This essay contains spoilers for Creme de la Creme.
2019 and 2020 had an unusual back to back combo of commercial Choicescript games in the XYZZY awards. There weren’t any before (although Zombie Exodus received several nominations in 2011 that had to be specially dealt with, as described here or after. What was so special about those years for Choicescript?
I know what was special for me. In fall of 2019, I released a Choicescript game that failed spectacularly, due at least in part to its unusual theme (Christmas!) and genre (otherworldly horror). Afterwards, I decided to learn what made Choice of Games games successful or not, and was able to get steam keys for every game from the company in order to write reviews for them and analyze what made them work, which I summarized here.
In the course of that, I discovered how good Creme de la Creme was, even in comparison with other Choicescript games. The same was true in 2020 with Vampire: The Masquerade–Night Road. I wrote glowing reviews of both on IFDB, and I thought I also mentioned them on the forum, but I don’t see any evidence of that looking back.
Were the games actually especially great among Choice of Games games, or were such games just getting more ‘press’ here in general, from my reviews or from the author being somewhat well-known here?
I think they truly were exceptional. Even now, on the Choice of Games omnibus app, Creme de la Creme has more reviews than any other game. And Vampire: the Masquerade–Night Road has made Choice of Games more many than any other game but Choice of Robots (which lost to 80 Days in a year that also featured Hadean Lands). These are two games that represent some of the best Choice of Games has ever put out.
And, funny enough, Creme de la Creme’s biggest competition in 2019 was another Choicescript game, Turandot. While it didn’t win IFComp, it lost to a lightheard comedy (Zozzled) and traditionally a darker game that loses to a light comedy in IFcomp has a good shot of winning XYZZY (look at Blue Chairs, Bogeyman, for example). Although in this case, Zozzled also won in the first ever XYZZY Best Game tie!
In any case, this game has a lot going for it, despite being the least played game of the XYZZY Best Game winners (alongside Night Road). What does it do right?
Audience Awareness
Choice of Games games are primarily targeted to fans that are fairly young, generally left-leaning, more likely to be LGBT, interested in romance. Not all of those things are definitive of course, but as overall trends they seem to be true.
Creme de la Creme takes the audience well into account. There are many romanceable characters (around 10, I believe, and someone has romanced all of them in a single playthrough). The romanceable characters can have their gender chosen randomly, as one whole block, or individually. The player can customize their gender, their way of dressing, the way others address them, and so forth. Polyamorous relationships are possible. In this alternate world, traditional literature includes gay and polyamorous relationships (not that our world’s traditional literature doesn’t also do this, but it’s even more common in this world).
The setting is a finishing school, which aims to get youth educated for either college or to marry them off to suitable nobles or other wealthy people, hitting on the concerns that much of the audience care for (early romances, marriage, college, leaving family, etc.).
Depth of plotlines
This game is quite large. In the summer I’ve been writing this, I divide my day into ‘play’ chunks and ‘work’ chunks. I usually use one ‘work’ chunk to play an XYZZY winner like Superluminal Vagrant Twin. I had to use 4 work chunks to play this game, taking around 8 or more hours. I think I took 10 hours the first time I played. This is big!
Main plotlines include :
-The PC dealing with the fallout of their parents’ social disgrace
-Blaise bullying and framing the PC before being disappearing
-The truth behind the financial sources of Gallatin (the school in the game)
-The contest between Gallatin and rival school Archembault
-The affair between 3 different teachers at the school.
Side plots intertwine with each other in ways that can be completely missed. These include the clubs; joining the Children of Hecate can lead to numerous mystical opportunities; joining Max’s club leads to a lot of vandalism and pranks; and joining the Prefects leads to you stopping the others a lot. I haven’t tried many of the clubs, including athletics.
And the romances individually have a lot of depth. The headmistress of your school has a child at another, who was my first romance, but events in the endgame really hurt our relationship. On a different playthrough, I romanced Karson, the servant with a dark secret. This time I romanced Delacroix, who has emotionally abusive parents and a penchant for withcraft.
All of these plotlines together make for a massive and replayable game. IFComp games evolved a certain way due to an arms race of sorts with plot and parser functionality, and later Twine and CSS/styling. Choicescript games evolved in a different war, one where replayabality and size were dominant. Creme de la Creme is near a half-million words, which once was one of the largest but has since been dwarfed by several million-word epics. However, it is still very substantial, and the resulting customizable story shows the author’s great talent with plot.
Every Choice a Good Choice
One of the biggest problems I found with low-sales Choicescript games (including mine, I suppose) was punishing the player. In Choicescript, you build up stats and then check them, with different results if you succeed or fail.
There are a lot of games with confusing stats and checks, where the game constantly says ‘you’re wrong, you’re bad, you messed up’ etc. Creme de la Creme and other games don’t do that, at least not so much. You can fail checks and the game can tell you, but it doesn’t ruin you, it just offers alternate paths. Having one really low stat means you get tutoring in it, or learn about it. Failing to escape from kidnappers doesn’t end the game early, it gives you an alterate storyline.
Conclusion
Creme de la Creme is a solid game that still stands up to this day. It excels at knowing its audience, at threading together multiple plot points, and at rewarding the player for almost all play styles.
I’d love to see more players try this one out and rate or review it. It (and Night Road) have half the reviews other XYZZY Best winners have. Of course, in broader terms, it has been played far more than almost every IFComp parser game put together, and has 113 Steam reviews, but I’m mostly recommending it here because I think people will like it.