Janine "Iris Ophelia" Hawkins' ongoing review of gaming and virtual world style
I experienced Hate Plus in much the same configuration as my character: With a drink close at hand, squinting into the glow of my monitor, poring over pages and pages of files and records, piecing together a devastating history with the help of my chosen AI companion. I devoured in a single night what's meant to take the investigator/player three real-time days to complete. How could I not? These were answers to questions I'd been holding on to for a long time.
Eventually I had almost all the answers I had ever wanted, and I had the ending I'd earned. I was exhausted and the sun was rising. I tried to sleep, but couldn't. I tossed and turned for a few hours, mind racing, unable to resist peeking at the Joseon dynasty Wikipedia page (I promise that will make sense shortly) on my phone every few minutes. In the end I slipped out of bed and back in front of my screen to play Hate Plus again, this time choosing a different AI companion to see how the game would be different. That's just the kind of game this is; that's just the kind of game Christine Love makes.
Let Me Be Upfront About Something
You spend the vast majority of both Analogue and Hate Plus reading.
You spend the vast majority of both Analogue and Hate Plus reading some of the best pieces of science fiction I've come across in recent years.
The Story So Far
In Hate Plus, the newly released sequel to Christine Love's Analogue: A Hate Story, players return as the humble space investigator who was tasked with recovering the log files of a derelict Korean spaceship called the Mugunghwa-- a ship that left earth about two thousand years earlier and hasn't been heard from since. In Analogue, you uncovered the catastrophic fate of the Mugunghwa and its repressive patriarchal society through decrypting what remained of its data, assisted by the two remaining AI personalities on the ship's computer. It's a profound and beautifully realized story that stuck with me, and it's absolutely vital to play before coming anywhere near the sequel. This is not something you pick up halfway through.
Still, Analogue left one big red flashing question unanswered: How did things get as bad as they were? When the Mugunghwa left Earth things weren't so different from how they are now, so how did a ship full of people with contemporary beliefs and values fall backwards in time into Joseon-era thought and one of the most stifling social climates in history? The events uncovered in Analogue may have been the climax of the Mugunghwa's story, but there was still so much left to tell.
Like Analogue, Hate Plus is not a game of Good versus Evil. It's a game of depth, subtlety, and all the best and worst parts of human nature. "Good" people do bad things, and "bad" people... Well, everyone has their reasons. Given this, the answer to what really happened on the Mugunghwa is just as complicated and unsettling as you would expect.
The Technical Details
Beyond addressing the aforementioned big red flashing question in heartbreaking detail, Hate Plus seems to a have learned a lot of lessons from its predecessor. One of the biggest problems I had in Analogue was keeping the tangled webs of family relations straight in my head, and even though family trees where provided for reference, it was all just so confusing. I guess in some regards it should be-- it was practically a plot point-- but still I was grateful to see Hate Plus' easy (and beautifully illustrated) reference system, which fills in the more you learn about a character.
Hate Plus also eliminates one of the more tedious aspects of playing Analogue, which involved pressing a button to show a log to your AI companion. Given how many log files their were, showing everything you could to every AI was a bit of an ordeal. Now, your companion is always on the left side of the screen, reading and commenting as you go.
The downside of this is that to allow the AI to comment on every
paragraph during particularly interesting files, the logs no longer
scroll a page at a time, but rather line by line. Unfortunately this felt a bit slow and
not terribly smooth at times. Frankly that's the only real complaint I
have about the game, and it's a pretty minor issue in the end.
I'll admit that I also miss the old-school console commands used in Analogue. Love is very good at imitating antiquated OSes and controls-- so much so that a while back when I was playing Digital (one of her earlier games) my dad caught a glimpse over my shoulder and thought I was actually using an Amiga emulator to dial into BBSes. But as much as I miss those strangely tactile technical aspects, it's a change that makes sense. The Mugunghwa is a relic, so of course you'd have to do everything through a junky console system. A Space investigator's ship from 2000 years in the future certainly wouldn't have anything that primitive in place, right?
My Girl Friday... Frid-AI?
If you enter into this series for the powerful sci-fi bubbling just under the surface you might be put off by the vibrant anime girls guiding you through it. They're chatty and playful and the way they dress and act often seems to clash with the setting and the material you're reading. These are sad stories. Nothing ends truly happily in them, but that's precisely why the AI companions *Hyun-ae and *Mute make such a difference. You might even find their fourth-wall-breaking quips and playfulness (very much in Love's voice) jarring, but at the same time they provide just enough focus and levity to keep you afloat. But *Hyun-ae and *Mute are both characters, far more than just comic relief or pieces of the game's interface; they react to every piece of information according to their own personalities and experiences, for better and for worse. They work through their thoughts to help you work through your own.
(As an aside, Love's treatment of AI might be one of my favourite things about her games, and as minor a detail as it is in retrospect one of the highlights of Hate Plus for me was receiving an email from an AI psychologist [both a psychologist specializing in AI and an AI herself] regarding my companion.)
It's absolutely worth playing the game more than once to see each of the different character routes. I hesitate to comment too much on this for fear of spoiling Analogue for anyone, but as much as Analogue is *Hyun-ae's story, Hate Plus is *Mute's. Each character will have wildly different views of what's happening, and even the not-so-secret "harem" route where both AI are present (my route of choice, not because I wanted a harem but because the idea of leaving either behind at the end of Analogue turned my stomach) is quite different from how things transpire separately. That said, you have absolutely not finished with Hate Plus until you've played with *Mute and *Mute alone at your side.
In the end, no matter which AI is accompanying you, they are vital to bringing a little closure. Though there were no happy endings for those on the Mugunghwa, there are a few in store for the AI companions... Some happier than others.
If that wall of text hasn't scared you off yet you're probably the perfect candidate to play and enjoy Hate Plus as much as I did. You can get both Hate Plus and Analogue: A Hate Story on Steam for Mac and Windows.
(Hate Plus was played using a review code provided by the developer.)
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TweetIris Ophelia (@bleatingheart, Janine Hawkins IRL) has been featured in the New York Times and has spoken about SL-based design at the Fashion Institute of Technology in Manhattan and with pop culture/fashion maven Johanna Blakley.
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