One of the best horror premises is going back to your small hometown and slowly uncovering long-buried secrets. The potential for tying the town’s evils to your family history is apparent from the start, allowing everything to have more personal stakes. Small town citizens always have the best petty rivalries, which can be amplified by whatever weird happenings begin to occur.
Scarlet Hollow, from the two-person studio Black Tabby Games, brings you back to a rural Appalachian mining town for the death of your aunt. You stay with your cousin, who runs the mine and seems to have bad blood with you, related to family drama you weren’t privy to, as you wait the seven days until the funeral. In the meantime, you meet the town’s various residents as paranormal things begin to happen.
Much like Slay the Princess, Black Tabby Games’ other project, this all plays out as a visual novel with a heavy amount of narrative freedom. Whereas Slay the Princess was a smaller-scale story, allowing you to make these choices in shorter narrative loops that built on each other, Scarlet Hollow is much longer, taking place over seven chapters. Originally released in Early Access in 2020, today marks the full release of Chapter 5, with another update planned that brings home the story with its final two parts. I’m usually not someone who jumps into Early Access games, but my fondness for Slay the Princess caused me to get caught up in the hype of the new chapter, and I am so glad I finally took the plunge.
In Scarlet Hollow, you don’t have a set character, but rather one you create at the beginning of the game. You give them a name, pronouns, and a pair of traits that will define them. These traits do an amazing job of helping distinguish who you are by giving you unique options as the narrative unfolds. I chose Book Smart and Keen Eye, making my playthrough one that was focused on knowing or noticing details, and it turns out these might have been the most basic stats that I could have picked. I was glad when I noticed someone trying to hide their behavior or remembered a specific detail of the town’s history, but I couldn’t help but wonder what the game would have been like if I picked a weird combination like Mystical and Talks to Animals. Or if I built a beefcake himbo by picking Powerful Build and Hot. Even though you’re only picking two traits out of seven, the way they are handled in play makes it feel like the possibilities they allow for are endless.
The most amazing part of the game is just how branching it is, making your choices truly feel like they matter. Not only do these traits give you different options, but your choices about who you talk to or what you do with your time can lead you down wildly different paths. The Steam page promises that you will only see one-fifth of the game on a single playthrough, and based on my ten-hour run-through of Chapters 1-5, I can totally see that. Not only does the climax of each episode end with a monumental decision, but there are plenty of interactions throughout that can cause you to spend more time with one character over another or pull at a specific narrative thread.
Given that it’s episodic, it feels a bit like a TV show, with each chapter having its own self-contained story that still contributes to the overall narrative of the town and its many mysteries. I was surprised at how different they all were while still feeling like they tonally belonged with each other. I went on a cryptid hunt, explored a creepy mine, and cleansed a haunted house, among many other things. Excellent writing makes all these situations shine, and the fact that they plan so many very different narrative branches is a herculean amount of work, especially when it maintains such a high standard of quality for each of them.
A small but greatly appreciated thing Scarlet Hollow does is a quick recap when you start a chapter. Even though I was playing this game all at once, it helped to see what moments they emphasized, shining extra light on an interaction I might have deemed inconsequential. The game slowly builds so many different threads, creating a broader mystery than I anticipated, so I was always grateful for helpful reminders every time I started a new chapter. I can only imagine how crucial this is for those who have been playing since the start, so I’m happy they put in the extra work to implement them.
What really makes it all work are the characters that you run into throughout the town. Every one of them feels well-rounded, with a charming personality and a complicated web of relationships that makes your choices even trickier to navigate. In my playthrough, I found myself gravitating towards Stella, the YouTuber who investigates paranormal happenings in the area, even going down the romance path with her, but it wasn’t an easy choice, as all of them are equally fun to spend time with. I’m itching to do another playthrough to test out the dynamic relationship system, because the characters truly are the soul of the game.
Even though your character is a blank slate at the beginning, the dialogue you choose throughout your many interactions gives you a lot of leeway to define them as you see fit. There’s honestly a staggering amount of choices for many of your responses, forcing you to scroll down in the text box to see them all. What’s even more impressive is that none of them seem to be outlandish, at least based on the traits I had. For every option, I could trace a direct line to a possible motivation my character could have to think that way, even if it wasn’t a direction that I was interested in pursuing. This made navigating the many character relationships a joy, deepening my connection with them very naturally while defining who I was.
To lean into the cliche, the titular town of Scarlet Hollow is a character in itself, bringing a ton of personality to the game. Locations fall into standard small-town clichés, but are made unique through their well-defined history. The game’s folklore, inspired by Appalachian myths, feels familiar yet original. Just when I thought I knew what to expect from a creature, it added another little twist to keep me off balance. Many of these monsters actually end up having a sympathetic aspect to their origins, bringing a strong sense of heart alongside the horror.
All of this is rendered in an absolutely gorgeous hand-drawn art style that breathes so much life into every scene. Artist Abby Howard not only has such a strong sense of how to use color to paint a scene, but also framing, knowing exactly when to switch to a close-up for emphasis or a canted angle to add an off-kilter feeling. Most of it is static, with the character moving slightly from image to image, but more consequential scenes are animated to make them feel extra important. As much as the evocative writing builds the world, it’s the art that really brings it to life.
After I finished Chapter 5, I looked at the Steam achievements and noticed that I had 49 out of 178. Even though the game is still in Early Access, this shows just how much content there is in the game as it stands now. While I feel like this first run I’m doing through the game is my “canonical run,” I’m definitely going to jump back in to see what new character and narrative revelations are revealed through other choices. I don’t know how long it will be until the finale is released, but the strong writing and beautiful art style have me deeply invested in the world of Scarlet Hollow, and I can’t wait to see how it wraps up.
Review code provided by publisher. Episode Five of Scarlet Hollow is now available on Steam in Early Access.
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