Main game
3.60 average rating based on 139 ratings
This is a game with a lot of reading required. Its structure requires a lot of piecing stuff together and the Korean names made it difficult for me to to remember who's who among the excerpts.
Mechanically it's quite limited, and while I like the transition between "AI interface" and command-line (CLI), both are pretty restrictive and the latter is missing a lot of convenience stuff found in modern CLIs.
While the story's main emotional point is well-made, and the mid-game emergency refreshing, I found the overall structure highly restrictive and the automatic save points to be detrimental to trying different things, since you never know what's going to be important. I saw one ending (which lacked a bit of oopmh in the finale) but had to go to Youtube to see the others as the save system meant I'd have to restart the game to try getting to them.
While Digital: a Love Story is the better game, I did learn completely new things about ancient Korean culture, though!
It's a very short venture, but Analogue: A Hate Story is a pretty good dive into cultural abuse and societal issues around patriarchy. In those ways it's excellent in terms of brutally describing the situation where a fish-out-of-water is thrown into a disgusting cage that ebbs away her freedom. It also juggles a couple themes regarding hate and understanding each other, although not nearly as fleshed out. Which is really my only endemic issue, it's a bit too simple. Both characters have motivations and opinions on the subject but neither is really fleshed out personality wise, it's very safe.
Even still, I do recommend Analogue: A Hate Story as a nice quick read. (7/10)
Man, I played this thing for hours straight when I first got it... and then I took a break. A two year long break. And this is one of those games that is so story-rich.... I'm gonna have to start over if I wanna play again, because I have no idea where I was or what was happening. *Weeps*