I struggled with was the public influence game, but a little google search and someone has the instructions posted and they are amazing and way better than they guy that tried to explain what to do in game. Was not hard to figure out what to do after reading them so I would recommend using them.

The story line and major twist that happens in this game is not at all what I was expecting. I read a few reviews so I knew there was going to be something, but wow my brain went no where near where they went. It was a super cool aspect and I can not wait to play the second game.

I like the concept and the overall story is decent, although a bit flat with rather obvious twists. But where the game shines, in my opinion, is with the individual cases. They mostly aren't as black and white as other games tend to portrait the subjects of your "snooping" and they carry you through the rather basic game mechanics.
Overall, this game is like a solid 6.5/10 in my opinion. Enjoyable for what it is if you enjoy good storytelling in little chunks and don't mind rather simple/repetitive game mechanics.

It is a very fun game with a lot of different characters. The story is well done and the graphics are good as well as the voice acting.

Recommend if you like things alike to 1984 and hacking in games etc.

fun

fun

Kinda liked the game, however it's hard to figure out what to do.. I've been stuck on some missions for hours. It comes eventually, but this game is truly a nice detective. Would recommend to people with big brains. XD

开户好玩爱玩，逻辑也特别好

Similar to the "Orwel" games. Overall decent, but with some grammatical/translation errors. Some of the mini games are obtuse, but otherwise, a puzzle game you'll enjoy your time with.

Terrible game, very frustrating. I saw many people mention this and I totally agree, the public influence mini-game basically ruined the experience for me. Besides that very repetitive and very easy to lose track of the narrative as it barely explains anything. Disappointing.

Amazing game! so immersive and also game me chills! Music is also amazing.

就喜欢这种orwell类型的游戏kek， 要是能把收集信息到笔记本上的动画关掉，再给各种应用程序加一个最大化的按钮就好了

After one hour I finished the first actual mission and I must say that the story is indeed interesting but the game is so linear and doesn't really let you do anything I didn't find any motivation to continue with it.

An interesting and fun game with an great story with lots of twists, as you explore people's hidden lives.

I think the game hits a sweet spot between making the game too easy by holding you hand through everything, and too hard where where you actually need a computer science degree to understand whats happening. It highlights important text for you as well as automatically recording any important information you get. The game also gives you a few clues if your lost, but you still need to pay attention and understand whats happening.

A few complaints however, firstly the voice acting is not the best. Most of the time it's just bland delivery but Van is outright cringy and annoying. There are a few times when i thought "That's not fair," or "how was i suppose to figure that out." But these moments aren't common, and you always get a couple of those in these type of games. They're are a few moments (mainly during phishing and hacking minigames) where you aren't given enough information to chose the right answer so i usually had to just trial and error these parts.

Overall Its game that strikes a perfect difficulty, (mostly). Combined with a good and engaging story and you've got a good indie game. There is a lot of reading however so it may not be for everyone, but if you don't mind then i would pick this up.

An ok attempt at whatever this genre is, it's no The Operator, but it's (mostly) playable and very rough around the edges, being riddled with terrible ESL dialogue that ChatGPT could've done a better job at generating. This game is translated from Chinese so that accounts for some of those issues, but worse are that some of the "puzzles" are just incomprehensible nonsense based off of bad information the game gives you. In places like the "symbols" password or the phone unlock pattern for Jim's phone you will basically have to use a guide because you aren't given correct information, or an indicator that you have bad information and need to work around it. You will also require a guide for the later public opinion "game" which can be found on Steam, because it is unplayable as the Engrish describing each topic makes it incomprehensible as to whether it's good or bad to promote.

The voice acting and art are also not great, two other aspects that quite frankly would've been handled better by AI, and the menu options have text that sometimes don't fit their graphics or are hidden behind them. Overall the presentation and feel is very janky mid-2000s but I'm giving it a yes anyway because I like this genre and at least an attempt was made. At the time of this writing there is already a sequel out so hopefully some of these issues were ironed out, but that remains to be seen.

