Ahhhh, Christine Love. Out of all the indie developers whose games/VNs/software I have played, she is 2nd-highest on my love/hate list (pun intended, and the 1st-highest is Wolfire Games).
I liked Digital: A Love Story a lot and have no complaints about it.
Don't Take It Personally left me confused and annoyed. I was initially intrigued by the exploration of a social-media-saturated near-future, but the plotline with the student-teacher romance left a bad taste in my mouth. In recent months I went back to thinking about whether her thoughts on social media were supposed to be positive---if they WERE supposed to be positive, then I find it bitterly ironic given how stressed-out she reacted during Gamergate. On the other hand,
JDarkside said in a prior post in this thread that it might have just been an extrapolation of current trends in social media, nothing more and nothing less.
I liked Analogue: A Hate Story, and then grew to dislike it. I liked the unique premise and the inventive computer-style interface for exploring the story, but think it missed some opportunities and the only character I found particularly memorable was *Mute. *Hyun-ae was kind of bland, and some of the attempts at giving her more character fell flat---given what happened to her, I personally found it more than a little unsettling and/or unrealistic that she'd ever want to wear the maid cosplay. If you don't understand why, consider this---there are Holocaust survivors that have nervous breakdowns at the sight of mailmen just because they're wearing uniforms.
I didn't find *Hyun-ae convincing as a character, given what she had been through. There's little explanation as to how she held onto her sanity/identity/whatever given that she was stuck alone save for her mortal enemy inside a ship's computer banks for...Decades? Centuries? An inhumanly long time, at any rate. Thank fuck I had the option to keep the relationship at the end strictly professional, though---while I wouldn't blame her for doing what she did, I'm also not going to casually hook up with some woman stuck on a starship who committed genocide in a fit of desperation.
There's also some interesting questions I found myself asking that Christine didn't---does it really matter what *Hyun-ae did, given that the population of the ship would likely have rendered themself extinct anyway? The crew didn't even know what a cryopod was or how it worked---I can't imagine things going well if they had a new problem with something vital like life support or the ship's reactor, and I think *Mute was probably the only thing keeping the ship from exploding at any given moment.
The other thing: How would you hold the ship's population LEGALLY accountable for its collective crimes against *Hyun-ae when they had in effect formed a wholly new society and would likely have no memory of Korea-on-Earth, nor no longer be abiding by any of its laws?
The LAST thing: It just seems odd for *Hyun-ae or *Mute to persistently think of themselves as female---or any gender---after spending time as a computer program for an extremely extended duration. I don't think Love thought through the implications of a transhuman existence as well as she could have.
I tried Hate Plus. When the game curbed my archive-browsing after an arbitrary length of time and told me to take a break, I put the game away and haven't touched it since. What is this game trying to be? My mother?
I will not be trying Ladykiller in a Bind at all for a variety of reasons. Some are practical (I don't find explorations of sex and sexuality in any way, shape or form very exciting), some are less-than-charitable (the game comes across as an attempt to catch the attention of the LGBTQI crowd to me).
Love used to be one of my favorite indie devs but now I don't think either of us have anything to offer each other.
I also have other reasons for not liking her that
JDarkside sorta summed up elsewhere on these forums---the LGBTQI community can be prone to infighting over things it really, really shouldn't be, and as someone who USED to consider himself a cis/straight ally it's come as a real disappointment to see people I really wanted to see succeed go after each other over perceived betrayals. Christine kinda blew up at the GaymerX Twitter account when she didn't like that GaymerX was taking a neutral stance on Gamergate, you see. And while I don't blame her, I also don't see a point in putting up with all this drama when it gives me neither material reward (that would at least make up for some of the bullshit) nor warm-fuzzies (that would be a good indicator that I had done my good deed for the day and would help me sleep easier at night when in fact LGBTQI politics are making me LOSE sleep instead).
After all, why should I take it personally? It just ain't my story.
EDIT: Given that
JDarkside also described white feminists as being part of the aforementioned drama, I believe my previous paragraph was a misquote of sorts. Apologies---combination of faulty memory and not knowing of a more-encompassing word.