Decades of playing adventures and RPGs has trained me to exhaust every conversation option to gather as much information and story as possible, but in Scarlet Hollow what I choose not to say feels just as important as what I do. There are just so many things I love about this game, but the way it makes me not want to pick certain conversation options is really high up there. Not in a big, obvious way – you can just choose with whom you’re comfortable sharing information, forming friendships or keeping people at a distance. Then there’s how it lets me keep secrets from people. It’s just good, evocative writing in every instance. “The autumn-tinged mountains, sprawling for miles in every direction, now feel less like beautiful scenery and more like the walls of a cage.” Here’s a completely incidental line, as you’re walking from Tabitha’s to town on the second day: Better still, it’s completely nonchalant about all this – it is how it is.Īnd goodness, the writing is just SO good. At the start you can choose your pronouns, and while it emphasises this doesn’t affect the game, it does of course change how others address you. This is an incredibly diverse cast, and you can choose who you are within that.
In fact, at one point I just didn’t really believe the branches could really spread this wide, so reloaded an earlier point to make an opposite decision – assuming it would write its way around to the same conclusion – and was completely wrong.ĭespite being set in a small town in South Carolina, with an emphasis on how insular the place is, and how rare it is for outsiders to visit, the game goes to some lengths to be progressive. That a conversation I had with an opossum in Chapter One was remembered and continued in Chapter Two, when I know just how completely differently it could have gone, is overwhelming if I think about it for too long. Let alone the myriad smaller conversation choices, that genuinely continue through in how specific characters react to you.
I found myself having to willingly refuse to think about how complex the back-end must be, to allow it to let me see major characters live or die in Chapter One, when seven chapters are planned and their non/existence carrying over significantly into Chapter Two. What blew me away, on top of the superb writing and astonishing number of incredibly detailed drawn scenes, was just how impactful these choices are.
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As you read through the story you get many choices, some of which will close down others, or open up more – plus, conversations let you choose how to behave with different people, ranging from over-enthusiastic to downright rude, but thankfully with more moderate choices between. But gosh, the idea of not being able to chat with the cats, rats and various other fauna in the game seems impossible now!ĭespite presenting like a visual novel, this is much closer to an illustrated interactive fiction. I’m also dying to know how being stronger, hotter or supernaturally-leaning might rewrite the tale, and absolutely definitely going to start over again with those picked. I eschewed Powerful Build, Mystical, Keen Eye, Book Smart and Hot (attractive) for Talk To Animals and Street Smart, and honestly, I can’t even imagine how the game properly works without them: a massive sign of just how important those choices are to the story you experience.
At the start you choose two traits from a selection of seven, and even this is going to have such a strong influence on the game you play. So far Black Tabby Games have released the first two chapters of an intended seven, that tell this spooky tale with such confidence and competence.
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