Careless Talk

All right then. We have a world where magic exists and magic-users are only recently (in European terms) getting accepted as useful members of the military. We're a magic-user on a battleship in service to Queen Ann III of Albion; there's a distinctly Napoleonic vibe happening. Oh, and we're also gay, which is tolerated about as well as it would have been in that era. The world-building is dripping -- no, pouring -- with potential.

The entirety of the story is us discussing the lynching murder of another gay magic-user with the ship's chaplain.

It feels like we only just got started. What's this about the murder and what we're going to do about it? I want to play that game! What about all the angst and drama of trying to keep your secret in the close confines of a battleship? I want to play that game too! What about the consequences of this discussion? Instead, what we have here is basically an introduction: the most effect that a choice can have seems purely cosmetic, and the story proceeds regardless of what we do. In one place, it seems as though both options lead to the same place without so much as a cosmetic change of detail; and in another, three of the four options are rejected as unsuitable when you click on them, which makes one wonder at the point. This sort of thing might be passable (just barely) in a prologue to a bigger story, but when they are the whole story, one wonders at the point of making it interactive at all.

It's breakfast at one of the classiest breakfast joints in the city, the one where the French omelettes make Gordon Ramsay weep with joy. But we're just having a cup of coffee (French vanilla) and then we've got to run.