"Honor Bound"—Guard students and secrets at an elite school!

Originally published at: “Honor Bound”—Guard students and secrets at an elite school! - Choice of Games LLC

Honor Bound
We’re proud to announce that Honor Bound, the latest in our popular “Choice of Games” line of multiple-choice interactive-fiction games, is now available for Steam, Android, and on iOS in the “Choice of Games” app.

It’s 40% off until December 12th! And you can catch up on the other games in the Crème de la Crème world, too: Crème de la Crème, Royal Affairs, and Noblesse Oblige are all on sale this week for 40% off!

Protect an exclusive boarding school and rebuild your life after scandal as a military bodyguard for the children of the rich and famous! Return to the world of Crème de la Crème, this time as a military officer in the Republic of Teran.

Honor Bound is an interactive novel by Harris Powell-Smith where your choices control the story. It’s entirely text-based, 595,000 words and hundreds of choices, without graphics or sound effects, and fueled by the vast, unstoppable power of your imagination.

You’ve built a promising career in the Teranese military, a force which has not seen major engagement in decades but which holds vast influence. Thanks to an injury, you’re no longer in the field. Thanks to the complicated (read, scandalous) circumstances of that injury, you’ve been quietly reassigned as a bodyguard for the teenage child of a famous scientist. This should be an easy assignment: your charge is at boarding school in the wilderness, an exclusive sanctuary where the children of the rich and powerful become artists and scientists of the future. The school sits close to your own hometown, so you’ll be familiar with the area. Finally, you can recover your health and get your career back on track.

But danger is closing in, and peril can come from inside as well as out. What secret projects are your colleagues pursuing in the dead of night? What is your commanding officer not telling you? Bandits lurk in the wilderness—including one of your childhood friends!—and natural disasters constantly threaten the fragile environment. And then there’s the danger to your heart, from the complicated feelings that come from returning to your birthplace, and from adjusting to the new reality of your life. Can you really go home again?

Build a warm community and bond with your colleagues, or impress everyone with your aloof competence. Chase ambition to receive glowing reports and get your life back on track—or become such a disaster that only bandits will tolerate your presence. Or, just maybe, you will have to risk it all for the sake of doing the right thing.

  • Play as male, female, or nonbinary; cis or trans; gay, straight, or bisexual; asexual and/or aromantic; allosexual and/or alloromantic; monogamous or polyamorous.
  • Customize your age: play a junior officer in your 20s, a mid-ranking officer in your 30s, or a senior officer in your 40s.
  • Befriend or romance a severe military officer; a bold, easygoing outdoors expert; a determined and overworked priest; an earnest but scatterbrained fellow bodyguard; a childhood friend turned disgraced bandit; or the anxious, serious widowed parent of your charge.
  • Pet the dog, the cat, or both.
  • Meet the main characters of Crème de la Crème, Royal Affairs, and Noblesse Oblige, and find out what their lives are like now!
  • Shape the school life of your teenage charge: encourage her to make friends or sabotage her rivals; let her slack off or push her to achieve; and get caught up in boarding-school drama.
    Unearth and thwart shadowy schemes—or join in the scheming for your own gain.

How far will you go for ambition, duty, and your country?

We hope you enjoy playing Honor Bound. We encourage you to tell your friends about it, and recommend the game on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and other sites. Don’t forget: our initial download rate determines our ranking on the App Store. The more times you download in the first week, the better our games will rank.

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I can’t believe it’s finally here! I’m so looking forward to hearing what people think. It was such a fun game to write, and I had a really brilliant time getting to know all the characters and giving lots of personality to the PC along with tons of different paths through the story!

If you play and enjoy it, please consider leaving a review - it makes a huge difference especially in the early days of it being out! Thank you so much :heart:

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I noticed there doesn’t seem to be a way to import the save from the last game. Did you not add that or am I just stupid?

It should be there, but I’ve contacted CoG to check if something’s missing or incorrect. Thank you! (The quiz at the beginning will also cover what happened in earlier games, so you won’t miss out on anything if you pick that option instead of importing, it just takes a bit longer - for which I’m sorry!)

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What injury options are available for selection?

Play will commence in T-30 minutes :slight_smile: I’ve been looking forward to this. I’ll post a Steam review when I’ve done a playthrough.

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Punctured lung (from a broken rib), spinal fracture, fractured skull, or fractured knee!

