YMMV / Analogue: A Hate Story

• Alternate Character Interpretation: Lots, mostly revolving around whether or not Hyun-ae was justified in her homicidal rampage against very awful people. There is also a theory though, that she might also be responsible for the reactor meltdown, given how it only happens after *Mute creates some very pointed questions to ask her — i.e., after a combination of her abuse plus several hundred years with nobody to talk to has caused her to develop into a full-scale Yandere more willing to destroy herself than let her only companion/lover leave her. Given how *Hyun-ae falls in love with the player instantaneously after just being shown some kindness, it makes a disturbing amount of sense.
• Anvilicious: While the overall reception of the game is positive, there are people who found the anti-sexist themes to be excessively insistent and melodramatic.
• Harsher in Hindsight: Everyone aboard the Mugunghwa died centuries prior to the events of the game, before they could reach their destination. Hate Plus reveals that the navigation AI was destroyed some centuries before that, meaning that even if Hyun-ae hadn't caused everyone to die, they'd still be stuck in a wayward ship that will forever travel through deep space, and eventually die out from radiation poisoning.
• Moral Event Horizon:
  • The Kim family crosses it when they cut Hyun-ae's tongue so that she can't backtalk a man ever again.
  • So far as *Mute is concerned Hyun-ae crossed it when she murdered the entire ship. Only the revelation of Hyun-ae's mutilation makes her reconsider.
  • YOU can cross this by attempting to download the log files during the meltdown, thus betraying both AIs and abandoning them to their fates. Yeah, good luck with that by the way...
• Nightmare Fuel / Nausea Fuel: The Pale Bride's diary entry describing the way she was held down while her tongue was cut out. It makes re-reading the later entries — the ones where she is subservient — even worse, because now you know exactly what it was that broke her. The entry is exceptionally difficult to read for victims of parental abuse.
  • There's also some of this with how everyone on the Mugunghwa died. One particular creepy detail in *Mute's log is the list of failed login attempts from Ryu In-ho, the Captain Emperor, frantically trying to get back into the computer and turn life support back on after Hyun-ae used administrative privileges to disable his account.
• Romantic Plot Tumor: Hyun-ae/Mute and the PC can definitely feel like this. The Prostitute's story felt a little tacked on as well.
• Tear Jerker: Numerous. Just one instance is the human Hyun-ae lying down in the remains of her cryogenic pod to suffocate with the rest of the ship.
• The Woobie: The Pale Bride, AKA Hyun-ae. She's a sick girl who is forcibly pulled out of cryosleep to be married to the ship's "emperor" in a gambit to earn favor from him. She has been literally pulled out of a society in which she is treated like a person and forcibly placed in an archaic world where she's just a thing, a subhuman being that has no worth as anything but a baby factory and a bargaining chip, and is despised for not accepting it. Not feeling sorry for her is inexcusable. Even *Mute, who despises her, is appalled when she learns about the hell she has been through. This caused her to be sent into a very subtle psychotic rage that ended with the complete extermination of the ship's human population, and while a combination of isolation and time have caused her to calm down, she still claims she was justified, at least for the Kims.