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Flight of the Necrovoyager (in Real Time), May 5, 2017(Disclosure: I participated in EctoComp 2016.)
The premise is original, and the writing is pretty good. I came into it expecting something rather light-hearted and silly, but the various PCs' backstories turn out to have a bit more darkness to them: a nice mixture of black comedy and inhumanity. Those backstories are probably my favourite part of the story: they're well-written and get the right amount of detail without dragging on.
Then you get to the bulk of the story, and... it's a boredom simulator. You have to click through a few repetitive tasks until enough years have passed for you to reach the planet of your destination, (Spoiler - click to show)upon which the storyline ends. There exists a game called Journey to Alpha Centauri: In Real Time, based on a joke in Terry Pratchett's novel Only You Can Save Mankind, where the joke is that it takes 3,000 years to complete; this is like the coffee-break version. Of course, the point is that the journey is immensely boring for the PC; the problem is that intentional boredom is still boredom.
(Spoiler - click to show)I played through all the characters, in case there were some sort of reward for completing all the storylines, but it turns out there isn't.
I found most of the PCs interesting in one way or another. I particularly enjoyed the vampire's backstory, and the lich has an interesting personality (and also the most varied content during the actual journey). Implementation-wise, the game is competent: nothing groundbreaking, but a good use of expanding text and randomised elements. On the downside, there are a few typoes, but not enough to reduce my enjoyment.
Not particularly scary.
To sum up: a fun idea, decently written, but still a boredom simulator.
