Analogue: A Hate Story

released on Feb 01, 2012

A dark visual mystery novel featuring transhumanism, traditional marriage, loneliness, and cosplay. Two pursuable characters. Five endings. Welcome to the future.


Released on

Genres


More Info on IGDB


Reviews View More


This is another VN that my girlfriend and I played through together. It's a shorter one, so we got through it in only 5 hours in one sitting, but it was something still very worthwhile despite the short length~.

You play an unnamed space pilot in the far future who gets a job to go out to the recently re-discovered generation ship, the Mugunghwa, that went missing a very long time ago. Your job is to retrieve the log data, particularly about the AI on the ship, and bring it back. Simple enough. Upon getting to the ship's interface, you meet the ship's AI Hyun-ae. Her text parsing feature has been worn away by time, so your forced to communicate through you answering binary prompts she gives you, as she does her best to help you complete your mission by bringing you old ship logs. The gameplay mostly consists of reading the logs and talking to Hyun-ae about them as well as also talking to the ship's other AI, Mute, about them.

It's a very interesting story that's both a cute romance (if you so choose) and an intriguing mystery. It's a super small cast of active characters; being just you, Hyun-ae, and Mute; but slowly learning about the world of the ancient past that the ship's log discuss is loads of fun. We got the ending where you leave the ship with Hyun-ae, but it has several other endings including one that plays with the nature of a VN being re-playable, which is just the kind of thing I love. The dialogue and character writing is very good, and the art is very pretty to boot, though there isn't a ton of it, ultimately. This is a very bite-sized game in many respects, and that goes for not just the run-time but the presentation as well. It does just what it needs to, and it fits the aesthetic of "interfacing with a really old space ship via a terminal" very well~.

Verdict: Highly Recommended. This is a really well put together little story. If you like sci-fi and history stuff and also enjoy a good mystery to unfurl, this is a great way to spend an evening~.

Fooled around with this for the longest time, thinking I'd get invested in it soon enough. Didn't happen.

One of the few Visual Novels on the western sphere worth reading -- at least back then, when its political commentary was still novel.

You are a faceless space inspector/prospector, far past the age of humans navigating with standard non-FTL drives. The goal here is to investigate relics of the past, upon which you happen on the Mugunghwa, an ancient colony ship converted into a Joseon Dynasty period piece by its inhabitants, where women are powerless versus their husbands. An AI, introducing herself as *Hyun-Ae guides you through its secrets, though she herself has a few secrets of her own... which you will discover.

The ending sequence is rather contrived, and serves to abruptly end your investigation while hastily wrapping up a subplot related to the ship's former inhabitants, but for what its worth, it did detail the horrors of a non-democratic civilization quite effectively, even if all you were doing was sifting through logs and being a glorified email reader.

If I’m honest, it got me interested in making games. Kudos

A stirring sci-fi story of injustice told in a novel format that casts the player in the very role they're already inhabiting: someone at a computer exploring the logs of a long-dead starship.

I need to replay it, as my first playthrough was while I was still steeped in a conservative religious worldview, and I expect the story of discrimination and gay rights would hit differently now.

A unique approach to visual novels in that the story is nonlinear, told after the fact through a series of journals that you can read at your leisure. Interesting to see Korean Culture (very old style and traditional) injected into a futuristic setting (spaceship). I enjoyed it.