Analogue: A Hate Story
5.0 Stars
1-1-2015

I normally don't review interactive fiction, but when I do it is genuinely creative and interesting. This story is by Christina Love, who also wrote the excellent _don't take it personally, babe, it just ain't your story_. Hate Story is a sort of epistolary novel, where you are recovering crew-member logs from a generation starship that never completed its mission of colonization. This is complicated by the fact that you can only interact with the logging system with the assistance of ship's AI. So it starts off as an epistolary novel, but then adds in a narrator who is sort of reading over your shoulder, and that is questioning you, and who is then modifying what you read. You could think of it as taking an adaptive SAT written exam, where the exam itself is judging you. And that is just the initial premise, after that things start to get weird. :) I could write more, but I think any further information would ruin the charm of the story. There are some flaws in the story, and I don't think it fully realizes the great potential of the sort of narrative system that it sets up, but I still really enjoyed the work as a whole. It manages to be a clever experimental novel, very fun, occasionally moving, and quite simply something I haven't seen before in the realm of words on paper.