Keeper of the Day and Night
by Brynn Chernosky
Released April 2001 - 390,000 words
Keeper of the Day and Night is the follow-up title to Keeper of the Sun and Moon, where you continue the urban fantasy story of attending a magical college for your now Sophomore year, and continuing to juggle magical classes, supernatural friends, and enemies coming at you from every direction.
I will try and avoid spoilers as much as possible in my review, but keep in mind that because this is a sequel, even some of the implications I make might be spoilers for the first game in the series.
PROS:
Plot. Once again, Chernosky doesn’t disappoint in the story department, and I think the story is even stronger in the sequel than it was in Keeper of the Sun and Moon. Now that they no longer have to worry about introducing the world, characters, and supernatural society, there is a lot more room to delve into the set-up of the plot and character motivations.
Everything feels much more developed here, as the player deals with the reality of what the revelations from the end of the first game have forced them to deal with and confront in their new role.
Keeper of the Day and Night also does a good job of adding more depth to the first game’s story, through re-contextualizing the actions and motivations of some characters and showing events from other perspectives.
In occurs to me that I never mentioned the character I’m playing in my review of the first game, so I’ll do that now.
I continued my adventure as the most normal “chosen one” possible—a regular human college girl who only craves being normal. She resents being thrust into a world of magic and monsters against her will and having massive responsibility forced onto her shoulders. So, she only trusts her single-parent father, and is rebellious and abrasive towards everyone else, because she can’t possibly trust these supernatural beings that kidnapped her at the start of freshman year. She rejects magic entirely and relies only on her own human abilities. She doesn’t want any part of anything that will prevent her from going back to a normal human life as soon as she can get away from this madness. That includes avoiding these weird foods and drinks—she’ll take water or black coffee, thank you very much. Mermaid caviar? How about a chicken breast, you weirdos?
She’s a lesbian, but that’s neither here nor there, since she won’t let anyone get close.
Importantly, she has a strong sense of justice. She hates getting involved, but she won’t let bad things happen to people who don’t deserve it…and she’ll also do anything to make sure bad people are punished.
She’s basically Harry Potter if he hated being at Hogwarts, wanted to go back to London, and resented having to deal with this Voldemort guy, but will, since it seems like everyone else is too incompetent to do so.
Chernosky makes playing this character feel wonderful and rewarding. I was worried that now when we are on Book 2 in a series about attending a magical college, the options to be a resentful hater of the situation would be reduced, but the author has managed to preserve the flavor, nuance, and options of this “path” extraordinarily well.
There is a scene in this game where the player’s dorm mates confront them, and I’m not sure if it’s a scene every player gets in a different flavor, but I was surprised at my character lashing out on her own, really laying into every character viciously…and saying exactly what I was role-playing her to think of them. All without a choice beforehand, which I was impressed by.
Frankly, I’m really impressed by how cohesive and structured Chernosky was able to make the story for even a character like mine, who routinely told characters to “go kick rocks”, refused to attend parties, or be presented issues to take a side on and responding with shrugs of “not my problem”.
Choices again. Once again, Chernosky has knocked it out of the park with a wide range of not just choices for the player, but select-able reasons for making them. Several times I was presented with a binary choice, but with multiple flavors for why I was making whatever choice I decided on taking.
I really appreciate that nuance, even if it only alters the flavor text of actions at times.
Bonus points for having a scene letting my cruel, pessimistic, resistant, and generally miserable character scream and yell at children. It’s not every game that lets your character have a stressed-out meltdown directed at adoring children.
Also, there is a scene at the end of the game where you are presented a binary choice, a classic in dramatic stories, in fact, and Chernosky gives you an option I’d often wished to see a protagonist do in such situations, where you can say, “Screw that. Option 3! Only way to be sure!”
Relationship descriptions. I really liked the change from relationships being percentage bars in the stats menu to descriptions of how the characters feel about you and the option to show both if the player wants.
It really gave more nuance to how characters felt about me, the player. A low percentage number is one thing, but a description of “Often wishes she’d never saved you.” is something else! Even for high percentage relationships, a player gets more information, like “Confused how she can both love and hate someone so much.”
The Ending. Major spoilers, ahoy! I don’t know of how to discuss this part without spoiling major reveals in both the first and second games, so don’t look beyond the spoiler blur unless you’ve already played the games yourself.
Major Spoilers Inside - Don't Open Unless You've Played Both Games
Seriously. I recommend you go and play both games yourself. Don’t spoil yourself.
Last warning.
Okay: So, I don’t know how much of this Chernosky accounted for or set-up (obviously a lot of it), but I also don’t know how many player’s would manage to create the mirrored set-up that makes it punch so hard.My character’s mother was dead and a big part of the reveal in Keeper of the Sun and Moon and though there was a lot of evidence in the first game to suggest it, in the second game, the player can discover that she was really something of a cruel woman, loved, but never caring about anyone else. “Adored, but alone,” someone describes her as.I had accidentally made my character into a sort of perfect parallel of her mother - like mother, like daughter. The outward personality was different, but the internal motivations, lack of true friendships, etc. all lined up perfectly.This is probably where I should mention my character did get very close to one person, the nymph Seraphina. Now, it turns out my mother was responsible for the murder of Seraphina’s whole family. And my character’s primary way of removing threats in the two games has been to remove them. So, when it became clear that Seraphina was threatened by a character, I decided to remove said character with, ahem, murder. Only afterward does my character discover the motives for her own mother’s actions had an identical motivation to her own.So, in the end, my character commits the same crime as her mother, albeit with less collateral damage. And my character has spent the last two game hating this woman and refusing to refer to her as “Mom” or “Mother” due to her actions. Only to repeat history.
