Title: CyberRebeat -The Fifth Domain of Warfare-
Genre: Casual, Indie
Developer:
E.N.Nach
Publisher:
Sekai Project
Release Date: 24 Aug, 2018

English,Japanese

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7.5\/10. Barebones presentation and a couple of story weaknesses hinder, but are ultimately outshone by a story about an interesting topic with morally grey protagonists and antagonists that left me genuinely thoughtful about the future of the internet and how we interact with it.

CyberRebeat is, as the store page says, a VN about hacking.

UX is quite frankly poor. Things like full-screen or auto-play or skip mode don't have any buttons in-game, just a list of hotkeys in the "config" menu. If somehow the developer sees this review, I recommend using Fungus in the future if you're going to stick with Unity. The music isn't bad but most loops are short, so they get repetitive quickly. The art is also...not great. Most of the backgrounds are real pictures which are grainy and covered with some random overlay that makes them look odd. None of the characters truly look bad, but they don't look good at all, and those ears...

Like other relatively short, low budget VNs I've played recently, however, I really didn't have a problem looking past all of that and delving into the the story, which is definitely atypical. As the store page states, it's about hacking; more specifically, it's about hacking as "warfare," in both analog and digital realms.

I found it pretty interesting in several ways. One is the topic itself: it frames most everything around a hacking "game" called CTF. I don't have any experience with this, but their descriptions of it are pretty interesting to read. That said, at certain points they do also expand out into social engineering, which is really cool. Another facet of this is the portrayal of the hackers. Hackers are a broad group - the existence of the terms "white," "grey," and "black" hat speaks to that. The game frames the main characters as mostly white hats, paints most of the larger community as "grey" hats, and just a few here and there as "black" hats. It's not as "villainous" as someone big on IT security might prefer, but it's not nearly as clear-cut as it could be. Connected to this is the portrayal of the game's adversaries. I won't spoil who they are, but for me personally it was difficult, in that I wouldn't necessarily view them as adversaries. Seeing things from a different perspective is valuable, and that's a strength of this VN. I found myself struggling to decide who the true "bad guys" were, or if there were any at all.

At the same time, there are a couple weaknesses in the story. The big one is their portrayal of hacking. It feels...exaggerated, larger than life in some of the descriptions they give. Example quote:

"She didn't use anyone's hacking tools, nor did she look at anyone's password, but somehow, impossibly, words began to scroll onto the screen as though they were magical runes appearing from thin air."

It's not like that all the time, but a fair portion of the more involved hacking segments use that kind of language, which just feels unrealistic to me. It takes me out of the experience.

A second, more minor criticism I have is that too many characters are connected to one another. To a point it's a good thing, and it's cool and intriguing to see familiar characters at different times in totally different contexts and try to figure out how they got from one to the other. But when basically every other character has a history with at least two others in the group from before the VN, it gets a little ridiculous. Again, this is fairly minor. It's not a big deal, it can be overlooked; it's just suboptimal.

Ultimately, however, I can really only recommend this VN.. While the game system is poor and off-putting, CyberRebeat provides a wonderful story and an interesting concept worth reading till the end.. 7.5\/10. Barebones presentation and a couple of story weaknesses hinder, but are ultimately outshone by a story about an interesting topic with morally grey protagonists and antagonists that left me genuinely thoughtful about the future of the internet and how we interact with it.

CyberRebeat is, as the store page says, a VN about hacking.

UX is quite frankly poor. Things like full-screen or auto-play or skip mode don't have any buttons in-game, just a list of hotkeys in the "config" menu. If somehow the developer sees this review, I recommend using Fungus in the future if you're going to stick with Unity. The music isn't bad but most loops are short, so they get repetitive quickly. The art is also...not great. Most of the backgrounds are real pictures which are grainy and covered with some random overlay that makes them look odd. None of the characters truly look bad, but they don't look good at all, and those ears...

Like other relatively short, low budget VNs I've played recently, however, I really didn't have a problem looking past all of that and delving into the the story, which is definitely atypical. As the store page states, it's about hacking; more specifically, it's about hacking as "warfare," in both analog and digital realms.

