Analogue: A Hate Story

Analogue: A Hate Story is a digital epistolary VN by Christine Love in which the player interacts with AI on a derelict ship to uncover journal entries and letters and understand what happened to the ship and crew. This was my third attempt to play this game. Part of the problem was I thought this game had a lock-out timer (I was thankfully incorrect, the timer is in the sequel, Hate Plus).

The letters are a little hard to get into at first but I stuck with it and got drawn into the story. Analogue does some interesting things with the digital epistolary format and setup. It has an unexpected hacking/puzzle game thing about two-thirds through, which I didn’t mind too much but I can see how it would be off-putting players who just want to read the story.

I enjoyed this one quite a bit, but I think I’ll pass on Hate Plus. Outside the lockout timer thing, which is a terrible design choice, it sounds like Hate Plus was originally intended to be DLC and isn’t as well-designed or written as Analogue.