Analogue: A Great Story

[Gormongous]

So I just replayed Christine Love's Analogue: A Hate Story in anticipation of starting on Hate Plus, the sequel that just came out, and found myself really wanting to have some Thumbs discussion about both games and any of Love's oeuvre, for that matter.

 

Honestly, I think this is one of the most affecting games I've played in years. People complain about the visual novel format and manga art style, but both of those fit really well with the game's concept as the recovery of written logs from a deserted Korean colony ship. What's more, playing it a third time after about a year, I found that Love did a great job building the opposing dualities of male and female, speech and silence, power and submission into the different threads of the story, even the minor ones that I previously thought were only meant as incidental set-dressing. Two moments especially,

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Eun-mi's miscarriage and the Pale Bride's mutilation,

were just as vivid and disturbing as I remember.

 

And now I'm playing Hate Plus and it's great! The interface is much better and there's a nice graphical presentation that, while not as stark a statement as the previous game's women-free family trees, is still interesting to look at. Not to mention the game is time-locked and you have to wait twelve real-life hours between in-game days. The achievement for completing the first day makes a Majora's Mask reference, was that how that Zelda game was?

 

Anyway, I love Christine Love's games because, not only are they different and well-made, but I can give one to people who are interested in media (but not games) and count on them to get something out of it. What does everyone else think?

[TychoCelchuuu]

How exactly does the manga style fit into the concept of the recovery of written logs from a deserted Korean colony ship? I didn't mind the manga at all but if I hadn't known of Christine Love prior to this I would've thought it was a dating sim or something. I'm looking forward to playing Hate Plus at some point but like you I'll want to replay Analogue at least once, maybe more since I think your ending carries over.

Analogue is a great game for a lot of the same reasons Gone Home is great - investigative narratives where you piece together a story are fun because they give your brain a workout. They're like convoluted movie plots except they only move as fast as you play, which is nice for making sure you don't get lost (although I can't remember a time when a movie lost me) - that's a feature they share with books - and also they involve you directly in the investigation because you are doing the uncovering, which is a really gratifying sensation that you couldn't really recreate if Analogue were a book or something.

My complete inability to remember names did cause me to have to start writing down the family trees on a piece of paper though. If Hate Plus has a better interface, that's good - I wanted access to all that stuff at my fingertips, easily, without being trapped in conversation menus or having to click 8 times.

[Gormongous]

  On 8/22/2013 at 10:02 PM, TychoCelchuuu said:

My complete inability to remember names did cause me to have to start writing down the family trees on a piece of paper though. If Hate Plus has a better interface, that's good - I wanted access to all that stuff at my fingertips, easily, without being trapped in conversation menus or having to click 8 times.

 

Hate Plus has clickable names, which bring up portraits and short bios that are filled in automatically as you discover more about the person from their logs. I really like it and (horribly) found myself wishing for an Analogue HD or something. Apparently there are three paths, based on whether you went with *Hyun-ae, *Mute, or (not so much) spoilers, both. I don't have my saves for any of them, but once you've played through the game once, you can (again, horribly) speed-run it pretty easily.

 

And as for the manga style fitting, I was annoyed at first too, but realized playing it again just yesterday that a ship AI on a Korean or Japanese ship probably would depict itself in the pop-art style of those countries, rather than in a Western pop-art style. But no worries, the aforementioned character portraits for Hate Plus look like rotoscoped photos.

 

 

EDIT: Also, I should have mentioned in my first post that Analogue is one of those games that comes with a bibliography. I didn't read most of the literature recommended, but I found Deuchler's The Confucian Transformation of Korea a really serious scholarly read, to my pleasant surprise.

[Twig]

I've been sort of eyeing the game from afar for a while now. Maybe I'll give it a shot, now.

[juv3nal]

I'm wondering about that save file stuff. I couldn't figure out how to get hate plus to detect my saves (and I never did the harem end for analogue),  so I do wonder what I'm missing. Having said that, I have to sheepishly admit I have temporarily dropped Hate Plus (and all other gaming) when I picked up that immersive glowy thing chasing sim, Saints Row IV.

 

What I've seen of Hate Plus (about 2 days in):

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it seems less harrowing on first glance than Analogue, but maybe that's because it deals with stuff before the weird reversion to hyperoppressive patriarchy. To be sure, the roots of that inequity are visible in that society, but it's not as gross/overt...yet, at least. Also, one has to imagine your experience may vary greatly depending on the order you pick to extract memory blocks.

[Gormongous]

  On 8/22/2013 at 10:55 PM, juv3nal said:

I'm wondering about that save file stuff. I couldn't figure out how to get hate plus to detect my saves (and I never did the harem end for analogue),  so I do wonder what I'm missing.

 

As far as I can tell from trying to clean out all the failed endings I got from getting the achievements, it just reads any *.save files prefixed with "finished-XXXXX". They're only generated if you get through the credits to the main menu, whether by skipping them or just watching. If you quit out straight from the credits, I don't think the save is made, nor if you played the very first release version before Love decided to make a direct sequel.