I’m so pleased, I hope you have a great time! :smile:

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Massive congrats! This is such a huge accomplishment. Happy release day! :tada: :partying_face:

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Thank you so much, it’s really nice for it to be out there now!

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I am so thrilled to see Honor Bound out in the world at last! The world that Harris Powell-Smith has created in Crème de la Crème, and expanded and revisted in Noblesse Oblige and Royal Affairs, has become a favorite destination for so many of us. This time, we get to see it through the eyes of an older character, a soldier rather than a student, Teranese rather than Westerlind, but it’s every bit as delightful as the others.

Honor Bound isn’t my personal favorite of the Crèmeverse games (which is not a criticism - it’s still top tier), but it is certainly Powell-Smith’s most polished and mature work. The more dramatic story elements are woven smoothly into the story among the slice-of-life elements from early on, so the crisis that arises in the end feels like a natural course of events rather than a sudden twist. There’s more depth to the characters and relationships, especially the romance options. There’s a little bit of everything here: politics and romance and corruption and ambition and self-discovery and the small drama of everyday life. It’s just so much to explore.

Honor Bound stands alone perfectly well, so readers who haven’t played any of the other Crèmeverse games need not hesitate to dive in - although fans of the earlier games will enjoy getting to catch up with a few beloved characters.

Basically, I just can’t say enough good things about this game, and I look forward to many playthroughs to come.

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That was missing, but the game’s been updated to add it now. Sorry about that, and thanks for pointing it out!

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It’s no problem and you are very welcome.

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I’m so glad it’s almost the weekend. I’m going to replay everything before I start this one…

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Congratulations, Harris! This is such an incredible achievement. I’m in awe of your delightful (and numerous) games. :slight_smile:

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Awesome, congratulations :confetti_ball::tada: I got a steam gift card from my mom so I’ll happily indulge and buy the amazing game :laughing: never stop writing @HarrisPS :heart:

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@AletheiaKnights Thank you so much for your thoughtful and kind comments. I had so much fun exploring a different part of the setting and making a different kind of game, while keeping various familiar elements.

@AnneWest Amazing, I hope you have fun doing the lead-up to get into the mood! I love hearing about the various adventures different PCs get up to through the series!

@Jaybirdy Thank you so much, that’s really lovely to hear!

@Queen_Zelda Ahhhh that’s brilliant! I’m so glad and I hope you enjoy!

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Spinal fracture MC feels a tad weird at times. Mainly in Korzha’s sex scene where they ride them if body composition is female+male, optional opportunity to visit a masseur (back touching) and in overall very surprising springiness of movement.

Was that intended or mostly a result of injury taking one reactivity slot together overall? My character mostly ignored his health exercises and still somehow managed to stay at fair health.

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The injury affects things more, and pain is mentioned more, when health is lower. It’s possible the thresholds of better and worse health need adjustment. (Health is decreased by not resting and not doing exercises, but also by failing various tests, so it may be that you scraped by even though you didn’t do physio because of avoiding failures.)

Description-wise, though, it’s been long enough since the injury, and the PC’s been convalescing in good enough conditions, that the PC doesn’t generally have acute pain or mobility problems. It’s more of a chronic issue of dull pain and stiffness that flares up on occasion. I didn’t want PC’s to be in constant agony and difficulty with it, otherwise it begs the question of why they’re considered suitable for physical work.

The masseur isn’t doing something like chiropractic, or a sports massage - more a relaxation massage, so I’d consider it fine to do if the PC has chosen it: their bones are fine at this point, it’s more their muscles (or migraines, for the head-injury version) that are the problem.

About the sex scene, I’m not sure if I understand what you mean about body composition - do you mean a cis male PC and female Korzha? Either way I don’t think it specifies who’s riding whom when penetration happens in that scene. Exact/precise positioning tended (though not in all cases) to be something I was happy to leave up to players to picture themselves as it’s such a personal preference thing. I get that including more references to the injury in that kind of situation are good, though.

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Yeah, I’ve meant this case. In the full detail scene Korzha rides a cis male MC on top of his lower back, where the injury is. It just kind of felt that there wasn’t enough reactivity for this specific type of injury - it also seems much more dire compared to other ones.

Knee injury, head injury, punctured lung and then, suddenly, just spinal injury. I picked it because I expected the injury-related content to appear much more and have a unique flair, but it haven’t really felt like it was properly recognised.

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Thanks, that’s helpful - I understand better now!

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