I found it pretty interesting in several ways. One is the topic itself: it frames most everything around a hacking "game" called CTF. I don't have any experience with this, but their descriptions of it are pretty interesting to read. That said, at certain points they do also expand out into social engineering, which is really cool. Another facet of this is the portrayal of the hackers. Hackers are a broad group - the existence of the terms "white," "grey," and "black" hat speaks to that. The game frames the main characters as mostly white hats, paints most of the larger community as "grey" hats, and just a few here and there as "black" hats. It's not as "villainous" as someone big on IT security might prefer, but it's not nearly as clear-cut as it could be. Connected to this is the portrayal of the game's adversaries. I won't spoil who they are, but for me personally it was difficult, in that I wouldn't necessarily view them as adversaries. Seeing things from a different perspective is valuable, and that's a strength of this VN. I found myself struggling to decide who the true "bad guys" were, or if there were any at all.

At the same time, there are a couple weaknesses in the story. The big one is their portrayal of hacking. It feels...exaggerated, larger than life in some of the descriptions they give. Example quote:

"She didn't use anyone's hacking tools, nor did she look at anyone's password, but somehow, impossibly, words began to scroll onto the screen as though they were magical runes appearing from thin air."

It's not like that all the time, but a fair portion of the more involved hacking segments use that kind of language, which just feels unrealistic to me. It takes me out of the experience.

A second, more minor criticism I have is that too many characters are connected to one another. To a point it's a good thing, and it's cool and intriguing to see familiar characters at different times in totally different contexts and try to figure out how they got from one to the other. But when basically every other character has a history with at least two others in the group from before the VN, it gets a little ridiculous. Again, this is fairly minor. It's not a big deal, it can be overlooked; it's just suboptimal.

Ultimately, however, I can really only recommend this VN.. While the game system is poor and off-putting, CyberRebeat provides a wonderful story and an interesting concept worth reading till the end.. I'm a huge enthusiast for the cyperpunk genre, and a premise this unique at $5 was hard to pass up. I definitely enjoyed my time with CyberRebeat and would recommend it to anyone who find its premise or subject matter interesting, especially if you find it on sale like I did. However, it's also important to note that, as a VN itself, its production quality is considerably underwhelming (though it thankfully did not deter my enjoyment as much as it may others).

Let's start with the good though: The story is lengthy and very engaging. I found myself hooked from beginning to end and wanting more after the credits rolled. The characters and their designs are also a plus: I felt the characters were very well-rounded, not pulling too much (or too little) from their personality traits or backstories to leave a lasting impression on the reader. Background art doesn't wow much but gets the job done and, similarly, the BGM is also enjoyable despite a relatively short track list (an OST release would be a nice bonus).

Despite the good, the overall presentation of it all leaves a lot to be desired. This game only runs in 1024x576, a resolution pretty low by 2014 standards when the game was originally released as freeware and certainly even tougher on the eyes in 2018. In fact, several settings you'd typically find in the average VN today are totally absent: There's no way to reconfigure keyboard\/mouse commands, resolution (as noted above) or font at all. There were also a few instances where I not only noticed minor typos in the translation, but complete errors where the wrong character was listed as speaking as well. This happened enough to where I become slightly frustrated at least once from having to read dialogue over to avoid confusion. Transitions meant to break the narrative into parts were also ambiguous from time to time, but not enough to cause any real headache.

Basically, it seems like the only difference between the the freeware version and Sekai Project's release is the English translation. I'd have love to have seen a few technical tweaks, at least...

All in all, still had tons of fun reading this one. If the material piques your interest and you can overlook the presentation mishaps, you're in for a good time.. I'm a huge enthusiast for the cyperpunk genre, and a premise this unique at $5 was hard to pass up. I definitely enjoyed my time with CyberRebeat and would recommend it to anyone who find its premise or subject matter interesting, especially if you find it on sale like I did. However, it's also important to note that, as a VN itself, its production quality is considerably underwhelming (though it thankfully did not deter my enjoyment as much as it may others).

Let's start with the good though: The story is lengthy and very engaging. I found myself hooked from beginning to end and wanting more after the credits rolled. The characters and their designs are also a plus: I felt the characters were very well-rounded, not pulling too much (or too little) from their personality traits or backsto