Developer: Love Conquers All Games
Publisher: Love Conquers All Games
Rrp: £6.99 (Humblebundle) and £7.19 (Steam)
Released: 19th August 2013
Available on: Humblebundle and Steam
Played Using: A mouse
Approximate game length: 5 hours (spread over 3 days)
Hate is such a strange thing, just like love it can be fleeting or something long lasting. Also like love it can also be a great drive for personal growth and change. But also like love it can be incredibly destructive, and not all change is good. It’s safe to say that both emotions hold great potential both good and ill. They’re two halves of a whole and no one is complete without both existing in them, and much of life is all about learning how to manage these emotions.
Hate Plus is a visual novel and is a direct sequel to Analogue: A Hate Story, the plot of the game continues to follow the events of what happened on the generation ship ‘Mugungwa’. Except this sequel is also simultaneously a prequel as all of the events you read about are set three hundred years before the ones you investigated in the last game.
I should state now that even though I won’t be speaking on the subject of these or spoiling in game events that this game has some very uncomfortable and even disturbing themes. Be aware of that before entering into this experience.
At the start of the game you are asked a few questions to determine which AI companion you have and what their attitude toward you is. However if you played and completed the previous game (Analogue: A Hate Story) you can choose to skip all of that and play with your chosen AI companion. It should be noted that in order to get every ending of this game you need to have played and completed Analogue: A Hate Story and gotten all of its endings. Without those save files it’s impossible to access some of the content.
You also won’t get to read everything in a single playthrough. There are just too many files to get through in the allocated three days. Meaning that to get a full understanding you’d need to play each AI companion at least twice right to the end.
It should also be mentioned that the game starts differently depending on which AI companion you choose, one of them has access to an entire set of logs that the other doesn’t that provide a whole slew of backstory.
As you play this game you scroll through text logs, letters, daily updates and council minutes. Within these documents you’ll find that any name you see will be highlighted, clicking one of these will bring up a portrait (if one is available) of who that person is and will allow your AI companion to give a extremely brief overview of who they are based on what you have read.
Your AI companion will also change facial expression and comment on what appears in the documents you read too.
Annoyingly scrolling can only be performed through the scroll wheel or by clicking the up and down buttons on screen, which when you consider that every keyboard I’ve ever seen has [Page Up] and [Page Down] buttons is irksome, I don’t think it would have taken too much effort to make those work within the game.
The game works in real time, so when it says that you play over three days they aren’t kidding. Once you’ve completed that days work the game won’t allow you to access that save file until the appropriate time as passed.
When I first encountered this ‘real time’ mechanic I couldn’t decide how I felt about it. I couldn’t help but think that it was just a cynical way of prolonging
the playtime artificially. However after much thought on it I’ve decided that its actually a fantastic mechanic, by only serving the game to you in small chunks it leaves you with time to digest what you have read fully. I often found myself thinking about the events I had read on and trying to piece together clues as to what really happened.
Final thoughts time! I think this game is great, and I have to applaud the developers for sticking to their guns and using actual real time rather than game time. On the whole I actually think that it’s an improvement on its predecessor.
If this appeals to you perhaps try;
Analogue: A Hate Story
HuniePop
Cinder
