Around a year after the fascinating, sinister but divisive saga of schooling, sex, duplicity and privacy infringement that was Don’t Take It Personally Babe, It Just Ain’t Your Story, Christine Love is to release a fully-fledged sequel to her breakthrough game Digital: A Love Story. It’s called Analogue: A Hate Story but despite the inverted title aesthetically it has more in common with Don’t Take It Personally. It’s a semi-non-linear visual novel concerning mystery, transhumanism, traditional marriage, loneliness, and cosplay. Both building on and diverging from the Chan-fuelled ideas that informed her earlier work, then, plus, from its description, there’s a vague air of System Shock to it…



Here’s the back-of-the-box summary:

Back in the 25th century, Earth launched a generation ship into deep space, with the goal of establishing the first interstellar colony. It dropped out of contact and disappeared, never reaching its destination. Thousands of years later, it has finally been found. Uncover the mystery of what happened to the final generation aboard the generation ship Mugunghwa by reading through its dead crew’s logs, with the help of a spunky AI sidekick!

Spunky? Okay then. We’re also promised two “pursuable” characters and five endings. Does pursuable mean you’re trying to catch them or bed them? Or, er, both?

The ‘Analogue’ in the title is curious, given the sci-fi setting and the use of a clean, white, Applicious UI here. Will all be explained in the game, or is it just a knowing nod to a changed age?

It’s due later this month, it’ll cost $15, there’ll be a demo and there’ll be no DRM (something Christine’s been publicly chewing over on her Twitter feed; it’s a relief to see she ultimately fell on the side of the angels). More screenshots await you on this thoroughly digital website.