
Protect an exclusive boarding school and rebuild your life after scandal as a military bodyguard! How far will you go for ambition, duty, and your country?
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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?
Stats
All-time low is the lowest price we've recorded for this game since we started tracking it.
Languages: English
Engagement
Reviews
Loved this game. Great central story premise with engaging slow burn romance options. One of my newest favorite romances (the priest of course). Highly recommend. Lots of options that give re-playability (five romance options [with poly options!!!], three different starting ages, lots of different starting professions in the military, etc.) Only issue is the out of left field references to the past games, but did not cause too much trouble. Finally, this game has a lot of great quality of life options (with in-depth glossaries of characters and events, keeps track of player character appearance and history, chapters with a tally of which chapter you are on and how many are in the game in total, etc.
Another great game from H Powell Smith! I liked that I could set the PC's age relatively older compared to previous games, given the amount of history they can have with the military. I think this really helped the latter chapters in my case, giving the ending a kind of character development / turning over a new leaf vibe. Also never felt like there was a choice I wanted that wasn't in the game. The atmosphere is quite chill and oftentimes humorous, except of course for the more military-focused chapters. Even the town / random townspeople felt fleshed out. The characters feel well-written and their relationships (with you, with each other) contribute to the plot the most, in my opinion. However, the scenes where you tell people things that are going on can get pretty funny (unintentionally), if you repeat them enough LOL. Probably the fault of my warped sense of humor that a scene towards the end felt a bit Scooby Doo-ish, but the intensity ramped up quickly afterwards. I played with stat markers on, so that would have impacted how intense scenes felt for me. The Royal Affairs cameos were a pleasant surprise! The PC felt natural with the choices I had picked last game. Will replay this game after playing RA's epilogue!
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Hours played at review time, across 20 reviews with recorded playtime.
Я повелась на положительные отзывы. Зря. Чушь несусветная...
Masterful. tbh i cant write reviews that don't accidentally spoil certain parts of the game, but i still wanted to show support, absolutely love this series of games and i plan on replaying all of them. from the start. all over again. i love them that much.
I loved the pacing and writing and worldbuilding.... actually I loved everything. it was genuinely really fun. All the characters are endearing in their own ways. Honestly one of best games I've played in this style so far, excited to play the other ones in the universe now that I know they exist.
SO GOOD! i love the romance options, who all feel real + flawed, though savarel has captured my heart hahaha. it's a great story and has some really fun stats, as well as some tough dilemmas. so good!!! <3333
WOW wow wow. ok. so first off; i might be a little biased as this is (technically) my first text-cyoa i've ever bought & finished, but it was pretty fantastic. there's so many options which lends to deliiciousss replayability factor (mmm my favorite). The length itself is pretty good, took me around 20~ish hours (imma slow reader), but i do think the thing it lacks most is not being as fleshed out as it could be. it rather "under-stays" / much of the overall story & pacing feels kinda.. Rushed. Not in a badly made sense but like, missed opportunity i guess. There was so much more potential for the "little moments" that weren't given as much time put into them as they could've. there's plenty of instances i felt could've and *should've* been fleshed-out more beyond a couple sentences. Overall i'd say it sorta feels like reading a partial rough-draft or like the whole thing kinda feels like a demo. like it gets sooo close to feeling satisfying as far as plotpoints & character interactions go, but then time is skipped, or points aren't touched on as deeply, and it makes it feel much rougher than it could've. the later half of the game feels very sped up, skipping through seasons without much dallying, which is unfortunate because i think the whole story would benefit from slowing waaay down and taking more time to each seasonal chapters. it's hard to describe exactly because it didn't really impact my experience negatively to any lasting/noticeable extent... It's like ... The 'content' is quality, but i don't get enough time to fully appreciate it before i'm whisked away to the next