Rebirth! New Lover Review

Five admirers help you do just that. One becomes the cook, a martial artist handles security, a healer advises on medicinal recipes, a courtesan provides dancing entertainment, and a spoiled brat becomes a server.

Crucially all of these admirers have full story arcs. The martial artist wants to be a heroine, to help the downtrodden and punish the wicked, but she’s a bad judge of character. The courtesan is indentured and you will negotiate her freedom. Even the healer has a supernatural bond that needs to be expunged. To help them out, you can travel back to modern day and interact with the future versions of the same admirers, usually to bring back items.

The future admirers sometimes have their own mini arcs that mirror the past. For example, the courtesan is a streamer, and she is unhappy about her contract. And the spoiled brat keeps failing for scams. The actresses do a great job in their roles, with some standouts. Xiaobai is brilliant as the lovable brat, and her magic scene is first class. Lin miaoxian, as the healer, brings good emotion. Even Gu qiuhan has some nice sword moves. The male actors bring extra corny performances which can be funny. All these stories go together with the basic goal of building a successful tavern, so the narrative is solid.

It is also twice as long as most games in the genre, taking around 4.5 hours to get to the finale. This is because it goes through all admirers arcs. Big choices come mostly down to whether you go back to the future or not—both are viable. However, not meeting the future admirer will lock you out of going to the future later. That said, there are not many branching paths, with a few deaths and failed endings sprinkled around. All up it will take around 7 hours to view every scene, which is still good value.

The endings are disappointing though. Each admirer only gets one tiny scene and then a montage of old footage. It is easy to access all endings in one playthrough too. One unique feature is that you can actually say goodbye to someone, which lets players create their own bittersweet ending.

Sadly the translation is not great. There are a lot of conversations that are missing English text, so get ready with Google Lens. The rest of the translation is okay but some major choices don’t make sense and the typical gender issues persist. The game also uses ADR (automatic dialogue replacement) for everything. While ADR is always worse than live audio, here it is below average for ADR. Main admirers sound fine and some (Xiaobai) try to match their actual lip-syncing, but side characters sound like they rang up on a Nokia 3310. Video quality is okay, but also could be better.

So Rebirth! New Lover gets a pass mark because of the great admirers and their stories, while most of its other features are only average at best. Not the best in the genre but you could also do worse.