Pseudo_Intellectual (66360) on 2/16/2014 10:16 PM · edited · Permalink · Report

I wrote a description for the game only to find that someone had scooped me here. What am I supposed to do with it? Well, here goes:

In this visual novel, the player controls the actions of a cosmic troubleshooter sponsored by the Saeju Colony Historical Society to unravel the fate of a rediscovered derelict Korean generation ship, the Mugunghwa (Hibiscus), found with no survivors. Logging into the derelict's nix computer shell interface, they restore a lonely artificial intelligence in the ship's computer, Hyun-ae. Damage to the ship's user input interface over its long centuries adrift limit the player to answering yes/no questions posed by the AI, byt Hyun-ae is thrilled to have company at long last and helpfully makes the ship's collection of log entries available for browsing by the player in an attempt to figure out what happened to its crew complement. The AI also watches over the player's selection of logs and can provide additional commentary to complement the log entries.

The logs quickly reveal that, for unclear reasons explored in this game's sequel, 2013's Hate Plus, the ship culture aboard the Mugunghwa gradually reverted to one similar to Korea's medieval Joseon Dynasty, with a commensurate forgetting of the lanuch crew's sophisticated 25th-century computer-using, starfaring scientific knowledge as well as a great curtailing of the status of women on board. Compounding their troubles, later generations of the crew also found themselves beset with a drastically declining fertility rate, which led to the introduction into their society of a cryogenically frozen passenger, initially preserved with the intention of having their terminal illness cured by future, more advanced societies.

User interface was not the only ship system damaged over the centuries, and in the midst of their browsing, the player will be called upon to return to the nix shell in order to address a critical malfunction of the ship's nuclear power reactor core in a timed challenge and prioritize the remaining systems needed to allow them to get to the bottom of the mystery. The plot thickens with the awakening of a second AI, Mute, who fingers Hyun-ae as complicit in the liquidation of the ship's population and provides a contrasting viewpoint allowing further context explaining the log entries. The player's mission then expands to figuring out not only what happened, but why. The player will have to choose which survivor's account to believe, because there is only enough reserve power remaining to run one of them, and indeed, upon reviewing all available logs, may choose to return with one of them backed up to the wider future society.