Honor Bound Steam Charts & Stats

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 never played the previous titles from the series. Doesn't seem like it's needed - all I can say is that there's an overabundance of names that I couldn't really keep up with and that may or may not be related to the setting. Varied cast of characters. 6 love interest - you can pick their gender, two of them are trans. Most existing couples don't seem to be traditional; poly marriages are thing and a bit overfocused on (not sure if harems, it's not explained here how 3 people marry together). It's an easy read - the type that keeps you entertained and glued to your screen until you finish it; however, the start is slower and the ending feels a little abrupt and even anticlimatic. It has a bit of everything - some slices of life, some romance, some action, though none of it is very fleshed out. You get choices almost every single page - some add to your stats, the other test them. I feel they could've done more with your character - the setup is good, there's a bit of discussion here and there about your thoughts and feelings but that's about it. A few examples: - When you're talking to the priest about having killed someone, I expected something deeper, but not only is the answer pretty generic no matter the background, it's also almost identical to the reaction you get from telling another character; you even get the exact same response choices. At least you get the option to pray / remember the person that you killed, so the background isn't completely ignored. - The main characters' pain & injuries are a gimmick mentioned a few times that have no real consequences over the story (you can still carry heavy stuff while recovering from a spine injury and so on) - mostly used to trigger an achievement if you fail to take care of yourself too many times. - Religion is added but while it crops up here and there, I didn't see it having any effect over anything; it changes the events slightly - for example, a friend notices a statue in your room, or you get one extra irrelevant option at some point in a discussion but I played with both a believer and a non believer and there's no effect over your mental state, your recovery or your choices (like whether or not to help someone or hide something etc). In fact, you're always given a way for a non believer to choose believer options if you want (for example, choosing to participate in a ceremony because you like being part of the community) - so it's mostly choices to create the character you want in your mind, but with no ingame consequences. The other characters suffer from the same issue of their stats having almost no relevancy: - The characters can lean one way or the other with their personalities depending on your choices, but these values are only stat tests and the response is the same if you pass the test; they only seem to matter in the epilogue a little, but show no change in the character along the story - There's a bit of a discrepancy between the bar that shows how well you get along with someone and the text; you can have 80 on a bar with someone and they're angry with you and you never talk to them ever again; ok, we go from "trust" to "anger" but the option to patch things up only pops in the romance and not in friendship. - your charge's stats are even less relevant, even though there's several of them; once again, the result of a choice is the same if you pass the test using your preferred stat that you worked on; the character doesn't change or make different choice by herself; for example, she gets on patching up a relation with another girl if you ask her to and doesn't if you don't, no matter the stat you use - so it's all gimmicky, it genuinely didn't need 5 bars about her since all you needed was your influence over her; seems like they were added so you could fail if you choose a response that doesn't test the stat you worked on but that's about it. TLDR: it's a good read, but it's not long enough and detailed enough to be too deep. It's all very well technically done from the pov of a Choose your own adventure game, but the entire story is based on whether you pass or fail when a stat is being tested, the stats themselves changing almost nothing about a specific character or their actions (aside from where they end up in the epilogue); it also kinda fails at using the unique setup when fleshing out the character and the interaction with the others.