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Christine Love makes games about sex and technology... sexnology games, if you will. They exist in a video game landscape that's saturated with objectified women, but rarely attempts to give women characters a voice for their own sexual desires. Her latest is Hate Plus, a follow-up to her last game Analogue: A Hate Story, both of which are about women characters' struggles to talk about their desires. Analogue was a visual novel about cute girls in frilly dresses with kinky habits on a spaceship, thousands of years in the future. You were an archivist, digging into the ship's logs of a bygone Korean spacefaring society; your only company was two computer AIs who fought for control over you. Love deftly wove her warring AIs through the emotional revelations born of a patriarchal Joseon Dynasty of the future. That sounds like a sentence that would never describe a game, right? It's almost surreal to write it. But you'd need someone seriously well-read to pull it off. How deep is your Love? Pretty damned deep.
If you're interested in space soap opera twists and 'hacking' a terminal within a time limit, go and play Analogue: A Hate Story now. It's one of the finest, most unusual independent games we have. It asks you to become a critical reader of fragmented texts, a kinky word archaeologist who gets off on other people's perversions. It also has a quite admirable amount of sexy bits that made me feel like Alan Partridge at an orgy, and I'm no prude.
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