You know how in-game romances go: you say whatever it takes to get your love interest. Usually, all you have to do is be nice to another character and willing to listen to their life story for like 30 minutes and boom, theyâre in the bag forever.
Itâs not quite like that in Hate Plus, Christine Loveâs follow-up to last yearâs visual novel, Analogue: A Hate Storyâa game where you have to find out what happened to a futuristic society aboard a ship that suddenly adopted Confucian ideals. Like many visual novels, the game gives you the option to romance its charactersâonly the character in this case might be an unhinged AI who murdered a colony and endured a ton of abuse. If that sounds troubling, it isâyouâre supposed to feel uncomfortable for playing the game like you would any other visual novel where you can romance the protagonists. Maybe you shouldnât always give in to the impulse to romance, maybe your actions can be kind of gross sometimes, the game makes you think. (Update: full disclosureâŠLove and I are friends.)
Still, I ended that game by romancing the AI, meaning that sheâs still my in-game girlfriend in Hate Plus. And like any couple would, she wanted us to celebrate somethingâspecifically, by baking a cake. I said I would, like a good boyfriend (Iâm playing as a guy). Itâs just a game, right? Whatever, Iâll say what I need to say. âŠexcept I didnât expect the game to require me to bake an actual cake, and to keep track of time as a means of making sure I actually baked a dang cake. Meaning, if enough time hasnât passed, the game knows I didnât bake diddly squat.
(Sheâs an AI without a body, she canât actually eat the cake with you.)
Donât worry. Sheâll give you a recipe.
Do you have the ingredients? Sheâll ask you to check.
Donât even think you can just click âall doneâ right away. The game is keeping time! The AI will chide you for not actually getting up to check. Sure, you could just wait a few minutes and game it that wayâbut then again, instead of just sitting around doing nothingâŠwhy not actually check?
Youâll try to talk your way out of making a cake, of courseâyouâll see if there are other options, if you can backtrack, and so on, eventually realizing that you shouldnât have told your virtual girlfriend youâd bake a cake when you actually had no intention of doing so. And then the game is clever about the whole thingâŠ
(Ero is short for âeroge,â which refers to the type of visual novels with erotic content.)
Eventually, after enough time has passed, you can get through that mess and get to these screens:
Hereâs where this gets a little more ridiculous. If you check the gameâs achievements (you can think of achievements as badges the game awards you for completing certain tasks), youâll come across this:
Letâs say you weaseled your way out of baking a cake for your girlfriend in-gameâyou can do it, after all, provided youâre patient enough. If you want this achievement, thereâs no way to get it other than actually baking a cake and sending a picture to the developer, Christine Love. If you do that, she told me yesterday, sheâll send you a special code that unlocks the achievement.
As of yesterday? At least 80 people have emailed her with such pictures. Whatâs worth noting here is that the game is segmented into three days, and this cake incident doesnât happen until the third day. The game only released earlier this week, and I imagine that most players are only now/recently getting to that day given that you have to wait 12 real-world hours between days. What Iâm saying is, thereâs bound to be a lot more people who will actually bake a real-life cake for their virtual 2D girlfriends as time goes on.
Heck, if you go to thegameâs community page, you can see some of these cakes (if not people doing things in a similar vein):
(By Durro)
(Caption: The cake that wasnt a lie, by Grekdar)
(Caption: yeah⊠why was i up doing this at 2am again? Cake is a slice of my birthday cake, and while Iâm sure sheâs mad that itâs store-bought, Iâm sure if I could explain to her, sheâd appreciate it. uwu Also had some tea and cookies while waiting for the timer to go so that Iâd be clicking at the right time, by ăă«)
(Caption: Creative application of colored toothpicks. *íì (*Hyun-Ae) spelled out on the cake, by unclghost)
If all of this seems familiar, itâs because the entire thing is taking a page off thegag where Otaku will take pictures with anime characters, typically on Christmasâin Japan, itâs more of a date-night than a typical holiday. Sometimes, itâll be done be for a characterâs birthday. Either way, itâs not done completely seriously or anything, although people will try to outdo each other in the pictures.
Still, as curious and ridiculous as this all is, I think this is one achievement I wonât be getting.
You can check out Hate Plus here, although Iâd suggest playing through Analogue: A Hate Story first.
