Analogue: A Hate Story

Published on: 2012-09-17

I don’t want to talk a lot about Analogue: A Hate Story. Mostly because of how I perceived my being completely oblivious to what the game was really about improved the experience of playing it.

So instead of treading cautiously in quasi spoiler territory, I will limit myself to recommend that you play it. Go with an open mind and don’t expect much in terms of game play. It’s a Visual Novel, and one quite deserving of the title “novel”. Don’t be fooled by the cheery anime look of the characters, the underlying subject treated is serious and it has historical backing — i.e. it’s based on what was once real, not completely made up —, which makes it more impacting as you put the pieces together.

In a related note, the game is developed using Renpy, a visual novel engine written in Python. It’s not because I’m a Python fan and I’m not even that much into Visual Novels, but I love Renpy and how accessible it makes for anyone to create this particular kind of game.

Since I’ve seen Renpy I had this feeling that something really impressive could be done in the form of a Visual Novel. Analogue, to me, is a proof of this.