moment. It's a bit like going to a museum on a time limit, you see all the cool art exhibits and stuff, but you can't stop and appreciate the details, so all you remember is the general shape of a piece in a blur while you're hurrying onto the next painting so you can get the most out of your time & money; but it doesn't feel fully realized despite the effort. Idk how else to describe this feeling! Anyway i really enjoyed the characters and the amount of customization (i thought it was pretty quaint that youre given the option to modify the outcomes of the previous games, esp since i didn't play them.) Raffi was my favorite (✿◡‿◡) but his romance ending felt a little rushed too unfortunately! I wish there was more time to get further into detail with the potential 'futures', like marriage or starting a family? Maybe DLC or a sequel :] ?.... I will be replaying to test out how the poly mechanic works and to see other romance routes, to check if they also suffer from the 'rushed' feeling. (Edit: Ok this time I tried out a multi-romance route with Varenn (captain korzha) and Denario, which honestly i'm just surprised it didn't explode in my face since they aren't the most compatible LOL. But if you choose the "It'll work itself out" option near the end, you can stay in a relationship with both of them. It didn't bring up the rockiness between them after this on the ending i got (being Honored), but iiii like to think eventually varenn warms up to him. Enemy to lovers style ^_^ The pacing for this one seemed okay, but maybe its superficial because you're technically dealing with two romances at once? Although this pairing technically isn't one of the legitimate "poly" routes, so i'll have to play again to try one of those. But in my experience romancing multiple people; even if they're not into eachother (or one of them "hates" the other, in this case,) it should turn out fine if u play ur cards right!! As far as a "future" in romance goes for multi-partner routes; this one allowed me options to choose to move in with Varenn or stay at ozera, although i unfortunately didn't see any option about staying with Denario in some capacity. who knows maybe he moved in with us in the end... Still no discussion of things like marriage and such, but moving in together is a step up! So I think it must differ between romance routes.) As far as MC customization goes, i think it's great, definitely more than i've seen from a couple other VN's and text-cyoa (demos) i've tried in the past, but even still i think there could have been more. (I'm a little surprised you never get to decide the color of your eyes! I didn't even realize until halfway through the story when i noticed a description of korzha's eye's being grey, and it made me go "huh! what about our eyes?") Being able to choose between three different age groups/"experience" in service was absolutely my favorite aspect. I greatly enjoyed playing a grizzled standoffish Captain, i hope to find more cyoa's that have features like this!! One thing about conversations go that i realize might not lend itself well to being a 'character' maybe is how many instances where you're forced to verbally respond or insert yourself into a conversation where it felt .. idk. Improper ? to do so. Can't think of one in particular aside from maybe at the big celebration event, where you speak with the elites and the field marshal. I wish there were more options to quietly listen in on conversations and just nod/"mhm" along rather than being forced to throw my two cents in XD it isn't a real complaint, nor did it sour the experience for me at all, but it would've been cool to have more quiet responses, although the ones we did have were nice too :] Main takeaways: I wish Catarina was my daughter. Immediately smitten w/ her. Big "I've only had her for a day and a half, but if anything happened to her I would kill everyone in this room and then myself." energy. (unfortunately, first playthrough Fiore was furious with me for the Big No No Experiments at the finale, and i never saw her again :[ hoping i won't lose her next time... I WAS SO SAD!!) (Edit: I did lose her again but Fiore didn't hate me as much this time... PROGRESS WAS MADE! I'm going to try again....)
I'd write an actual review but they made Denairo so hot that I just don't know what to say... Thank you Author, for writing Denairo? ... Also I swear the Author's intimate writing keeps leveling up each book.
已玩過手機版 這家發行商推出很多類似的遊戲, 但沒有奇幻或科幻要素劇情也能有趣的很少, 這就是其中之一
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Momentum
Pace estimated from the game's recent review growth (our daily snapshots) at its own sales-per-review ratio — a momentum signal, not booked sales.
Audience
Estimated from the language of this game's reviews — a proxy for where players are, not official Steam demographics.
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