 

On the bright side, using Ctrl to "auto skip" dialogue, you can get through all the messages and every crit-path decision in just over five minutes, by my reckoning. Like I said above, it's almost grotesque to do so for such an introspective and somber game, but the Mass Effect series has taught me that a save-generating "questionnaire" is always inferior to importing an actual save, so what else is there to do? I mean, I've got "unmarried male from Earth" saves for all three branches, which I'd be happy to mail or upload if anyone wants their time saved. The completion percentage is crap on all but the *Hyun-ae one, though.

[Roderick]

I love a good visual novel, it's a great genre for delving into inner thought, more so than a lot of other games (even narrative ones). Will eventually get to the Love/Hate games!

[eot]

How does it compare to Don't Take It Personally Babe? I was mostly enjoying that game until the moment where you find out what's actually going on, at which point it just fell apart. I've been semi-curious about her other stuff but not enough to actually check it out.

[TheLastBaron]

I really liked Digital, and didn't care much for Don't Take it Personally. As with the above post, how does this compare.

[TychoCelchuuu]

I played the first Analogue and Digital (but have yet to play Don't Take it Personally or the newest Analogue) and I enjoyed both more or less equally. Digital is shorter and has BBS nostalgia and the narrative conceit of only reading one side of the conversation is pretty interesting, but Analogue has more to do and has a fun investigative aspect rather than the more linear experience of Digital.

[Gormongous]

  On 8/24/2013 at 9:20 AM, eot said:

How does it compare to Don't Take It Personally Babe? I was mostly enjoying that game until the moment where you find out what's actually going on, at which point it just fell apart. I've been semi-curious about her other stuff but not enough to actually check it out.

  On 8/26/2013 at 1:07 AM, TheLastBaron said:

I really liked Digital, and didn't care much for Don't Take it Personally. As with the above post, how does this compare.

 

I actually have a soft spot for don't take it personally, babe, it just ain't your story, just because I played it right when I started teaching college-age students and a lot of the incidental stuff felt spot-on.

 

That said, I think both Digital: A Love Story and Analogue: A Hate Story are better. Like Tycho said, the narrative and setting conceits of Digital are great, but Analogue is a genuinely interesting story outside of those trappings, plus it's about as nonlinear as a visual novel with a coherent story is going to get, as opposed to DTIPB's rather obvious railroading. In fact, I think a lot of what makes Analogue great (even greater than Digital, in my humble opinion) comes from Love's extended postmortem process with DTIPB. There are drastically different routes, each with their own interesting and sympathetic characters, and the revelations at the end of both are built into the storytelling throughout in order to maximize their impact. Also, Love has matured substantially as a writer over the past few years. Hate Plus is almost shockingly good in terms of composition and tone, at certain points.

 

So yeah, I think it's fairly simple. If you like Digital, you'll like Analogue; if you like Analogue, you'll like Hate Plus. I just finished my first run of Hate Plus tonight, so once I finish my class prep over the next few days, I'll post some thoughts. There's some especially transgressive stuff that I'd like to get a second opinion on.

[juv3nal]

zomg cake shenanigans

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got called out repeatedly when trying to just click my way through when Hyun Ae tells me to bake a cake

[Gormongous]

Okay, I played all three routes. It was a pretty intense experience, actually. I'll spoiler my thoughts.

 

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First, the story. I agree with juv3nal that it's not harrowing like Analogue, which was a thick vertical slice of stories from a brutal and corrupt society. Hate Plus takes the long view and plays out over years, the length of which are reinforced by the enforced breaks in play that I'll talk about later. In the end, the story of *Mute's death is not as shocking as the Pale Bride's, but I think I like them both equally? Partially from the interface and partially from the writing, there seemed to be more characters in this story with more to do. The different memory blocks reveal new perspectives on the same events in a way that Love only really dabbled with in the "lesbian lovers" arc of Analogue. There seemed to be more sense of doom but less of despair as a result. The codas with Ae-jeong and Seung-bok, where subversive relationships survive the otherwise cataclysmic takeover, are the best example of that.

 

But more than the story, I liked all the transgressive stuff in this game. I'd been talking about it with a friend, who agreed that a lot of design choices in other games that thwart the player, call attention to the game as a game, or just go beyond the game itself are usually presented as a "fuck you" to the player. You know, "it's just a game, stop being such a nerd, etc." I really liked that all the choices here – the twelve-hour breaks between play sessions, *Hyun-ae's demand that you make her a cake, her warning not to treat this like a game if you try and lie, the fake achievement for *Mute's route with the Final Fantasy 7 reference – all encouraged the player to engage more and not less. I actually planned to knock out Day Two with *Hyun-ae right before my department's beginning-of-the-year barbeque, but then was goaded into going to the grocery store, getting cake ingredients, and baking a quite frankly gross microwave cake, just so that I could say I did. Then I emailed it to Love and she sent me back a short but polite thank-you with the achievement code. I've never really had that experience with a game or its developer before. I liked it a lot, even if my baking skills are so bad that I ended up with a cocoa brick I couldn't really eat.

