This game relies heavily on you playing through Analogue: A Hate Story first, as I did. And like me, I imagine many people came to this game,This game relies heavily on you playing through Analogue: A Hate Story first, as I did. And like me, I imagine many people came to this game, still stunned over the last game's conclusion, and wanting to find out more about the disaster that led to the complete regression of the Mugunghwa's culture and knowledge.
Unfortunately, that "Omigosh, what happened?" impulse is largely left unsatisfied by weak gameplay, design flaws, and a message that continually breaks the immersion of the game so the creator can beat you over the head with it. Did you know that it's bad to take away women's freedoms and treat them like objects? Oh, but don't forget to bake a cake for your virtual waifu. (Because virtual AI women are, at the end of the day, so desperate for their first contact and conversation in over 600 years that they'll fall in love with you right away. Because ultimately, the gamers must have their waifu option over any natural development for a (technically sixteen year old) character.)
The game ultimately can't decide what it wants its message to be, and muddies the original story with its inability to decide. But let's look at the other aspects of the game:
GAMEPLAY: Overall, annoying. There are some very basic mechanics that make it immersion-breaking to play. First, there's no "reveal" system for logs - you can literally go into Mute's data, pick any six files, and read them, which means it's very easy to proceed in an almost completely chronological order. This kills a lot of the interest the first game held, because you had to read *everything* and show it to the AI to continue unlocking puzzle pieces of the story. Secondly, the AI (or AIs on the Harem route) comment on things as you scroll down through the document, meaning you have to continually glance away from what you're reading to see if anything important is being said. If you scroll too far, the comments go away, and you can't get them back for subsequent re-reads - the meaningful commentary hopefully wasn't too important! This function would have worked better if the player read the whole file, uninterrupted, then asked the AI for input at the end, rather than having the AI standing to one side, twitching with minor animations throughout. Thirdly, the game design chooses to have the message scrolling hiccup EVERY THREE LINES of text, presumably to show how the ship is running on low power. Rather than being immersive, this just absolutely kills the gameplay, because faster readers will constantly be battling the mouse wheel.
Finally, the game actually crashed to the desktop. Checking Steam forums shows two threads of people with similar issues, one of which apparently got fixed in 2013, the other of which seems to have gone unfixed. The Harem route can and will crash... and you'll have to scroll through those logs all over again.
Music: Not as compelling as the first game. Not bad, but there's an art to doing basic background music that won't grate on the ear after thirty minutes of listening. Analogue pulls this off beautifully, Hate Plus starts to wear on me after awhile.
Achievements: I'm actually not going to complain that there's one achievement that is literally impossible to achieve (though OCD gamers may find that 99% haunting them), because I don't mind the occasional clever bit of trollery from a creator. However, if you're going to make an achievement that requires the creator of the game to regularly check her email and send people unlock codes, you had better be prepared to do this for all eternity. Last I checked, no one's gotten the cake achievement in 3 three years (according to Steam), short of brute-forcing the game to unlock it. And this is after people spent time and money baking or buying a cake, photographing it, and emailing it to Love, the game's creator.
It's not particularly a well thought-out gameplay choice, and a poor way to treat fans who've shelled out money. Especially after the AI lectures you about not being some easily-won-over ero waifu. (...who manages to fall in love with you after only speaking with you for six hours in the previous game.) Nothing is ever addressed concerning how on earth you could buy OR bake a cake in the middle of space, on a power-drained ship, but hey, it's cool. The creator just wanted to lecture you and give you a moe waifu moment in the midst of this feminist message. Nothing story-relevant to see here.
STORY-TELLING: ...eh. It's not terrible, but there's nothing to root for, either. The narrator essentially pits feudal Korea against modern Korea, with only the worst of both eras on display, and the end result is the reader has nothing to root for. I can't be happy about the whole feudalistic culture taking over, obviously, but the corrupt, indifferent, anti-democratic mess that came before was nothing to cheer about.
The characters I found myself cheering for previously were reduced to cheap moe fanbait in this game, at the expensive of development and story. A shame.… Expand
