I picked up Scarlet Hollow, an early-access visual novel from Black Tabby Games, sometime last summer and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it since.
Scarlet Hollow kicks off with your player-character visiting a long-lost cousin named Tabitha in a small, nearly rundown North Carolina town (which is called… you guessed it! Scarlet Hollow). It’s already a morbid affair since you’re in town for a funeral, but each day brings a new, increasingly disturbing supernatural event, with a masked figure watching you from the shadows.
It’s a gorgeously atmospheric horror game, and also a dating sim with an incredibly nuanced character relationship system. And it’s one of the most choice-driven games I’ve ever played (and I am all about choice-driven games). The four episodes that have already been released have so many branching dialogue paths, so many instances where one seemingly superficial choice affected actions and relationships down the line.
And Monday, Black Tabby Games (also the studio behind Slay the Princess) released a massive 70,000-word update, fleshing out the existing chapters of the game to allow for more player agency. And I cannot wait to dig in and replay it many, many times.
The horror slowly builds. Things are off from the moment you arrive in town and see your family’s historic, dilapidated mansion, but a trip into the woods soon reveals something more sinister lurking in the shadows. Each episode unveils more and more about the town, your family, and the supernatural events — and different character builds and dialogue choices will spotlight different revelations. The game grows increasingly more intense with each update.
Image: Black Tabby Games
Even in Early Access, Scarlet Hollow already lent itself to a lot of replayability before today’s huge update. For one, each episode ends with a huge choice, intentionally designed to be difficult with no clear right answer, and each subsequent episode builds off the previous big choices, rippling out to many different variations. But those hugely consequential choices aren’t the only ones that matter. In fact, every single decision affects your playthrough.
You begin the game by picking two of seven traits, which each give you some additional perks, be they extra information, more dialogue, or even baseline relationship boosts (Hot trait, my beloved). Various combinations of these traits unlock even more — for instance, with a Keen Eye, you can spot another character’s stick bug pet, and then with the Talk to Animals trait, you can have a conversation with it.
I have three different saves with three different character trait combinations because each of those separate character approaches has let me discover more about the overarching mystery — though no one single combination will give you a playthrough with all the information needed to solve it.
Image: Black Tabby Games
I’m the type of person who gets really into role-playing, so I’ve tried to really think about the choices people with these traits would make. That’s turned into some deliciously varied scenes across my saves. My super bubbly Hot-and-Mystical character managed to endear herself so much to her prickly cousin that Tabitha made a huge sacrifice for her in the end of episode three. Meanwhile, my more confrontational Powerful-Build-and-Talks-to-Animals character pissed her cousin off so much it led to a physical altercation in episode four.
But even without the replayability and the choice-driven narrative — which is going to get a whole lot meatier in the new update — Scarlet Hollow has such a rich story. It’s one about breaking generational cycles and answering for the crimes of those who came before us, all wrapped up with some beautifully haunting art.
There are still many mysteries in Scarlet Hollow (both the game and the town). The next episode won’t be out till later this year, but I’m hungry to return to the Hollow with this new update.
