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, 550,000 words and hundreds of choices, without graphics or sound effects, and fueled by the vast, unstoppable power of your imagination.

I sat down with Harris to discuss this latest game. You can play the first three chapters of Honor Bound today; the rest of the game will release on December 5th! Be sure to wishlist it on Steam—it really helps. 

We return to the world of Crème de la Crème in Honor Bound, but this time players will be experiencing it in a much different way. Tell me about the PC and the setting.

The Republic of Teran has been mentioned here and there in earlier games in the Crème de la Crème series, and the Royal Affairs PC went there for a whirlwind vacation, but this is our first long trip there. It’s a sprawling archipelago with one large island plus many smaller ones to the south, one of which notably seceded from the mainland a few decades ago. Landscapes range from mountainous areas to rainforest to wide open plains.

Teran considers itself more modern and advanced than some of the other countries such as Westerlin, where Crème de la Crème is set, although just as in other places, people with wealth and influence behave badly – and the meritocracy is not always as straightforward as people would like to think. Three hundred years ago the monarchy was overturned in a military coup, and it’s now ruled by a President and Parliament. Military service is embedded into the wider social culture. Almost everyone does two years of service aged eighteen, although not everyone sticks with it as a career.

Enter the Honor Bound PC. They did remain in the military – the details of which can be decided by the player – and have been working there for a variable number of years, as they’re either in their late twenties, in their thirties, or in their early forties. They’ve built up a good reputation over the years, but a recent incident left them badly injured and reassigned. There are a lot of options as to why this happened, ranging from having disobeyed orders to rescue civilians, to being wrongly blamed for an accident, to abandoning their exploration team in a cave-in, and more!

So now at the start of Honor Bound they’re in a position where they need to prove that they’re worthy of staying. Or figure out whether they want something else from their life…

At first blush I might have guessed that playing a mature adult in a school setting might be a little less captivating than the youthful PCs of Royal Affairs and Crème de la Crème. But you’ve—as ever!—taken a really fresh approach to that gameplay experience.

Thank you so much! I’ve really enjoyed taking the opportunity to embrace a fresh way of telling stories in this setting, and taking advantage of setting it in a different country to explore that. The adult Honor Bound PC has more responsibilities to consider and juggle than a younger PC, but also a lot more freedom and agency. They have the chance to stand up for themselves and for their principles against other adults in a way the Crème de la Crème and Royal Affairs can’t always do.

And it’s been fun to write an adult with more physical capabilities: you can help in emergencies and thwart – or enact – various shenanigans because of having more influence available to you.

It was also lots of fun to write teenagers from an adult perspective. At fourteen, Catarina and her friends are younger than most of the Crème de la Crème and Royal Affairs characters, but I could imagine them having a whole other game to themselves. There’s a lot going on with the kids beneath the surface and I really enjoyed giving the Honor Bound PC glimpses of their world, and the ability to interact or interfere if they want to. If they bond with Catarina over the course of the game, they can influence her in a number of directions and make a genuine connection; it’s very different to writing teenagers interacting with other teenagers, and it was fun showing this different view.

Plus it was refreshing to write friendships and romantic relationships between adults: the communication styles are different and so are the associated emotions. Some of the romantic interests have had serious relationships before; some are wary about workplace romance; some are expecting something casual and may be surprised by their depth of feeling. One knew the PC when they were younger and therefore has a different perspective. Even the younger romanceable characters have gone through some major life changes, though not all of them feel comfortable sharing about them at first, and it was lovely to explore that through the growing relationships – romantic and otherwise.

As you’ve grown and refined your writing and coding style for COG, I wonder what you’ve been able to iterate and innovate on game by game.

I’ve developed more clarity about what my goals are with the games. When writing Honor Bound, I did have moments where I needed to course-correct and figure out what exactly was going to be in the chapter I was about to write. I think that always happens! But in general I found that easier to do this time around than with some of my earlier games because I had a stronger sense of what I wanted from each part of the game.

With each game I’ve developed better responsivity for when the PC is trying to romance lots of different incompatible characters at once! In my earlier games, the characters sometimes have conversations about it but in Honor Bound it’s all a lot clearer and the romance interests feel to me more real and human in the way they talk to each other and to the PC about what’s going on.

And in general I’ve developed how skills and personality stats work together, and clarity about what stats are being tested. In Honor Bound, I’ve included an option to show what’s happening to the stats, but even without that I think the stats mesh together in an improved way. I also made the descriptive text, the PC’s dialogue, and the PC’s “inner voice” very responsive to the personality choices the player has made. There are so many different self-expressive choices as well as background options, and I really wanted the PC to feel like the player’s own. So it was really exciting when playtesters said things like “I really loved that my very callous PC had that pragmatic thought about this event, when my very Humane PC was more sympathetic”.

Do you have more stories to tell in this world? Noblesse Oblige was a great glimpse into some interesting standalone story possibilities.

For the moment, I’m taking a break from the Crème de la Crème world – I’ve been writing in it near-constantly for six years now, which blows my mind – but I have a lot of ideas! My current favourite is one about an archaeological expedition. But who knows, I’ll probably come up with many more over time…

What else are you working on for COG or otherwise?

I’ve got a couple of CoG projects in the pipeline – neither of which are from the Crème de la Crème setting – but they’re under wraps for now. Both involve magic, though, and I’m very much looking forward to writing some creepy supernatural stuff with CoG for the first time since Blood Money came out!