Crapshoot Monday: This Free Thing I Found on Itch.io…THE GRIFFIN

​A space hulk by Unchartedworlds, level not listed
Written for Sea of Stars
  There are several very different, very powerful, aesthetic traditions in the science fiction genre. Ground-based sci-fi has your grimy dystopia, your cyperpunk mohawks, your sword & planet, your Fallout mutants, it’s all over the place. In the space travel mainstream we have the shiny/idealistic Star Trek, with every line clean and sharp, every suit clean, utopian social assumptions. As a deliberate contrast there’s the “used future” look of classic Star Wars, manifested fully in Firefly. Then you have the “realistic” 2001: A Space Odessey designs that are based on current space technology. On the fourth and final hand, self-consciously retro smooth-lines-and-chrome designs are their own branch, a vision of the future built from the science fiction of the 1950’s…and that’s what we have in this one-page-space-wreck adventure, The Griffin:
  Our plot is a bog standard as it gets. The titular ship has sent out a distress call due to rogue meteor storm, which smacked it around and took it offline. As so often happens, one of the meteors had a mutagenic zombie virus on it which infected the crew. Couple that with the ship’s AI going insane, like they do, trying to crash into a nearby planet…yeah, you’ve been here before. It’s cozy. Salt in the fact that the ship was transporting an alien predator that got free in the disaster and we’re officially hitting every single note.
  I’ll be friendly and say what I liked was the look of the thing, even the false creases from paper-folding. The adventure gets a nod for remembering that spaceships have an outer space side, with one of the critical repair paths only reachable via dangerous EVA. Nice that the ship has a weapons locker that either you get free access to if you meet the security officer first, or else you loot and make the SO really mad, that’s good.
  At this point you know I’m not some reviewer hyper-fixated on originality, but what can be improved here starts with thinking outside of the box a little bit more, space-hulk-infested-with-zombies-and-insane-AI is probably the single most common trope in the entire genre. At this point, something like an android that wasn’t evil/deranged would be the twist. Even if you are going with the tropes, a little more effort would help. How many injured crew in the medbay? What motivates the crazed AI? Is there anything to use the alien tiger against? Stuff like that can elevate even the most basic of plots. Also it’s pretty but the flow of the map is a bit unclear.
  Knowing nothing of Sea of Stars specifically, I’ll still say the best use case for this is as a S.O.S. one-shot, because while I enjoy the look of the map, it’s a bit hard to extract as a useful bit. None of the other parts are worth extracting.
  Final rating? */***** with a sorrowful sigh, not a shout of anger.