Thanks for the warm welcome and mod approval! First review (for no particular reason except it’s the one I just finished reading):
Keeper of the Sun and Moon
by Brynn Chernosky
Released Jan. 2019 - 310,000 words
Keeper of the Sun and Moon is an urban fantasy set in modern times where you play as a freshman college student who discovers there is a world of supernatural creatures, monsters, and magic hidden in the fringes of our own. After a car wreck you’re attacked by a gorgon, things escalate, and you find yourself attending a magical college in New Magi City - whether you want to or not.
PROS:
Plot. Keeper of the Sun and Moon is great. For the reader it’s basically Harry Potter: College Edition meets Supernatural. The “magical school” plot has been done seemingly endless times at this point, but Brynn Chernosky does it very well with enough differences and uniqueness that it never felt derivative to me. The opening scenes also had just the right amount of intrigue, danger, and world-building to keep me glued to the screen.
Your character’s introduction to the magical world is much less whimsical than “You’re a wizard, Harry!” and more ominous kidnapping with polite niceties. Chernosky gives you the opportunity to lean into either direction—you can be thrilled to be introduced to the mysteries of the magical side of the world and getting your very own acceptance to New World Magi Academy, or you can make it clear to everyone that will listen that it’s all been under duress.
Choices. One of my favorite things in Choicescript games is when the author lets the player be a sullen spoilsport and Keeper of the Sun and Moon delivers on that front. At nearly every junction (except for two or three where a little railroading for plot was necessary) what I wanted to express in any given situation was there as an option in the choices.
Right from the opening, you can come in hot as a character and throw matches at every visible bridge that presents itself. Chernosky even has an opposing stat for Kindness/Cruelty and one for Resistance/Acceptance (more on that one in a moment). You can insult everyone you come into contact with, whether deserved (yeah, some of the opening characters deserve it) or not. In fact, there is an interaction early in the game where you can scream at someone to “Leave me alone!” that is nearly immediately followed by two polite characters introducing themselves to you and one of your options is “…Screw both of you.” How could I not pick that?
It was at that fated moment I decided my character would commit to being stubborn, rebellious, and dead set on making sure no one forgot they were enrolled to higher education under duress. I enjoyed this immensely, except for one small hiccup I’ll bring up when we get to the cons. This continued to pay off long into the game, including what I presume was an Easter Egg where my character groused about a movie featuring a chosen one finding out they had magic powers and getting whisked off to a school and loving it was incredibly unrealistic and stupid and that no one would react that way.
You get to pick between one of two extra classes each semester, what species you turn out to be, how you fight, how smart you are, or even if you’ll learn magic or not. In keeping with testing how committed Chernosky was to letting my character be an absolute rebel without a cause, I decided I was completely human and rejected any attempts to teach me magic. I was pleasantly surprised by how well that kept paying off for my character, including a few funny scenes were villains assumed my character had powers and my character could scream about not having them or make exasperated remarks about anti-magic effects. I even got an achievement at the end for being fully committed to being ‘not special’. A+
You even get to pick a part time job, though I’m not sure what impact that had on anything. It’s mentioned they pay different amounts, but my character always had money when they needed it. I chose being a newspaper intern as my part-time job and it resulted in just one scene and then was never ever mentioned again.
Romance. There are (perhaps too many) romance options, with up to ten potential love interests according to the store page for the game. This is no doubt due to the fact the romance options seem to be gender-locked (I’m not entirely sure, some may change), so Chernosky probably wanted to make sure an equal number of male and female romantic character options were available.
From what I saw on my play-through of the game the romance-able characters are fairly fleshed out, with wide variety in personality types and dispositions and seemingly lots of chances to interact.
Now, as I’ve said, I was a cruel sullen character who told nearly every other character off constantly, but still managed by apparent sheer force of happenstance to become pretty close to two of my fellow students, and hat’s off to Chernosky, it felt natural, even with my character being a jerk at every opportunity.
I didn’t end up romancing or dating anyone, and I know just from some of the options towards the end of the story that I was missing a huge opposing chunk of story by not getting close to certain characters, but everything still resolved in a satisfying manner that I felt explained and finished the story well—even if I knew I didn’t have the whole story.
Replay value. Even though I’ve only played-through Keeper of the Sun and Moon once, I can already tell there are tons of branching scenes and sides to the main plot that I didn’t get to see, and whole character relationships that I missed. This is one I definitely plan to replay after I finish the sequel.
CONS:
Occasional odd choice format. There were a few times in the game where I was asked to make a choice about what a character said to ME, or how they reacted to me, which I thought was weird for established characters you already had a relationship with. For instance, one choice I received was to pick between a character complimenting my outfit for a dance or insulting it. My thought was that one of these was out-of-character.
I know the reason Chernosky likely added these choices - they serve as a way to attempt to mend bridges or continue to let them burn, but I feel like they could have been easily flipped to maintain perspective continuity and still give the player the option to mend or damage the relationship, for, by instance, letting the player choose to compliment, insult, or say nothing about the other character’s outfit.
Too many characters. I almost feel bad for putting this as a con, but at one point I went into the Stats Menu (thankfully, Chernosky included a Contacts option that kept track of character names and who they were) and counted characters. At a little over half-way through the game I counted just over 30 named characters involved in the story. That’s not counting others that are briefly introduced and named just to give verisimilitude to the world—at one point my character contacts some friends from their old high school and another 4 or 5 names got thrown into the mix, but never came up again and so weren’t added to the Contacts.