I can’t wait for the last book to see how this all shakes out.
CONS:
Side-character overload. Yeah, this is still my complaint, imported from the first game.
I started Keeper of the Day and Night by reading the entirety of the Contacts entries, to try and familiarize myself with all the characters. I realized that part of my issue with keeping so many of the politicians and other characters straight from each other is the fact I use sight-word reading due to mild dyslexia and several of the family names are similar enough in how they start and end that I mix them up - Moreno / Monroe, Celosia / Castella.
Everything did get easier for me to keep track of this time, since I was now two titles into a story with these same characters—as I suspected would be the case if you were replaying the first game multiple times. It also helps that I knew going into this title this time that the stories in the Keeper games are both magical school AND political machination stories.
Still, unlike in the first game, this time in Keeper of the Day and Night the Contacts menu isn’t as complete, and isn’t updated (that I could see) like in the first game. There are plenty of names that get brought up and never added, including a few that WERE in the Contacts menu in the first game and aren’t present in the Contacts menu in the second game, enough though the characters are present in both. I didn’t need to use the Contacts menu as often in this game, but there were several times when I did, confused about people mentioned in a scene, only to get no help, because the names weren’t in the contacts list.
Chernosky wants to make this world feel real, with lots of connected friends, family, politicians, suspects for the mystery, romance interests, etc. but I can’t help but wonder if they are all necessary, and if functions of certain side-characters couldn’t have been collapsed or combined to make stronger more memorable characters over-all.
For instance, the plot purpose of the player’s aunt could have easily been fulfilled in other ways. And I think it would make some of the intrigue and mystery work better with a smaller, tighter cast that let the player hold more of the mystery in their head and have a chance to connect the dots on their own.
As it is, even for someone like me who reads mysteries regularly, at some point it started to feel like “dirty pool”. There were so many suspects, people, and connections, and misdirects that even when narrowed down to 4 or 5 people I still didn’t feel like I had a fair amount of information to narrow it down much from that group. There is something to be said for building tension with a reader by letting them tightly narrow down suspicion to one or two suspects well before the end of your story - that way the reader to build theories and look for clues to verify themselves one way or another, and if you do plan a misdirect, it can feel fair as the reader has the bandwidth to possibly see it coming.
Less than two chapters from the end I still had 4 named suspects the game gave me, of which it had already shown ways it also might NOT be them, several different characters possibly working on behalf of someone else, and at least two possible double-agents. At the eleventh hour in a story built around a mystery, I think that’s entirely too many balls to still have in the air for the reader to try and make any kind of educated deduction about which one will land.
As for the final reveal, I didn’t really get any set-up, which again, as much as the games branch, I might have missed with my path through, but I still felt a little blindsided. Besides just a genre suspicion on the character’s first scene in the new title and one other off-side mention right before the 11th hour, I didn’t get any clues.
Oh, and to round out this “con” entry, I have in my notes this:
Oh-no, those high school friends who got mentioned in the first game showed up again, but now with last names! 
Character inconsistency that wasn’t addressed. So, my single parent dad is apparently bi-sexual. And it seemed to come out of nowhere.
The first game only mentioned him and my mom, and this game even mentioned he’d dated another woman in the past, but suddenly he’s dating a guy. Now, that wouldn’t be impossible—I’ve certainly known several gay men in my own life that used to be married to women and even had kids before they decided they needed to live their truth.
What I did find weird was this was not addressed by the game, either in internal thoughts by my character, or a statement from their dad, or anything really. It wouldn’t have needed much, just some kind of acknowledgment.
It felt doubly weird because my character kept mentioning and thinking about how much her dad still loved her dead mom, and didn’t want to hurt him by letting him know certain uncovered truths about her.
Spoiler: Of course, it also turned out my character’s mom was bi-sexual too, and never addressed beyond my character thinking, "I hope dad never finds out. "
Achievement pop-ups. This isn’t even a real con against Keeper of the Day and Night specifically, I just noticed it in this game, even though it’s a common issue in a lot of Choicescript titles. It’s when you click on a choice and instantly get a ding and pop-up that pretty much spoils the whole page of new text you’ve yet to read.
I’m wondering how this might be mitigated by delaying the pop-up until the next *page_break, with a little scene re-organizing.
I had two instances in the games where I got achievements for winning a fight before I got to read about said fights, so… a little anti-climatic.
Final Rating:
(8/10)
Final verdict, I would recommend Keeper of the Day and Night. It manages to be better than it’s predecessor by virtue of having most of the world-building already out of the way and a dramatic escalation in character stakes and dramatic choices available to the player.
Now I’m sad I’ll have to wait to play Keeper of Life and Death. I know a substantial WIP is already available, but reading WIPs generally take a bit of the magic away for me that comes with reading something for the first time all the way through!
and now I’m stuck wondering what content I should give to MC who refuses to leave their room and interact with characters but I’m way too invested by now.
At least I know what I can expect for my word count on my own WIP—verbose.
(In case you guys thought I always just picked the anti-social options in these games! …okay, I did in my first play-through of this game. But this time I was a sweet butterfly!)