Steins;Gate: My Darling's Embrace

Steins;Gate: My Darling's Embrace (STEINS;GATE 比翼恋理のだーりん Steins;Gate: Hiyoku Renri no Darling?) is a romantic comedy spin-off visual novel occurring in the Delta Attractor Field.

Synopsis
Fall in love with the lab members all over again in this sweet and slapstick romantic comedy!

Follow Your Heart: Explore the private life of Rintarou and your favorite lab members in a series of "What if?" scenarios.

Love Isn't a Science: The hard science of Steins;Gate takes a back seat to let the slapstick story run wild!

Phone Trigger System: Interact via Rintarou’s cellphone to answer or ignore calls, and send and recieve emails. Your everyday choices in life steer the story!

Story
The story takes place after the 6th of August, 2010 in the original visual novel, when Okabe Rintarou suddenly finds himself in a Delta world line after conducting multiple D-mail experiments. There the Phone Microwave was placed aside and never used in multiple experiments. The Phone Microwave still exists, however the function was not discovered until a later period compared to the original game, thus few experiments were ever held due to Delta Attractor Field Okabe interrupting the members beginning to experiment on the Phone Microwave. There are several new Future Gadgets, and Kiryuu Moeka and Amane Suzuha are lab members. Also, neither Tennouji Yuugo, nor Kiryuu Moeka are Rounders.

When Okabe comes to, he finds the lab members preparing for a party and that due to successive experimenting the Future Gadget Laboratory's electric bill has skyrocketed. To compensate for this Okabe tries waitering and decides to sell the latest Future Gadget.

This Attractor Field is seemingly peaceful. Amane Suzuha of the Alpha Attractor Field's hostility towards Makise Kurisu is absent, and neither Makise Kurisu nor Shiina Mayuri die. However, little is known about its future, and what its convergence point could be.

The story pans out in six possible possibilities, or "routes", each revolves around Rintarou's romantic relationship with either of the 6 main female characters (Rukako remains male throughout the story though), including the newly added Kiryuu Moeka story path.

Name
The name 比翼恋理 (Hiyoku Renri) is a wordplay on the phrase 比翼連理 (hiyoku renri), which means "marital vows". The "連" (ren) character, meaning "entwined", is here replaced with the "恋" (koi/ren) character, meaning love or tender affection. "比翼" (hiyoku) describes two birds flying together ("翼" means "wing") and is often used to refer to (married) couples with a deep, postive relationship. "理" (ri) generally means, reasoning, principle, or logic. However, when paired as "連理" (renri) it denotes an intimate male and female relationship, and, as mentioned previously, when combined as 比翼連理 (hiyoku renri) it denotes "marital vows". As such, by changing "entwined" to "love" the phrase can be read as "loving vows", or alternatively as "比翼 hiyoku" (happily/deeply/strongly bound), "恋 ren" (love), "理 ri" (reasoning, principle, or logic). The substitution of 連 by 恋 also connotes the fact that Okabe doesn't really get married in those lines, but simply have relationships instead.

Newly Introduced Future Gadgets
Future Gadget No.12 "Darling is an idiot!" This gadget was named by Daru, in which the Labomems had all agreed upon. Mayushii thought that the name "Love Love Bracelet Chans" would be good, Kurisu suggested "Affection measuring instrument" and Okarin said "ETERNAL ENGAGE".

The purpose of Gadget Number 12 was to be used by lovers which measured the degree of affection between them. It has a sensor which measures body temperature, blood pressure, pulse and sweat and monitors psychological changes. It also displays the wearer's mood or feelings on the screen. Then if one person feels weird it is recognized as cheating and an electronic pulse is transmitted. In a sense, future gadget no.12 is a lie detector, with the ability to not only prevent affairs but mend them. But because Kurisu felt if it was just a lie-detector it would be "lacking in vision", and so made modifications to the device. There is an turn on button but not a turn off button.

The functions of Future Gadget No.12 are:

- If you have an affair, you get zapped.

- If you try to take it off, you get zapped.

- If you argue, you get zapped.

- If you are further than 1m away from each other you get zapped

- If you hold hands you won't be zapped

- If your minds and thoughts are the same, than you can remove it.

Future Gadget No.13 can record the thoughts of a person as a video. Kurisu designed this gadget using progressing research into projecting what the brain sees. This research has already reached implementation stage. At the same time, research into recording visual information as a video has reached the advanced stages. The university that Kurisu attends, "Victor Mitochondria University" has developed a technology called "Visual Rebuilding", which is a technique which converts nerve pulse signal into video data. By using this technique, it emulates what a person see's right in front of their eyes as neural data is fed into the brain. Kurisu utilises the idea that if they could do this, then they could do the opposite, since she also studied the analysis of the nerve pulse in human memory. "If we were able to convert memories into accessible data, I thought maybe we could access what is seen as data". The actual appearance of Future Gadget No.13 is something like a VR headset.

Future Gadget No.14's "Electric Signal Jacker" (Kurisu names this gadget as "Broadcast Signal Intrusion") purpose is to send data which has been recorded on a hard disk by stealing TV broadcast signals. Instead of just uploading a video on the internet, because only the people who wanted to watch it would watch it, it makes sure that the video is publicly seen. It looks like a regular black hard disk with a collapsible antennae attached.

Release Info
Steins;Gate: My Darling's Embrace was released by Spike Chunisoft in North America and Europe on December 10, 2019, on the PS4, Nintendo Switch, and Steam.

Trivia

 * Suzuha comes back in time in order to retrieve lost technology through ages which are required to decrypt certain information, in this case -- floppy disks, cassette tapes, etc. (not IBM 5100)