Analogue: A Hate Story and Hate Plus

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Hipolito
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Joined: Thu Oct 21, 2004 2:00 pm
Location: Chicago, Illinois

Analogue: A Hate Story and Hate Plus

Post by Hipolito »

I sorta liked, sorta didn't like Christine Love's earlier games, Digital: A Love Story and Don't Take it Personally, Babe, It Just Ain't Your Story. Digital had a BBS-style interface which was a pretty neat and involving way to watch the story unfold. But having had no actual experience using BBSes, it was a struggle for me to play and I got terminally (hee) stuck twice. Giving up, I watched a Let's Play and was not impressed by the story's reliance on techno-tropes. I had a lot more fun with Don't Take it Personally, an upbeat tale about high school romance and online privacy. It was more of a traditional visual novel with some Facebook-style stalking and snooping, so it was easier for me to enjoy. But it had an awful cop-out ending.

I've now played Analogue: A Hate Story, which really hits it out of the park for me. It takes place way into the future, with you aboard a derelict colony ship named the Mugunghwa to download the ship's logs and figure out why the colonists never reached their destination. You're assisted by a beautiful, spoony AI who unlocks the log entries for you. You can ask her to comment on log entries, which may unlock other entries. Sometimes she, in her playful curiosity, will ask for your opinion on what you've learned, and your answers may affect how the story plays out.

The game is a whole lotta reading, and at times I felt frustrated by all this homework. But the AI's lively personality kept me glued to the game and the story ends up being a fascinating one. The log entries paint a complex picture of the dominant families on the ship, how they interacted with each other, and their inexplicably patriarchal society. It's a tale of politics, romance, gender roles, and the clash between traditional and modern values. It'll even teach you a little bit about Korean cultural history.

About 95% of the game is reading logs, and 5% involves some typing into a terminal interface like Digital. That 5% provides some significant and complex puzzling that I enjoyed sweating through. There are 5 possible endings, and if you can get Ending 5 without looking up a walkthrough, I will bow and call you master.

Analogue never actually reveals why the futuristic colonists became so socially retrograde. That question is left to the sequel, Hate Plus, which I'm now playing. You can import your ending save file from Analogue, which has a significant impact at least in the beginning. I'm again frustrated by the amount of reading, and the log files are even longer this time, but I have faith that this game will be as enthralling as Analogue.

Dumb fact: I didn't notice until writing this post how the titles Digital: A Love Story and Analogue: A Hate Story mirror each other. Their plots are not related, though.
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Hipolito
Posts: 2187
Joined: Thu Oct 21, 2004 2:00 pm
Location: Chicago, Illinois

Re: Analogue: A Hate Story and Hate Plus

Post by Hipolito »

I finally finished Hate Plus, the sequel to Analogue: A Hate Story. I had started playing it years ago, but my motherboard got fried before I finished. I recovered most of my data but couldn't find my saves for this game.

Because I'd forgotten pretty much all the details of the story, I replayed Analogue and had a lot of fun with it. The story twists surprised me once again.

I then finished Hate Plus and didn't enjoy it as much. The log entries are much longer and sometimes include boring content like meeting minutes. Also, you can only read so many log entries before the game makes you quit and wait 12 real-time hours before you can play again. That's a pain when you just want to get the story over with.

Most problematic of all is that the character motivations just aren't as convincing here as they were in Analogue. Analogue asked why the generation ship Mugunghwa never reached its destination, and the answer was chilling and believable. Hate Plus asks why the society aboard the ship became harshly patriarchal, and the answer isn't quite as satisfying. It all kind of adds up, but not neatly.

Some positives: when the writing is at its best, it can be even better than that of Analogue, with some hilariously raunchy situations and snarky comebacks that had me slapping my armrest. We get to see photographic portraits of the Mugunghwa crew this time. And the soundtrack features this chill little tune named Vision that I love.

Cake, cake!

Hate Plus got a fair amount of press because of an unusual Steam Achievement. The AI asks you to go bake a chocolate cake in real life. While eating the cake with the AI, you take a photo of the AI with the cake in the frame. You email the photo to the game developer to prove you actually went through the trouble, and she'd send you a code so you can unlock the achievement. The developer no longer does this, but she released a code so you can earn the achievement on the honor system.

However, to get to the cake dialogue in the game, you have to finish Analogue a certain way and import that save into Hate Plus, and that was not the save I imported. So no cake. Too bad, I was totally ready to bake a cake for a computer game! Maybe in another few years I'll go back, import the correct save, and try out the vegan chocolate cake recipe I've been curious about.
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