Analogue: A Hate Story
Platform: Mac, Windows, Linux
There's a ship floating in deep space that's been lost for thousands of years; the Mugunghwa was a generation ship that was supposed to establish the first interstellar colony, but contact was lost and it had disappeared. Until now. You've been sent to board it and find out what happened to it by combing through the logs of its crew, dead these long centuries but still simmering with familial and political drama. Analogue: A Hate Story is a visual novel from indie developer Christine Love that is by turns touching, funny, dark, and introspective. Are some crimes unforgivable? What makes people believe the horrible things they do are done for the right reasons? What does it really mean to be human... and to love someone?
Since you're stuck on your own spaceship, the entire game is presented through a computer interface similar that allows you to talk to either Mute or Hyun-ae, the two AIs still active on the Mugunghwa, read the logs left behind by the crew, or access a terminal to execute more complex commands. The core of the gameplay, however, revolves around the text of the dead crew and discussing it with your two companions. Ultimately, your goal is to find out what happened to everyone on board, but Mute and Hyun-ae won't be satisfied until they feel you've really learned the truth, and that's a lot harder than it sounds since they both seem to have conflicting ideas as to what that is.
You can only have one AI active at a time, but once you've reached a certain point early on you can swap between them freely in the terminal. Show the logs you read to each of them to get insight, more messages, and find out more about them, which is more important than you might think. From time to time, they'll ask you a question, and your response will influence their opinion of you which can direct the game towards any one of five different endings. Just remember that you can right-click the screen to open the options menu and save or load your game at any time.
Analysis: Christine Love is a fantastic writer. The world revealed bit by bit is both fascinating and troubling, and is practically begging for some sort of sequel if only to expand a little more on the universe. There's so much left unexplained that people more interested in science fiction than character development might wind up frustrated, but I would call the story more tantalising than annoying in that regard. It's something you really want to know more about, but it isn't the star of the show; that would be the characters, and not just our two leading ladies. Mute and Hyun-ae are drastically different personalities with more layers to them than you might think based on first impressions. Talking to them and seeing them open up bit by bit in ways that even seem to surprise themselves is extremely rewarding.
Make no mistake, however; this is most definitely plot-focused rather than gameplay-focused. Most of the gameplay focuses simply on reading, showing every bit of text to Hyun-ae and Mute, and occasionally answering a question... with the exception of one clever puzzle-like timed sequence towards the end of the game. Whether this is a bad thing depends entirely on you. Your responses to Mute and Hyun-ae are extremely limited in a way that may frustrate those of us who are less "black and white" and more "shades of gray". Is it understandable given the way the game is structured and Hyun-ae's explanation for the choices at the beginning? Sure, but as the game wore on, the less I felt I could easily answer the questions poised as a simple "yes" or "no", and there were a few times when I felt I had to compromise my true feelings just to proceed.
But perhaps more importantly, I did feel. Analogue's complex narrative and varied cast of nuanced characters, even those you don't get to meet, is almost scarily good at pulling your emotions in unexpected directions. That the story makes you feel that strongly about the things you read about, from the people to the things they did, is more than a little impressive. The careful pacing won't appeal to everyone, but those who appreciate cleverly structured character dramas will get a lot out of it. The gorgeous artwork by Raide breathes life into Mute and Hyun-ae, while Isaac Schankler's soundtrack is unobtrusively beautiful and expressive.
My first playthrough took me somewhere around five hours or so, and while the endings feel a little abrupt, I don't regret a second of it. At times it was uncomfortable, grim, and more than a little saddening, but Analogue: A Hate Story was always, always heartfelt and smart with a light at the end of the tunnel. (Depending on your choices of course.) While it might be light on action, those looking for a deeper and at times darker narrative with a big focus on character development will want to give this one a chance to get inside their brain.
Windows:
Download the demo
Get the full version
Mac OS X:
Download the demo
Get the full version
Linux:
Download the demo
Get the full version
Walkthrough Guide
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Analogue: A Hate Story walkthrough
Alright boys and girls, there should be little to no trouble in playing this game right to the end. But I'm going to give you a guide on how to beat a very particular part of the game, specifically the "clever puzzle-like timed sequence towards the end of the game" as stated in the review.
