Creme de la Creme

Fantatstic choose your own adventure...beautiful writing and fun options

[h2] Introduction / TLDR [/h2] Fun, fun, fun! Creme de la Creme is a romance-forward IF novel set in a fancy boarding school. As someone who has grown up with Harry Potter this has been an intensely nostalgic read as it straight up borrows motifs and tropes from those books, but transforms them into its own thing. The result is an engaging and joyous book with charming and deeply familiar setting, characters and romance. If you want a social-focused board-school-em-up game, this one is excellent. [h2] Writing and setting [/h2] Let's get the Harry Potter comparisons out of the way. Last time I read them was half my life ago, the last 2-3 books I recall reading without caring too much about them and I have since grown even further distanced from them. Still this game manages to lean on those books in a way that makes me genuinely nostalgic and feel right at home. Tropes and motifs are remixed very efficiently to create an instantly recognizable setting, yet they're used in ways that makes the setting and characters feel like their own unique configurations of literary units than some sort of fanfic. It's difficult for me to try to imagine how it would be to read this for someone not familiar with HP or other similar youth literature set in boarding schools, but I would want to imagine this book still really holds up well. Creme de la Creme is paced well and quick. Powell-Smith is very efficient at setting up vivid scenes, so despite there being a lot of different things happening rather quickly the setting feels alive and engaging. Drama and intrigue is also nicely tunes to an upper-class high school setting. We're not saving the world, instead we are defending ourselves against slander, romancing peers and trying to win the sports day competitions. Overall this is just really fun, with the one downside that those few times the writing turn to more serious and heavy drama it can feel just a little bit whiplash-y. The setting is cute, too! "Boarding school without telecommunications" is a very efficient way to make a world feel believable without having to take too much of the exterior world into account, and while Gallatin is not the most richly developed world lore-wise it's an excellent setting for an interactive fiction book with an abundance of social skill checks. While there is a healthy dose of competition and some drama going on, characters are given room to display the kinds of insecurities and awkwardness that comes with being a teenager, which makes for a story that feels pretty grounded. And the world outside of the school gates is almost a little bit too idyllic, but unless you're going to think too much on it that only makes the book more appealing to lose yourself into. [h2] Characters and romance [/h2] There's a lot to love with the wide character gallery. Literally. There are 9-10 different romance options, I think, and they are all catering to different flavors of romance tropes / archetypes. They all have variable genders that you can set depending on preference, which works pretty well (more on that later). The sheer width of the character gallery means that no one gets the character depth that you can get from stories focusing on a smaller cast, but overall I have felt that the characters have been given enough space to come into their own. The pacing of the romance is great; you can start pursuing your love interest early on in the story and have the relationship progress as the story moves on -- super engaging if you find someone you really like and want to see more of. Characters in this book feel very familiar, bordering on trope-y. Some even feel like they are direct references to characters in other works, but they are always given enough rework and space to feel like more than just collections of tropes. And the width of characters and their sheer difference from each other makes Gallitin feel like a living place. The one thing I wish I had gotten more of would be insight into their internal lives, as the dialogue is very driven by plot, character motivations and giving the setting texture. Oh, and being able to set the genders of the characters works relatively well. However, in particular when it comes to tropes and references that [i]are[/i] heavily gendered there is a bit of friction that kinda starts highlighting the artifice. There is a good chunk of romance content in this book and it is surprisingly straight forward and un-elevated. You don't get much in terms of description of what the main character feels, and when it comes to your love interest (in the path I read at least) the feedback you get is mainly social cues and physical reactions. At the same time people are surprisingly straight forward and attracted to you in this book, and there is a wide array of different kinds of romantic and sexual behaviors represented amongst the cast. This makes for a surprisingly down to earth, but at the same time friction-free romance. It's been super fun to read the romance content, but the lack of friction really makes me feel like something fundamental to interpersonal communication is missing. It's kinda alienating that everyone is so sure of themselves, what they want and communicating with the MC without failure or misunderstanding. ...I still want to play through the game like another 5 times and romance the cuties I didn't the first go-around though. Oh, didn't know where to fit this in, but if you enjoyed this games setting and want an explicitly lesbian game, Hanako Games wonderful visual novel / student council management game Black Closet also set in an upper-class boarding school will be straight up your alley.