January
This is a sad post-apocalyptic story that meanders nowhere for a really long time, and I just about gave up on it–in fact, if I wasn’t trying to judge things, I’m sure I would have. But I pressed on despite not liking it, and then miraculously it came together and was somewhat compelling! Mostly because of the introduction of a cat. Always introduce cats to your post-apocalyptic worlds, people; you can’t go wrong.
There was a lot about the story that I didn’t understand even after everything was done, and I think this was because it was supposed to be Mysterious and that I was supposed to Ponder Things, but it didn’t really work for me on that level. Mostly it was just a kind of nice story about a guy with a sad backstory in a sad situation with a cat that made things a bit better.
The story is set up so that you get circled dates on a calendar you click on to see story vignettes, and when you’ve seen the vignette, the date gets crossed off. And then later sometimes the dates get un-crossed off and something changes about the vignette and literally every time this happened, I cringed and thought, “Argh, why” because the story is just so much of a downer that I didn’t want it to go on even longer but then I’d sigh and see the new bits and it was OK. Not all of the new bits were strictly worth it, per se, but that went for half the vignettes, too, so that was par for the course.
You supposedly can click on a few different dates to see the story in a sort of pseudo-random slightly restricted order, but honestly, why would anyone do this? And what difference would it make? I just always clicked on the earliest date available so that I could experience the story as chronologically as possible, and so I could read the newly-expanded vignettes as soon as I could so I had less chance of forgetting what it was about. So, technically interactive, sort of. I’m not going to complain that it was entered in the comp, but this level of interactivity is usually too low for me, all told.
Did the author have something to say? : Yes. Was it novel/interesting? A bit. The cat bits worked great, and that was the heart of the story, so definite points for that.
Did I have something to do? : No. And when I sort of had something to do, I always cringed, which isn’t a great sign.