Also, how to obtain all the endings.
How to beat the timed sequence:
The timed sequence is of course, the reactor meltdown. This event is triggered is by reading *Mute's questions to *Hyun-ae. Once the sequence starts proper, you are locked in with whatever AI that is active at the time. You cannot switch out for another AI for the rest of the game. That means, if you happened to have *Hyun-ae active at the start of the meltdown, you can never talk to *Mute ever again for the remainder of the game.
You are given pre-emptive warning about this by some static across the screen. There will be enough time to switch to whichever AI you want prior to the beginning of the sequence, provided you're good at typing and you don't faff about. And of course, whichever AI you do this sequence with will obviously make an impact on the ending you get.
You're given 20 minutes to do pretty much everything I'm hiding below. The sequence is divided into two parts, and as you play, you will know the divider. Will lump everything together, so read everything before you load up that save.
Disabling the reactor:
The "help" command really does help here.
In order to disable the reactor, you have to ensure that the ship has sufficient power to function without it. By using the "pss" command, you will be able to turn on the ship's backup power supply system...
...but the primary battery of the power supply system is running low at 0.1%. So, you then switch over to the secondary battery, which is doing just fine at 20%.
Still, that doesn't solve the problem that there are too many useless things on the ship that is sucking up all the power. You can check this using the "power_control" command. The ship is running at 99% power and you will need to drop it to below 20% in order to disable the reactor.
So, use "power_control list" to see all the stuff that uses power on the ship. Then, basically disable everything except the main_computer, communications and the core that your current AI is stored in. Yes, that means turning off the core with the other AI. Once that is done, you can safely disable the reactor.
Commands needed to perform this are below.
Commands:
1. pss enable
2. pss switch_battery
3. power_control disable core1 (or core2)
4. power_control disable bulkheads core3 core4 core5 core6 docking
5. power_control disable gravity rail sensors waste
6. reactor disable
The SECOND PART:
Now that you have successfully disabled the reactor, talking to your AI will reveal another problem, the core temperature is still too high and will result in massive damage. The timer does not reset at all for this part. You are not given any clue on how to lower the temperature at the start, you are meant to somehow figure it out.
If you're taking too long to figure it out, the AI will reveal the answer after some time, so really, there's no hurry.
If you're the impatient type, what you need to do is
use air from the ship's life support system to vent excess heat into outer space.
To do that, the commands are:
1. power_control enable bulkheads
2. power_control enable life_support
3. power_control disable bulkheads
Endings:
Ending 1:
Talk to *Hyun-ae. A lot. Agree with everything she says. Just be nice to her and be angry at the same people she's angry at. Then, when she inevitably confesses to you, reject her. Harsh.
Ending 2:
Talk to *Hyun-ae. A lot. Agree with everything she says. Just be nice to her and be angry at the same people she's angry at. Then, when she inevitably confesses to you, reciprocate her feelings. And agree with her taking things a little slow.
Ending 3:
The easiest one to get. At any point after you obtain admin access to the ship, type "download" on the override terminal.
Ending 4:
Go through the reactor meltdown with *Mute. And then choose to take her back with you when the time comes.
Ending 5:
Pretty tough. First, do the same thing as Ending 4. Go through the reactor meltdown with *Mute, then continue down her path. Close to the end, she will ask you whether you've shown her everything. Tell her there's one more thing left.
Now, the tricksy part. If you've gone through Endings 1 and 2, you'll know about that last diary entry of the Pale Bride. You know the one. Yes, that one. What you want to do is show it to *Mute. Ordinarily, you can't, because you need to go down the entirety of *Hyun-ae's path to access that entry and now, she's locked out.
This is where you learn how to cheat:
Notice that you're able to search logs by ID. This allows to search for every log in the game, including those that you couldn't unlock.
So, with this in mind, use the ID for that diary entry to unlock it:
7-EUX25
Then, show the log to *Mute. Yay!
Posted by: lunaticwraith
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February 13, 2012 2:41 PM