Analogue: A Hate Story

Where/when/why/who I bought Analogue during the 14/15 Steam sales for US$4.00ish. I’d played Christine Love’s earlier, free game Digital: A Love Story and enjoyed it, so this one had been on my to-do list since it’s release back in 2012.

What It’s a visual novel-type game. The player takes on the role of an investigator in the space mega future excavating the historical records of a long-dead colony space-ship. For an extra kick, the historical records are based strongly on the medieval Korean Josean dynasty. The game is navigated by engaging in dialogue of sorts with the ships AI, using a simple command prompt, and reading historical documents for story-related clues/enjoyment. Especially the reading.

First insall? Yes!

Play time/completion Lauren and I played it for 2-3 hours, which was enough to read all the documents we could find and successfully reach an ending. Apparently there are four further endings that we could choose to go after. 6/14 achievements down.

Thoughts I really enjoyed Analogue. The writing is very strong, which is good given that it’s 95% a reading game. It brings up a bunch of issues w/r/t gender roles and identity and sex with tact and nuance. The plot has quite a few despairing elements, but even so the tone is one of optimism. I really, really like the setting, the way it has been built from history how it functions with the mode of story-telling. The art-style and interface are minimal but functionally perfect. I’m also pleased it lived up to the flawed-but-memorable Digital: A Love Story, which also go and play that because hey it’s free and pretty short.

Replay? I was tempted to go back and work on the other endings but the idea of re-reading a lot of the text doesn’t seem particularly appealing at this moment. I’m keen to get my hands on the extra content of Hate Plus at some later date though.