Analogue: A Hate Story

Analogue: A Hate Story is another terribly-named visual novel from renowned internet word-lady Christine Love. Coming as a sequel to her début hit Digital, it’s also another tragic, clever love story that understands how games work.

It starts out slow. Sent to investigate a ruined ship, you plug into the main computer and are forced to hack through a primitive text-adventure interface in order to infiltrate the memory storage. When you get in, you’re greeted with a game made out of Deus Ex-style datalogs. For twenty minutes you sift through the emails and memos left by a bunch of dead Koreans who seemed to spend most of their time writing long messages about their lives to no-one in particular. Just when you’ve totally lost track of the Korean names comes a shocking twist: the game turns out to be actually good.

The following story rides through reactor meltdowns, mass murder and arranged marriage, and it’s twice as effective for the grounding the opening gives it. A hard game to review, then, because almost everything about it counts as a spoiler. Add that together with the 15$ price tag, and I can’t see anyone who doesn’t love Christine seeing it through to the conclusion. Stick with me, though, and I’ll see if I can’t convince you to try the demo without spoiling a drop.

The story revolves around the spunky, short-skirted schoolgirl of an AI sidekick who reads over your shoulder as you sort through the last messages of the ships dead inhabitants. *Hyun-ae checks all the boxes: she’s awkward, excitable, eager to please.  At one point you can even give her different outfits to try on. “I lov- I consider you a great friend!” she flusters adorably, dressed as a maid.

This game is sharp enough to cut itself, though, and there’s a deliberate, dark underbelly to the anime romance. The game makes it obvious that *Hyun-ae is an ancient machine, with specific reasons for appearing as a schoolgirl. You follow her story down through the fragmented remains of those old datalogs, revealing her more and more as a fascinating and tragic figure. Eventually you have to choose whether or not to trust her. At that point, it’s a hard choice.

Analogue is just far too clever, at every level. When you first meet *Hyun-ae she gets you to type questions to her. When none of them get through she realizes the ships language parsing gizmo’s cracked, and she’s forced to offer you binary dialogue choices instead. Get it? It even comments on how impossible it is to communicate this way, suggesting that *Hyun-ae is falling in love with you precisely because she has no idea who you are. Every part is like this, playing easily with the conventions of the medium. And, despite the binary choices, the biggest decision in the game is made without anyone even mentioning it. It’s something you have to work out and decide upon entirely by yourself. Love understands how to tell a story in a game.

The story tackles a lot of topics, but on the whole I’m inclined to view it as a jab at romantic visual novels. One ending shows *Hyun-ae with her hand pressed against the inside of the computer terminal: the digital woman you’ve built a relationship with, totally unable to reach you. You can never talk to her, but you can change her outfit. You’ve got total control over someone you can never contact, and hey: She says she loves you.

“A hate story” feels like an appropriate subtitle, in the end. Analogue loses the nostalgic optimism of Digital for something more unnerving and off-key. It’s a subtle, unconventional story told in a way only games could manage. It’s got more things to say than almost anything else I’ve played. It’s worth your $15.