Analogue: A Hate Story is pretty good

BitVyper · 03-27-2014, 01:23 AM

A couple years old, but if you like VNs at all, it's ten dollars on Steam. You're some kind of space archaeologist investigating the logs on a 2000 year old, pre-FTL derelict colony ship that never reached its destination, with the help of an AI program that's been running for the past 600 years since everyone died. What you discover is sort of a court drama tragedy set in a heavily Confucian society (inspired by Korea's Joseon dynasty), and it's really interesting going through and figuring out how different things play together and what happened. Of course, at the same times, you have a burgeoning relationship with one of the two AIs present on the ship. You also get to save the day with mad Terminal skills.

There's a sequel called Hate Plus where you investigate what happened to knock civilisation on the ship on its ass. I would say it's the weaker of the two games, primarily because almost all of the logs are available from the outset, so there's not as much figuring things out, plus events seem to proc a certain times regardless of what logs you've read. Then again, if you got a particular ending in the first game (requires either cheating or multiple playthroughs), there's actually totally a dialogue boss on the third day, which I thought was pretty cool (although kind of dumb sticking the most interesting gameplay element in a section of the game you ONLY see under those circumstances). In any case, it's worth another 10 dollars for finishing the story very nicely. A lot of details about the setting get really good explanations too (I'm an anthropology major, so I'm like, super critical of this cultural stuff).

The writing in both games is excellent, and the characters are all pretty believable, with the two AIs being very personable. I really liked all the political intrigue in Hate Plus, and all the hot court gossip in Analogue.

For the record, if you play Hate Plus, you will find that the game wants to force you to wait 12 hours to play again between days. You can overcome this without changing this system clock by just hovering your mouse over the "WAIT" save file, and pressing S.

Anyway, it's really nice to see more VNs showing up in the mainstream western market.

03-27-2014, 01:23 AM	#1
BitVyper History's Strongest Dilettante Join Date: Mar 2004 Location: Arcadia Posts: 6,662	Analogue: A Hate Story is pretty good A couple years old, but if you like VNs at all, it's ten dollars on Steam. You're some kind of space archaeologist investigating the logs on a 2000 year old, pre-FTL derelict colony ship that never reached its destination, with the help of an AI program that's been running for the past 600 years since everyone died. What you discover is sort of a court drama tragedy set in a heavily Confucian society (inspired by Korea's Joseon dynasty), and it's really interesting going through and figuring out how different things play together and what happened. Of course, at the same times, you have a burgeoning relationship with one of the two AIs present on the ship. You also get to save the day with mad Terminal skills. There's a sequel called Hate Plus where you investigate what happened to knock civilisation on the ship on its ass. I would say it's the weaker of the two games, primarily because almost all of the logs are available from the outset, so there's not as much figuring things out, plus events seem to proc a certain times regardless of what logs you've read. Then again, if you got a particular ending in the first game (requires either cheating or multiple playthroughs), there's actually totally a dialogue boss on the third day, which I thought was pretty cool (although kind of dumb sticking the most interesting gameplay element in a section of the game you ONLY see under those circumstances). In any case, it's worth another 10 dollars for finishing the story very nicely. A lot of details about the setting get really good explanations too (I'm an anthropology major, so I'm like, super critical of this cultural stuff). The writing in both games is excellent, and the characters are all pretty believable, with the two AIs being very personable. I really liked all the political intrigue in Hate Plus, and all the hot court gossip in Analogue. For the record, if you play Hate Plus, you will find that the game wants to force you to wait 12 hours to play again between days. You can overcome this without changing this system clock by just hovering your mouse over the "WAIT" save file, and pressing S. Anyway, it's really nice to see more VNs showing up in the mainstream western market. __________________ "There are worlds out there where the sky is burning, and the sea is asleep, and the rivers dream. People made of smoke and cities made of song. Somewhere there's danger, somewhere there's injustice, somewhere else the tea's getting cold. Come on, Ace; we've got work to do!" Awesome art be here. Last edited by BitVyper; 03-27-2014 at 01:29 AM.