It is the year 198X. Fragile lives persist in the flow of electric frames, traveling wide across the pre-Internet infrastructure, looking for someone or something. The progeny of the ARPANET, Community Memory, and PLATO networks now spread from one bulletin board system (BBS) to another, bringing the soapbox nature of CB radio into the information age. But danger lurks beneath all this novelty and optimism. The Cold War looms as ever, and rogue threats come in many guises, from hackers to aberrant chatbots. Anything can happen in this world, so long as it runs on telephone wire.

That's the romanticized frame through which this early standout from the 2010 RenPy scene immerses and involves you. A few older puzzle and adventure titles had already dabbled with diegetic story-telling about and set within earlier, tight-knit computerized communities. There's the seminal Hacker from 1985, combining illicit access with a cinematic plot (later succeeded by 2001's Uplink). La femme qui ne supportait pas les ordinateurs, also an '85 release, told a more personal tale of a woman dealing with sexual harassment on France's proto-BBS system called Minitel. But a fully character-driven plot combining these BBS-era subjects into one cohesive story, yet relatable to a post-Internet age? It's hardly what author Christine Love had set out to accomplish, yet here we are.

Today you can find plenty of these "literal computing games" where you mainly interact with a fictional PC or terminal interface, doing anything from traversing networks to forensics or surveillance work, etc. Digital manages to do a bit of everything without spreading itself too thin. You start off just learning the basics of your Amie Workbench OS (oh how I love the blatant Amiga-ness throughout!) before meeting welcoming strangers on your local nets. This quickly turns into a larger mystery when your new friend and potential lover Emilia goes missing, all while the BBS you chatted on has gone up in smoke. Thankfully you know a few others willing to help figure out what's going on, either by providing shady software in messages or giving you useful information like phone numbers. You do all this while jamming out to what sounds suspiciously like mod-tracker music, complementing the Amiga stylings of your desktop.

C. Love was already a known quantity in NaNoRenMo game jams, writing one or more short but satiating visual novels within a month. This wasn't meant to be any different, but the game made a strong first impression that lasts to this day. Booting into Amie, laboriously typing in each address to dial up networks, and hearing that gloriously shrill modem song every time…it's all here, fellas. The UI mechanics used in Digital: A Love Story make it easy to slip into a period-accurate mindset; clever quality-of-life shortcuts, like your notepad switching tabs based on context, keep your playthrough smooth and well-paced despite the intentional tedium. I had a lot of fun just downloading & replying to each public or private message, as well as guessing passwords or even the penultimate BBS' address before the story gave me a direct clue.

So there's a strong interplay between these light textual puzzles and the simple but engrossing alternate history you uncover along the way. The whole concept of accidentally creating a self-evolving AI, which itself needs to create separate network nodes to store its compartmentalized personalities, is compelling on its own (if not exactly original). We quickly go from thinking we were talking to a basic chatbot this whole time to grokking the sheer scope of techno-existential advancement. Digital excels at wrapping an idealized history of the real BBS milieu with an alternate history needed both for plot and after-the-fact critique. This also allows C. Love to justify your main cast interactions by having a unifying antagonist, which you only deal with indirectly. The game provides more than a few good reasons to care about Emilia and the friends you make along the way, inching towards a suitably cyberpunk-ish calamity.

Digital isn't afraid to indulge many classic cyberpunk ideas, usually for good reason. You're not going to bust down any corporation's doors or upset the military-industrial complex here, but spoofing long-distance calling card numbers rarely gets old. I wish the game provided many more gizmos to download and use from your desktop, not just one or two plot trinkets like a brute-force password cracker or C recompiler. Still, having these interface doodads to mess with is fun even before their progression utility. I've already spoiled quite a bit for this admittedly 2-hour game, but I'll say its take on near-future AIs and their human interactions is serviceable. Nothing here's as compelling as the William Gibson examples alluded to mid-way through, just solidly characterized in that late-'80s genre mold. The most cyberpunk we get here, otherwise, is a positive outlook on casual hacking in a time before federal regulations and enforced oversight curbed the power of grassroots networks, thus incentivizing adoption of the Internet & WWW.

What's clearly more on C. Love's mind this whole time is the nature of remote relationships. Finding out the truth behind Eliza's disappearance may be the main plot thrust, but understanding why she's fallen in love with you is nearly as important. The creator's said in later blogs & interviews how she wanted to balance a universal love story with romantic themes relatable to a queer audience much like herself. (Any cursory look at her works since will show much this matters to her!) The whole premise of finding a deep, inter-personal connection via the most remote means a lot more when talking about historically marginalized LGBTQIA+ people. Running into a sapphic chatbot, one whose first post on your home BBS is literally a love poem, is all too believable and relevant. Later on, you'll run into a user posting a series of fantasy wargames (which, like other games warez, isn't playable here due to the game's quick dev time), all of which involve a lesbian warrior queen. Cyberpunk can and should highlight people forced into the periphery of the mainstream, those who fight back against a harmful status quo even at their own expense.

Story ending spoilers ahead!





This all comes together when, after reviving Eliza on your Amie PC using a compiler and her crash dump/log, she endeavors to defeat Reaper at the cost of her own digital life. For as much as she loves you, the player, her biggest concern now is saving all the aspects of Mother from this rogue worm meant to keep them all in check. Sure enough, trying to access any networks at end-game is futile, as Reaper's bulldozed through every system it can, with nothing but black screens of death remaining. Putting a larger existential goal before one's love is no easy decision, and I'm still not convinced this works much better than a typical kill-your-gays plot resolution. To the writer's credit, Eliza gives you all the warning, apologies, and resignation one could while asking to be armed with an anti-viral payload that will destroy her as well. It's your choice whether or not to see this tragic comedy through to the end.

Plot spoilers end here





Given the unsubtle nods to Shakespeare, and Digital's generally hopeful outlook on how cyberpunk elements can bleed into our world without destroying us or enriching the 1%, I think the story ended on steady ground. There's a cool outro with commentary from BBS users recalling the plot's events, and the game has an unction of replay value in case you want to look for more lore hidden in plain sight. I could do this all over again just for the smartly written bantz between amateurs and pros across each node! But this ended up being a memorable one-and-done too, effortlessly meshing its diegetic play with a likable dramedy. Digital: A Love Story became a surprise cause celebre not long after its release, making C. Love's career and paving the way for countless newer computing adventures throughout indie circles. It's a swift play and, for me, practically required to understand the origins of this genre movement as it exists now.

A small-scale scifi story about coding errors and dialing numbers you shouldn't know about. I revisited this after being disappointed with Analogue: A Hate Story, and it's remarkable how similar and how much more successful Digital is despite (and perhaps because of) being a more straightforward project.

Out of all Christine Love's games I've played, Digital is the most sincere, concerned less with sweeping political allegories than with melancholic nostalgia and very deliberate interactions. Typing phone numbers and running down a list of free long distance codes is the most intense Digital ever gets, but wrapping these inputs in a blunt lo-fi interface causes them to wrap back around to feeling like each number is a bold step into the unknown.

I'm still very down on Christine Love's prose, but what's here benefits from fully obfuscating player responses (you see the reply to your reply but not what prompts it, providing some much needed ambiguity). The love story is by far the weakest part, due mostly to a lack of time to develop the romantic interest and the second half crashing into a pretty boring computer virus drama. It was surprising just how little the actual BBS interactions matter compared to the tactile experience of using them. It's a lonely game in that respect, but I'm happy to drift alone between boards when dialing in feels this good.