Fun premise, but wasted potential.
When people bring up Vampire the Masquerade, they really aren't kidding. It's a vampire series through and through, and if you enjoy media like Interview with a Vampire, What We Do in the Shadows, True Blood, and many others, you'll recognize a lot of the tropes and motifs in Rebirth.
MC is a newly turned fledgling vampire suddenly pushed into a secret society made up of the bloodsucking undead. It's decadent, indulgent, and not particularly original, but it does a decent job of setting up an interesting atmosphere. It plants the seeds for what should be an intriguing supernatural story.
Unfortunately, everything that follows ranges from borderline unsatisfactory to outright letdown. On every level, Rebirth fails to deliver on its promise and leaves you wondering what could have been.
The story is linear, essentially a kinetic novel with minimal choices. There's effectively three main character stats (stealth, prowess, and charisma) and a few other hidden numbers that are tracked, which determine if Sharon is willing to save Laurie and if Carmen becomes your lover. Every other choice is essentially largely irrelevant—and, truthfully, so are the aforementioned. Choices in this game really don't matter. There's very minor differences to how certain scenes play out, but they all get you to the same place.
The game also commits the cardinal sin of laying the groundwork for decent characters and dynamics, but ultimately failing to let them live up to their potential. You have Laurie, your childhood friend whom the MC stupidly ropes into this world and strips her of her right to live a normal life. You have your vampire caretaker/mommy, Sharon, and her thrall, Andrew. You have a vampire hunter, Carmen, who you capture and essentially stockholm syndrome into changing sides.
Development between them is mostly teased but never actually shown. For instance, apparently Carmen and Laurie become quite close, but you only know because the characters say so. They share almost no scenes with each other, and even in the scenes they share, they don't have the benefit of much interaction. The game essentially proceeds to ignore them all in favor of showing the MC awkwardly bumbling through the vampire world, needing every detail explained to him like an idiot, which gets old the 2nd or 3rd time it happens, much less the twentieth.
There's also a fairly large cast of secondary characters in this game, many of them with some promise: Merrick, Markus, Frank, Virgil, Marcius, Astrid, Eloise, Malia, MC's sire/vamp mommy, Calisto, and many others. But almost all of them fail to live up to their potential. A lot of them are heavy-handedly discarded to set up some nebulous big bad threat, which ultimately is dealt with incredibly unsatisfactorily.
Characters are not independent agents as much as objects where things happen to them. It's an amateur mistake repeated many times over. Instead of showing how characters react to their environment, how their perceptions may be challenged, changed, or solidified, they simply react to the newest event that happens, and not particularly convincingly at that. You rarely feel like these characters have their own ambitions. long term goals, or core desire because they're all prisoners of the moment, left at the mercy of a story that's not particularly interesting.
The story, which seems to build up to the MC and his gang figuring out how to take out this elder god vampire ends with literal whimpers, as most of them are taken out off-panel and the MC cuts a deal with said deity that he's never actually shown having to pay back. Then the last half of the last chapter is MC making some shitty political maneuvers to rise to the top of the vampire hierarchy, which was never a stated goal of any of the main characters. It's all as unsatisfying as it sounds.
Plenty of others have brought up the concern that this is essentially a porn game with very little actual porn, and that is certainly valid.
Make no mistake, a porn game doesn't need to have a lot of lewd scenes in it. A few relatively choice scenes in an otherwise interesting story is perfectly adequate. But the issue with Rebirth is that it's clearly a porn game, with so much of the focus on sexuality and the MC's sex drive, impotence, and obvious attraction to the women in his life. Yet the actual porn is so unsatisfying that it leaves a bad taste in your mouth. It feels too much like drip-fed patreon-milking that's already too common amongst this genre's shovelware.
It's all a terrible slow burn with the MC simping after Sharon for three or four chapters before they actually do anything, despite their clear mutual attraction. When the levee finally breaks, the scenes are bland, not to mention horribly dark and poorly lit so that you can't even see what's going on.
A lot of the problems with the lewd scenes, or lack thereof, would be alleviated by a strong, taut story, but this game is too much setup and not enough knocking down. The story essentially floats out there without any real urgency. Characters can disappear and the MC and his gang are supposed to find them, and yet they'll still be spending most of their time arguing about clothes or sleep schedules instead of having any urgency to get the apparently very urgent tasks done. It's a visual novel that plays out like a video game, where you can leisurely do sixteen fetch quests before you attend to the next pressing matter, which works in a free roam RPG but not so much a kinetic novel.
Ultimately, this game leaves you feeling more disappointed than impressed. At least it has an ending, which is better than most games on this site, but it left you feeling like the developer was just winging it without a plan, and the characters and storylines were just arbitrarily picked up or dropped at leisure. Almost none of the big mysteries established in the first act are really answered, such as the MC's vampire heritage or even the ultimate fate of the big bad. It's an interesting premise and a fairly strong start that's let down by everything that happens in the middle and end.