 

What else? There was good humor. The dig at people who put their place of origin in Analogue as somewhere other than Earth was funny. The multiple digs at Mass Effect-style dialogue wheels were funny. The several "forced" choices where all the options were the same was funny.

 

The internet seems to be mostly against Oh Eun-a as a good (read, tragic) antagonist, but she works for me. The way she's introduced in the final act of the *Hyun-ae and Harem paths as the missing link between all these awful developments is great, especially since the player learns at the same time that she was a self-hating lesbian who retreated into a fantasy world built out of the traditional values she studied in order to excuse why she was so unhappy, even though what this really did was remove from her only source of true happiness, her "little sister" Pyeon Mi-seun, and make her prisoner once her fantasy world had been made real with the help of Ryu-turned-Taejo. It makes sense to me, but then again I know too many university professors who think that the world would be better if it were more like whatever period they studied, so...

 

Hmm, this is a lot more scattered than I intended. Maybe I'll give it an editing pass after a bit of thinking.

[Dewar]

I ran across Hate Plus at PAX in the Indie Megabooth and I just had to buy it. I got the two pack for $15 dollars and now I'm not really sure what I got myself into. I'm thinking I might just play Hate Plus and then maybe go back to play Analogue if it grabs me.

 

  On 8/29/2013 at 4:01 AM, juv3nal said:

zomg cake shenanigans

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got called out repeatedly when trying to just click my way through when Hyun Ae tells me to bake a cake

 

Somebody actually came by with a slice of cake for the creator while we were looking at the game.

[Gormongous]

  On 9/3/2013 at 2:17 AM, Dewar said:

I ran across Hate Plus at PAX in the Indie Megabooth and I just had to buy it. I got the two pack for $15 dollars and now I'm not really sure what I got myself into. I'm thinking I might just play Hate Plus and then maybe go back to play Analogue if it grabs me.

 

I don't know if I'd recommend that. All the twists of Analogue are repeatedly and openly spoiled by Hate Plus, not to mention that the main plot assumes your knowledge of the previous game when explaining events.

[juv3nal]

  On 9/3/2013 at 3:18 AM, Gormongous said:

I don't know if I'd recommend that. All the twists of Analogue are repeatedly and openly spoiled by Hate Plus, not to mention that the main plot assumes your knowledge of the previous game when explaining events.

 

Have to ditto this. Play Analogue first.

[Dewar]

Hmm, ok, but everyone talks about the interface for the first game being horrible, and the developer told me that the games don't really rely on surprises.

[Gormongous]

  On 9/3/2013 at 4:59 PM, Dewar said:

Hmm, ok, but everyone talks about the interface for the first game being horrible, and the developer told me that the games don't really rely on surprises.

 

The interface isn't horrible, just a bit clumsy, and you can totally get around it by just writing down the Kim and Smith family trees on a piece of paper.

 

As for "not relying on surprises," maybe so. You can also watch Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers without watching Fellowship of the Ring first and enjoy yourself, but that doesn't mean it's the best experience of the narrative that ties both together. 

[Dewar]

Hmm, I just finished Analogue and I didn't have any problems with the interface at all. Maybe they updated it for the steam release or something, but there were built-in family trees to check whenever I got confused. I ended up having to check an FAQ to figure out how to get the Mute endings, but after I did both sides I ended up with 92% completion. I used the direct codes to see the last 8% and I didn't miss anything of great import, so I'm pretty happy with that.

 

I think I need a break before I tackle Hate Plus though.

[Dewar]

Hmm, I'm not sure how I feel about the forced breaks in Hate Plus. It's already pretty hard to keep all of these names in mind when you're going through in one shot. Maybe I just picked the wrong articles or something, but I'm not near as impressed with Hate Plus as I was with Analogue at this juncture. I guess we'll see how it goes.

[juv3nal]

As far as I know there's nothing stopping you from having multiple playthroughs of Hate Plus on the go simultaneously if the enforced downtime is bothering you.

[mikemariano]

The Gaming Intelligence Agency is back and they have declared this week Love Week.  I guess there are articles going up all week about all of Love's games?

[Dewar]

The irony of being uncomfortable lying about cooking a cake to a character in a video game is not lost on me. I keep telling myself that I just want to try out a new recipe, but I know it's because I'm weak. What's a little jarring to me is the fact that I've lied to this game several times because there was no way to really progress without doing it, but a cake is what it decided to call me on? It's wierd how they break the 4th wall here, but then they don't mention a thing about how I told the game that I'm married, but I'm still flirting with a digital person.

 

I dunno what I'm trying to say really, but I've been unwilling to move on past the cake part until I figure it out. Maybe I'll load up my other Analogue endings and see how they play to this point. At least I've been less dishonest in those.

[Dewar]

Just finished Hate Plus. I liked it, but I still think I liked Analogue more.

 

Edit: Oh, I got the cake achievement

[Gormongous]

  On 9/17/2013 at 2:07 AM, Dewar said:

Oh, I got the cake achievement

 

That makes two of us!

 

Also, I think I like Analogue more too, but the way that Hate Plus forces you into a slow burn really got to me.