Analogue: A Hate Story

A Visual Novel by Christine Love, creator of Digital: A Love Story.

In the 25th century, a generation ship called the Mugunghwa departed from Earth with the aim of establishing the first interstellar colony, only to disappear having never reached its destination. Thousands of years later, the abandoned and lifeless ship has been located adrift in space, and your goal is to access the ship's computer logs and discover exactly what happened.

With the aid of *Hyun-ae, an AI aboard the Mugunghwa (the * is silent and merely an indicator that she is an AI), you dig into the layers of a society that had degenerated into an antiquated patriarchy, and the plight of a young girl called the "Pale Bride" who seems to be at the centre of events. Things get even more complicated when a second AI enters the fray, bringing a whole new perspective on the events that unfolded.

The player lacks the ability to directly interact with the logs of the Mugunghwa (due to the system being unable to parse their text input) and must rely on their AI partner for exposition and searching functions. By presenting important logs to your partner, you can convey the information you wish to find out more about. In the grand tradition of Visual Novels you can also build up a relationship with your AI partner, which leads to one of the five Multiple Endings.

It's currently available on Steam for $10.

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Analogue: A Hate Story provides examples of:

 * AI Is a Crapshoot: Inverted.
 * And I Must Scream:.
 * And Your Reward Is Clothes: Butter up *Hyun-ae enough and you'll get the opportunity to change her outfit.
 * Bullying a Dragon:
 * Cosplay Otaku Girl: *Hyun-ae
 * Could Say It, But...:.
 * Deliberate Values Dissonance: Part of what makes the story so disturbing.
 * Despair Event Horizon:.
 * The Dev Team Thinks of Everything: Multiple examples of this. Characters acknowledge when you've done a bit of Sequence Breaking. You can never access admin privileges (even with the right password) until . And one ending can only be accessed if you.
 * Featureless Protagonist: Played With. No details about the investigator are revealed in the backstory, but you can tell *Hyun-ae and *Mute things like your gender and where are you from when they ask you about them.
 * Fish Out of Temporal Water:.
 * Ghost Ship: The Mugunghwa.
 * Gossipy Hens: *Mute, which is ironic considering her name. (She protests this description, calling herself "a social creature".)
 * Human Popsicle:.
 * Ill Girl:.
 * Kill'Em All:.
 * Late to the Party
 * Leaning on the Fourth Wall: During the Ending: the game slyly acknowledges that the only way to access it is to "cheat the system".
 * Little Bit Beastly: *Mute has some aspects, such as her bow resembling fox ears and her teeth being slightly fanged.
 * This might actually have thematic significance. As noted on the page, a gumiho frequently is associated with becoming human.
 * Mind Rape: Implied in the case of
 * Even worse,
 * Mythology Gag: The initial log-in screen boots up the Amie OS from Digital a Love Story and Don't Take It Personally Babe It Just Aint Your Story.
 * The Password Is Always Swordfish: The admin password.
 * Point of No Return:.
 * Red Oni, Blue Oni: *Mute and *Hyun-ae. It's played with a bit, though. While *Mute is usually more brash, she is generally more methodical than *Hyun-ae. And while *Hyun-ae is usually more calm, she can get very emotional, especially in the later parts of the game.
 * Ridiculously-Human Robots: *Hyun-ae and *Mute..
 * Sci-Fi Writers Have No Sense of Scale: At one point, *Hyun-ae describes as taking up "a few gigabytes" of memory. In actual fact,  is speculated to be 100 terabytes or more.
 * Send in the Search Team: You as the player. You're a little late to actually save any survivors, though.
 * Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism: It's called "A Hate Story". Take a wild guess.
 * Spiritual Successor: To the aforementioned Digital: A Love Story.
 * Tsundere: Both A Is have elements of this, but it is more prominent in *Mute.
 * Unreliable Narrator: Not so much "unreliable" as each AI having their own perspective on the events that happened..
 * What Happened to the Mouse?:.
 * Yuri Genre: Not the story in particular, but rather, a set of logs talking about the romance between a noble woman and a courtesan girl hired by her husband. The A Is also don't particularly care about the investigator's gender in their endings, although *Mute, in both a demonstration of her Tsundere nature and the prejudices which were baked into her by her culture, dismisses the possibility of falling in love with a girl quite insistently.
 * Unreliable Narrator: Not so much "unreliable" as each AI having their own perspective on the events that happened..
 * What Happened to the Mouse?:.
 * Yuri Genre: Not the story in particular, but rather, a set of logs talking about the romance between a noble woman and a courtesan girl hired by her husband. The A Is also don't particularly care about the investigator's gender in their endings, although *Mute, in both a demonstration of her Tsundere nature and the prejudices which were baked into her by her culture, dismisses the possibility of falling in love with a girl quite insistently.