A common enemy

Great opening dialogue. I was prepared to love this just based on the banter. Then we got to the descriptive paragraph and I wasn't so much anymore. Continuing on ... okay, this looks like a translation or not-your-first-language job. Fair enough. Also, the banter turns out to be some sort of coded password exchange, which makes things more interesting.

It turns out this is a thriller in which a forgotten project from the Cold War turns out to be a major threat. The damage is both terrible and inevitable; the question is, how do we handle the fallout? How do we spin it so we don't end up starting a nuclear war? The opening scene is character establishment: our hero is, well, kind of a douche, even if he only has a couple of months left to live. He's a relic of a bygone age. I assume that the disrespect he shows to the one woman at the planning meeting is related to this, but I feel that, by then, one should not be framing these character-establishing moments as events rather than as background colour. It draws attention and distracts from the story.

Also, I have to wait for an elevator in real time. NO DO NOT DO THIS WHY WOULD YOU? This adds nothing to the story and I have to wonder what the hell it's for.

Near as I can tell, except for one place where we can skip a scene exposing some further skulduggery among the side characters (it doesn't actually affect the ending, though it might change our understanding of it) the choices either make no difference, or end the game pretty much immediately. This isn't really a thing where we get to explore the consequences of each choice: it's a straight story with cosmetic changes.

I guess the real issue here is the inappropriate use of elements, both in the presentation and in the story itself. There are set pieces and stock effects, moments and events that are cool and useful, but it's important to know when to use them and when to hold back. Our hero's isolated disrespect for the woman from NASA, for instance might be appropriate in a more character-based story or in one where that disrespect has tangible consequences, but it is less so in a story where our focus is entirely on the looming crisis. Before sticking anything into a story, one should ask oneself, what is this for? What does it do for the story? Why is this here?

Breakfast, which is always appropriate, might in this case be hominy grits (uniquely American and ... kind of resistant to change) and Tang.