Honor Bound [WIP Demo]

Honor Bound is the fourth standalone game in the Creme de la Creme series from Choice of Games, a publisher of text-based interactive fiction. This demo contains Chapters 1-5 and is around 227,000 words in total.

You’re a promising officer 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 circumstances of that injury, you’ve been quietly reassigned.

Now you’re to be the bodyguard to the child of a famous scientist who is attending a wilderness boarding school for the children of the richest and most powerful figures of Teran society.

Bond with those around you or impress with aloof competence. Be a kind, trusted confidante to your charge, or a strict, stern caretaker. Work hard for glowing reports from your charge, your military superiors, or the Headteacher to get your life back on track—or risk it all as you uncover secrets that put you and everyone around you in peril.

• Play as male, female, or non-binary; cis or trans; gay, straight, or bisexual; asexual and/or aromantic; allosexual and/or alloromantic; monogamous or polyamorous

• 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 airheaded fellow bodyguard, or the anxious, serious widowed parent of your charge

• 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

• Protect the school, town, and your charge from natural disasters and criminals, or use chaos to further your agendas. Build a warm community, stand apart to focus on yourself, or push tensions higher in a place where gossip is rife

• Negotiate a cushy promotion, or open other doors, through heroic or devious actions. Or become such a disaster that only bandits will give you the time of day

• Unearth and thwart shadowy schemes, or enact them yourself for your own ends

This tightly-knit desert boarding school is a sanctuary for artists and scientists of the future to flourish. But as danger closes in, how far will you go for your ambitions, your commanders, and your country?

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Cover art by Adrien Valdes.