Ah, Christine Love. Love (heh) or hate her, you must admit that the free offerings she has cast into the ocean that is the internet have been at the very least considerable. What we're more concerned about here, however, is her first foray into the world of games that actually cost money. Costing fifteen United States Dollars, Analogue: A Hate Story is a sorta short but sweet experience that, while a bit pricey, is definitively worth your time and money.
This type of screen will compose the majority of your play time with Analogue. It is a point and click...well, Visual Novel would be the best genre to chuck this under. It's a 'game' that's all about telling a story. And one hell of a story it does tell. But we'll get back to that later.
Sound
Sound is one of the largest perks of a VN. Being able to add musical keys to the experience is part of what sets them apart from their paper-bound kin. Analogue makes good use of this, with a superb techno(?) soundtrack which will appeal to the ears. Incidentally, if you have subwoofer enabled speakers/headphones, the OST makes excellent use of bass. There are shortcomings, such as the fact that one of the songs plays a few too many times to be enjoyable, and the sound cues will occasionally bug out, but I guarantee you the thought of pressing the mute button will never cross your mind.
Story
The story of the game is that you are a unnamed, un-gender-disclosed profiteer sent into deep space to investigate the generation ship "Mugunghwa", which was sent to colonize space, yet mysteriously vanished. It recently popped back up on the radar, and it's your job to figure out what the hell happened.
And oh jeez did hell happen. As you'll quickly learn, the last years of the 'colony' ship were utter hell. I won't spoil what happens, but by the end I guarantee that you will keep reading out of desire to know more. In order to learn more, with the help of a AI named *Hyun-ae (The * is silent) you will be pulling up the logs of the ship's crew from "blocks" of data. You can learn more by showing a log to *Hyun-ae, who will comment on it and possibly add more logs.
Fair warning, this is definitely a mature story. As in, it doesn't pull any punches for the sake of seeming moderate.
Graphics
Not really much to note here. As per the norm with visual novels, the only graphics are the text on your GUI, any character currently speaking to you, and the background -which is rather sparse-. The sprites are very nice looking, but they will get a little stale by the game's end. However, thankfully, there are enough sprites to show every emotion that needs to be conveyed.
It might seem disappointing, but once again, this is a visual novel. The images the words will paint in your mind make up for the lack of imagery onscreen.
Conclusion
So, ultimately, the question is, is Analogue: A Hate Story worth your hard-earned american (or equivalent) dollars? The answer is, maybe. If you're a trigger-happy shooter fan who craves action, this probably isn't for you. But if you want to read a story, and have the ability to piece together facts in your head, then Analogue will probably be worth it. It certainly was for me.