I played through Keeper of the Sun and Moon over the course of two days and learned my fellow dorm mates very well, and had a good handle on most of the other students. Thankfully the professors were referenced with their classes often enough I didn’t need to remember them much—most of the professors are given one defining character trait for the player to keep them straight. One is late constantly, another is laid back, and one is classically strict and unforgiving.
Other than that, there is what feels like a near constant introduction of officials, politicians, student family members, and elites of New Magi City. Sometimes Chernosky has mercy and gives enough information to remind you who they are when they are mentioned again, but there were lots of times when a character would drop a name and I’d have to stop and do a dance I got very familiar with— going Stats Menu->Contacts->Other and looking for the name mentioned to refresh myself on who they were and why everyone in the scene gasped at the implication of said person’s name.
There are multiple times in the game where the player is given a list of names and it turns out the lists of names are only significant in that they are each hiding one relevant name in the noise, for a better player than me to use to play detective and find family connections and plot elements.
It’s never a good sign when a significant revelation in the epilogue that was set-up as a big moment of surprise is undercut by me having to leave the scene and do menu scrolling to figure out why the revelation was, well…a revelation. To Chernosky’s credit, they were very good at updating the Contacts information as the plot progressed - in fact, when I checked the Contacts in said scene, character info had already been updated.
As I said when I started this con point, I almost feel bad listing this as a con, but it really was too much for me to keep track of on a first play-through. I can see where on replays it would get easier and easier to keep everyone straight, but I didn’t have the mental bandwidth, so for me, it did hurt the story pacing. Some dramatic moments didn’t land as hard because I simply didn’t understand the implications of people who were being referenced.
Disjointed pacing. There were multiple times the story felt a bit disjointed. Some of this was necessary for a story that spans an entire academic year. The genre itself, by necessity, leans a bit into ‘slice-of-life’ territory with jumping between classes, months, and events, but I would have liked for there to be more connective tissue.
The appearances of the villain in the story always felt a bit too random for my tastes. I believe two or three times they just literally appear behind you like a performer in a haunted attraction and practically yell, “The plot continues now!”
Again, some of this, particularly in regards to the main plot, may be my fault. I know I could have seen a bit more connective tissue by getting involved with certain characters that I did not talk to in my play-through.
Surprise game-over. I’ve saved my biggest complaint until last.
Do you remember how I mentioned I’d get back to the Resistance/Acceptance opposed stat in a moment? This is that moment.
The game does a great job of allowing the player to express their displeasure over the entire situation they find themselves in, with repeated and frequent choices to call out other characters, express unhappiness, and refuse to perform tasks. I thought this was great. I found lots of fun in watching that Resistance meter increase. I eventually got it up into the very high 80s, which if you know anything about Fairmath and opposed stats…yeah. I was that big of a sour rebel.
Which brings me to this: Dying and getting a game over for making a choice similar to multiple other choices you’ve made really sucks. I don’t think it’s good narrative or game design to allow players to refuse the call to adventure and Chernosky does a great job throughout all the early story of letting the player do just that—insisting they don’t want any part of attending New Magi Academy, and writing frankly great, funny, or entertaining responses to railroad you into going along with the plot anyway. I really did enjoy taking the opportunity to pick those choices every time, watching my Resistance stat rise, and seeing the friction or fireworks.
So, you can imagine I was shocked and annoyed that three chapters in, after a series of choices that felt similar to all the other Resistance raising choices, the game replies with ‘okay’ and lets you just quit the narrative, at which point it kills you. No checkpoint. No option to go back and make a different choice - just a short scene to show you that the thing characters warned you about would happen if you walked away from the narrative would happen - did happen. And now you get to start completely over.
I was very much enjoying the narrative, my character, the interactions, all the sullen resistant options that had fun responses, pretty much everything up to that point - but when I made a choice I thought the game would block - like it had all others - and just get a bump in my Resistance stat - all that progress was, quite literally, erased. I was so bothered I actually walked away from the game for a day, almost considering dropping it, only to reconsider after a night’s sleep because I had really enjoyed it up until that point.
So, the next morning I took several deep breaths, drank some coffee, and I spent 15 minutes just speed running the choices for the first three chapters and doing my best to pick the ones I remembered choosing before and clicking Next to get back to where I was previously before the game-over. At that point I was finally on to new story, but with a slightly sour taste and a paranoia the game would kill me and erase my progress again. That continued to sit in the back of my mind the rest of my time with the game.
Now, some people familiar with the game will likely point out the author has a character warn you if you make that choice it won’t end well for you and that should be sufficient warning. However, as a counterpoint, the game has two previous scenes where you can, quite literally, choose to give up and die—and the narrative continues. Each time I just got an increase to a stat like my Resistance, so Chernosky had already primed me not to put much stock in character warnings and had taught me that they as the author would not let the story end.
So, uh, yeah. This con is that I almost rage quit.
Final Rating:
(7/10)
Final verdict, I would recommend Keeper of the Sun and Moon. I look forward to reading the sequel Keeper of the Day and Night. My save file with my sullen, rude, non-magic human character is ready for a second year at New Magi Academy.
