This Horror Game Has One Of The Best Narratives In Years

Scarlet Hollow's tale of creatures in the woods is gripping, spooky and delightful

Scarlet Hollow is a quite incredible accomplishment. It’s one of the best narrative games I’ve played. Not only is this interactive fiction a deeply compelling and engrossing story, but it’s also an Inkle-level of branching story possibilities where your choices have long-reaching and significant effects on the story told. Oh, and it’s beautifully co-written and drawn, by graphic novelist Abby Howard.Your aunt has died, and you’re travelling to a small, edge-of-the-map town in South Carolina for her funeral. Your aunt and her surviving daughter, Tabitha, were estranged, after an incident about which you know nothing involving your late mother. Now you must attempt to reconcile with Tabitha while staying in her depilated, unsettling mansion, while befriending locals of the town, and becoming embroiled in a mystery surrounding some strange noises in the woods.

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. 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. 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. 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. But gosh, the idea of not being able to chat with the cats, rats and various other fauna in the game seems impossible now!

Despite presenting like a visual novel, Scarlet Hollow is much closer to an illustrated interactive fiction. 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.

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. 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. Let alone the myriad smaller conversation choices, that genuinely continue through in how specific characters react to you.

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. 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.

Source: Kotaku