Hate Plus, Christine Love's new visual novel, started life as downloadable content for her last big game, Analogue: A Hate Story, and it shows. This game is an epilogue. Not even an epilogue, actually; more of an appendix. And no, I don't mean the little annex on your intestine that doctors are baffled by.
I'm talking about that weird section at the back of an enormous fantasy novel, when the main story's already finished but there are still 100 pieces of paper left to go through and they're all filled with family trees and maps and tangents and maybe a grocery list the author made or whatever.
Sitting in my tin can
Enjoying Hate Plus practically requires you to play it's progenitor. I didn't expect or want Christine Love to recap the first game, but let this serve as a warning: if you haven't played Analogue: A Hate Story, you might as well stop reading this review and go play that first—Analogue is a visual novel that tells a fantastic, heart-rending story.
Done? Good. Analogue [small spoilers ahead] tasked you with uncovering the fate of the derelict spaceship Mugunghwa by interacting with two artificial intelligences, *Hyun-Ae and *Mute, and poring through the ship's stored log files, a collection of short snippets of writing from the Mugunghwa's crew. Reading through dozens of logs like a 25th century archaeologist you piece together the complete story of the ship's downfall and the mysterious Pale Bride, before escaping with one of the two AIs.
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