“His Majesty’s Ship Impetuous”

by Jimmy Maher

2011
Historical
ChoiceScript

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Review

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Very short, almost fun while it lasted, June 4, 2025
by kqr (Sweden)

I agree with the porter that this version with explicit choices is less janky than the original, although it does lose some of it's magical qualities too.

The early bits where decisions concerned the fates of individual people and the mood on the ship were much more interesting than deciding whether or not to attack other ships -- mostly because I felt more in control at those points. I had a specific plan in mind for how to approach ship-on-ship interactions but the choices were too coarse grained to allow anything close to those plans.

Many decisions felt meaningless, or unrealistically consequential. Information pertinent for decisions was sometimes revealed only after the decision was made.

I was not impressed by the writing, but I'm unsure if that was because the writing was not engaging, or because I just didn't like the style personally.

Maybe it was because of the choices I made, but the game was very short. I'll play it again, making different choices, but either way I feel like branch in the narrative ought to be of similar length, so there is something for every play style.

Update a few minutes later: having tried other choices, it was indeed very short whatever I did.

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P-Tux7, June 4, 2025 - Reply
Not that it necessarily ought to make you enjoy the game more, but the short length and terse prose are from the original game that this was a remake of. Jimmy was being faithful to the original except in replacing the parser. In fact, all the choices there are were in the original parser version; he didn't remove any.
kqr, June 5, 2025 - Reply
Indeed, and my review is of the game, not the quality of the porting job. The quality of the port is, as far as I can tell, excellent. I should perhaps have made that more clear. Thanks!
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