So disappointed to have to leave a negative review for such a silly addition to a great game. The public image manipulation minigame is the must frustrating thing I've played in a long time. Even after consulting different walkthroughs online, it still seems the outcome is always arbitrary. This should absolutely be a skippable part of the campaign because it honestly just ruined the entire experience for me. I've seen a few people saying the same thing. So disappointing, but I had to just give up on the game and continue onto the second one instead. Developers please fix this.

poor story. im getting bored. the game force you to do everything in order. my stalker skill is outstanding comparing to this game.

Runs like crap, absolutely unplayable compared to their second one. CMH 2 is better quality and runs much more smoothly and is... actually playable. But my god the voice acting. If only they could actually hire quality animators, actors, and put real work into this series and money where their mouth is this series could have really been something. Hire real voice actors guys.

Have to say, this game was phenomenal. Really immersive story; however, I had two small issues with it.

(1) For some reason, on certain graphic settings, text would not render properly—either not showing at all or only being partially there. Not a big issue, though, since it's pretty easy to go into the settings and change that.
(2) The function of having to gather all clues before being able to proceed makes sense; however, if you somehow forget to scan something like a Toothbook ID, you just can't progress and have no idea what to do. It's just a really annoying process of going through everything again and searching for anything you have not clicked yet.

But these problems don't make it a bad game. It's still really fun to play, even though I recommend playing it with a guide if you have problems.

good story and gameplay

Very good

When it works it's fun, but majority of the time I was just frustrated. Dozen times I had the answer but wasn't able to enter it anywhere because I wasn't clicking on the correct pixel or I had not followed the illogical but required step. The atrocious translation and the clunky interface get in the way so much I was just rushing through a guide to finish it. I hear the sequel is much more polished, good for them.

The concept of the game is great. The Narrative is interesting, but you have to go so fast that you don't really get to enjoy the story. The mechanics of the game are terrible. Playing on a laptop with a trackpad/clicker, I spent way too much time pushing the various windows around trying to get the right window that had the info that I needed. When you have to go so fast, you don't have time for all the opening, closing, pushing windows around. Also, having to look up the same info twice in different chapters of the game is silly, because a real computer-based detective would have had it already. But overall, I enjoyed using the many digital forms of hacking info, cracking codes, and piecing together the story. I like the way the game brought in social media influencers too, that felt very 'real'. Another critique is that the game is very violent in parts, violent stories of torture, rape and killing; demeaning to women on the whole.There is no need for it to be so violent; it doesn't make it a better story. For that, I would not recommend it.

After spending over 12 hours in Cyber Manhunt, I can say it’s one of the most immersive and unique gaming experiences I've had in some time. I found myself genuinely curious about how my choices will affect the ending and the follow up on the characters' lives after each chapter.

wish there was a "meh" option. sometimes i was left confused at what i was supposed to do next, and some parts of the game were not enjoyable. but other parts were fun. there are also some translation errors which made things hard to understand.

The execution needs work.

I enjoy Orwell and other games in this vein. My main issue here is that it's tedious. It doesn't show you which information it wants you to click on until you mouse over it. But sometimes clearly important information isn't clickable. Other times information will be essential to click, but it's unclear exactly why. The result is that you have to mouse over everything, relevant or not. If you missed something, you have to search everywhere again to find it.

The result was me being in a place where I knew all the answers and had solved everything, but wasn't allowed to end the level because I had missed clicking on some piece of information somewhere. I looked at important pieces of information multiple times, and eventually found that the piece I had missed was something that was only slightly relevant to the situation at hand.

In other words- it didn't make me feel like I was solving puzzles. It made me feel like I was trying every single option whether it made sense or not, because that was the only way to progress. When I got stuck, it wasn't because I couldn't figure something out or because I didn't understand, it was because there was some random thing that I hadn't realized it wanted me to do.