Analogue: A Hate Story impressed me with it’s depth but at the same time that was almost it’s undoing. The two main things you will be doing is interacting with one of the ship’s AI and going through records and diary entries of various people trying to piece together what happened onboard. The AI were both great to deal with and my favourite part of the game was chatting with them. The logs and other entries had incredible depth and even included detailed family trees. They were very dry however and by the end I was just skimming them for important bits instead of reading every word like I started out doing. In visual novels I prefer to move the story forward and to be interacting with people through dialogue so this part of the game was a slog for me even though i can appreciate the effort put in by the developers. It’s not like I don’t enjoy similar concepts. For instance I enjoyed Her, Daemon 9, Jessika and others which all included going over logs as part of the main game mechanic but at the same time these were video logs rather than written. There was one more area of the game I didn’t like and that was a timed mission. The game gives you what I felt was a good length to complete your tasks but still I have never, and will never, enjoy timed missions. I also didn’t enjoy using the terminal. My main issue with it is the lack of realism. One thing I like about using the terminal every day in real life is that I mainly use the same commands and can use the up arrow to simply cycle through past commands but the in game terminal lacks this feature and I have to type the commands in full every time I have to use them which made it more of a chore.
I played Analogue on Linux. It never crashed and I didn’t notice any spelling errors. There were however other issues. The game would not work properly with more than one monitor. If I chose full-screen mode the game would try to stretch across both of my two monitors. I had to run the game in windowed mode to be able to see everything properly. I suspect if the developer upgraded to a newer version of the Ren’Py engine this may have been solved. You can manually save whenever you want and there are sixteen save slots.
Game Engine: Ren’Py 6.13.11.1715
Graphics API: OpenGL
Disk Space Used: 132MB
CPU Usage: 3-8 %
RAM Usage: 3.5-3.9 GB
It may sound like I hated the game but that actually isn’t true. I really enjoyed the story and the AI characters. So much so that I was willing to put up with the things I didn’t like to push on. It’s tough to say I recommend the game because that is borderline but when it’s good it’s really good. I finished the game this play through in two hours and thirty six minutes. My first play through lasted three hours and fifty four minutes. The current normal price for the game of $12.99 CAD isn’t bad although an even $10 would be better.
My System:
Intel i5-12600K | 16GB DDR4-3000 CL15 | Intel UHD 770 | Mesa 23.0.4 | Western Digital Black SN850 500GB | Trisquel 11 | Mate 1.26.0 | Kernel 6.7.9-gnu