H.M.S. Spaceman

The story begins with a starship captain setting the scene with a captain's log entry. It's ever so slightly pompous, but fairly basic starship stuff. Then we cut to to the trio of engineers (according to the captain earlier, "bred for their unrelenting work ethic") and ... yeah, they're pretty typical engineering fratboys just raring to cut loose, go wild, and (I dunno) install giant, fluffy, animatronic bunny ears on top of the MIT Great Dome or something. Things get wacky from there, as it emerges that the starship is designed as a near-perfect replica of a naked man, with all the appropriate functions assigned to the appropriate (or mostly appropriate) organs.

We're not following the engineers, though. The action cuts around to various points of view, including that of the captain's clone (presumably his second-in-command) and the daughter of the alien diplomat. Everyone has their own goals in mind, and, ultimately, whether the starship is destroyed or not depends on decisions that affect that storyline only incidentally. It's like curing a cold entirely through the application of medical side effects.

And that's a very interesting thing to do. As cartoonish as the characterisations and situations are, the game does a couple of pretty clever things in my opinion. That makes it rather a bit cleverer than it pretends to be. As a breakfast, I call this muesli, the original recipe as developed by Dr. Maximilian Bircher-Benner in 1900 (apples, nuts, rolled oats, lemon juice, cream, honey) with a banana on the side and a freshly ground espresso. If you think it's just cereal, you would be wrong.