Analogue: A Hate Story

=== Setting and characters ===
Set several thousand years in the future, Analogue revolves around the Mugunghwa (Korean: 무궁화), a generation ship that lost contact with Earth some 600 years prior to the events of the game. For reasons initially unclear, society aboard the ship had degraded from that of modern, 21st Century South Korea, to the intensely patriarchal culture of the medieval Joseon Dynasty. In the process, the ship's clocks were reset to year 1, and the colonists began using Hanja characters to read and write. The reasons for why such a cultural shift has occurred is lost to time, leaving the player to formulate the cause on their own. Over the three centuries after the shift, the ship's birth rates began to gradually decline, to below the "replacement rate" of noble families. By year 322, the ship inexplicably went dark, falling into a state of severe disrepair.
In Analogue's present, 622 years later, the Mugunghwa is discovered in orbit above Antares B, a star system en route to its destination. A friend of the protagonist's, a dispatch officer, is the one who discovers the ship on their radar; this catches the attention of the Saeju Colony Historical Society (which suggests that humans have established planetary colonies beyond Earth), who sponsors the recovery of any remaining text logs that can explain the ship's disappearance. The dispatch officer gives the unnamed silent protagonist, an independent investigator, this "job" in the introduction message for its isolation from social situations; this implies that the protagonist is somewhat asocial, but beyond this their personality and background is based almost entirely upon the player's decisions. The protagonist encounters two AI cores within the ship's computer. The first, *Hyun-ae (Korean: 현애; RR: Hyeon-ae), is a bright, cheerful girl who loves cosplay, and is highly curious about the player and the future they come from. The other, *Mute, is the ship's security AI and self-proclaimed "social creature", who outranked all but Emperor Ryu, her master and Captain of the ship. The AIs dislike one another intensely, apparently due to the event that led to the ship's demise. The logs the player must recover are written by members of the Imperial Ryu family, the noble Kim and Smith families, and those linked to them. The game relies heavily on this unreliable narrator mechanic, where the AI characters and log entries thematically withhold key information from the player in order to add to the importance of certain elements of the plot (e.g. the administrator password to the ship's computer).



Story

In Analogue's introductory cutscene, the protagonist receives a message from a colleague, who tasks them with accessing the text logs aboard the Mugunghwa, and download as many as possible, as sponsored by the Saeju Colony Historical Society. After enabling the system AI using a Linux-style terminal, *Hyun-ae greets the player, pleasantly shocked to find an external connection. She expresses her gratitude to the player for contacting the ship "after so many years", and promises that she will do her utmost to help access the logs.
As the player reads the logs, *Hyun-ae provides commentary on the letters and diaries of the late inhabitants of the Mugunghwa. A key series of logs discovered with *Hyun-ae is the diary of the Pale Bride, a sick girl on the ship who was placed in stasis so her compromised immune system could be cured by future medical technology not available during her lifetime. The Pale Bride was brought out of stasis many years later by the descendants of her immediate family, the Kim family, in order to serve as a fertile young bride to Emperor Ryu In-ho, captain of the Mugunghwa. She found herself in a culturally reverted, deeply misogynistic society, writing that "[e]veryone's so uneducated and stupid". The Pale Bride, accustomed to the more liberal society of her own time, has difficulty assimilating with this reverted culture, and often describes youthful rebellions in her diary entries.
After giving the player a key entry from the Pale Bride's diary, *Hyun-ae reveals that she is the AI form of the Pale Bride, and asks the player to decrypt a block of restricted data by entering the override terminal in super-user mode (accessible only by entering a certain password). While attempting to do so, the player encounters a corrupted AI core and is forced to restore it to proceed. This activates *Mute, who reveals that *Hyun-ae may be linked to the ship's demise by referring to her as "that murderous bitch". As only one of the AIs can be active at a time (determined by keying in Linux-like terminal commands), the path through the story and the revelations contained within the many logs and messages branch based on decisions made by the player - most relevantly, which AI receives the most attention.
Upon reaching one of two criteria (obtaining a certain percentage of the games logs, or showing *Hyun-ae any one of *Mute's questions), the game's main climax occurs—the Mugunghwa's nuclear fission reactor enters meltdown, endangering the AI cores, valuable data, and the protagonist. The player must execute a series of commands to safely shutdown the reactor and vent out residual heat, all within 20 minutes. The player must choose which AIs they will continue the story with prior to meltdown; leaving their separate cores on consumes too much power for the backup power system, and it is not possible to activate the dormant AI from this point onwards. Once the player has safely disabled the reactor, saving the life of the active AI, the game will continue similarly to before, with the player accessing logs and the surviving AI providing commentary. Each AI reveals a different side of the Mugunghwa's story: *Hyun-ae will assist in uncovering the Pale Bride's perspective, while *Mute yields logs from the noble families of the ship. More interaction will take place between the player and the AI, until a pivot is reached with the relationship and one of the five endings will occur.
Eventually, it is revealed that the Pale Bride (now *Hyun-ae) was brutally treated by the Kim family after they awoke her from stasis. After many small rebellions and increasingly serious punishments, going so far as to refusing to be wed to Emperor Ryu, to whom she had been promised as a bride and concubine, her adoptive parents cut out her tongue to prevent the young girl from speaking out against men (a trauma *Mute was unaware of to the game's present). After her marriage, Hyun-ae became close friends with the Emperor's first wife, Empress Ryu Jae-hwa. She calls her "stronger than I ever was", not letting men order her around "while still knowing her place"; as well as the only person to notice Hyun-ae's muteness and failing health. Upon the Empress's sudden death, Hyun-ae's sorrow and rage ultimately drove her to kill everyone she hated aboard the Mugunghwa by deactivating its life support systems. As the crew suffocated to death, she retreated into the computer system as an AI by using a "neurosynaptic" scan of her brain and a copy of *Mute's AI coding, which she used to deactivate the security AI up until Analogue's present. This explains the *Hyun-ae's hatred of the Kims, *Mute's hatred of *Hyun-ae, and acts as a key factor for the player's decisions.
The first two endings involve *Hyun-ae leaving the Mugunghwa with the protagonist, either as a companion or lover. In the third ending, the protagonist leaves without taking either AI with them (either by not saving the ship from meltdown in time, or by prematurely downloading the logs before the end of the AI commentary has been reached). This conclusion can also be reached if the player opts not to download the AI data during the final conclusion. The fourth ending involves "kidnapping" *Mute, effectively relieving her of her duties on the ship. The fifth ending, which can only be accessed by "cheating" (searching manually for a log which would not normally appear on the story branch in question), involves taking both AIs as a harem. The game can also end by penalty for disagreeing too much with an AI, causing the angered AI to permanently disconnect the protagonist from the ship's computer, or by the "bad priorities" ending, which occurs when the player downloads the logs during the meltdown sequence, which takes too much time, killing them in the explosion.