Scarlet Hollow raises the standard for what RPGs where choices matter should aim to achieve

The horror RPG Scarlet Hollow wasn’t the game Black Tabby duo Abby Howard and Tony Howard-Arias initially set out to make. Like Slay the Princess before it, the team viewed Scarlet Hollow as a warm-up act for the as-yet-unannounced game they really want to make, one day. Yet five years after the game’s first chapter launched, it’s raising the standard for what RPGs can, and should, achieve in their storytelling.

It started with a loose end.

“Neither of us knew what we were going to do next with our careers,” Howard-Arias tells Polygon over a Zoom call. “I had been in media and tech spaces, and I’d just shut down a startup I’d been working on with a couple of friends. We were building volunteer organizing software for nonprofits who, it turns out, have no money and don’t like using software. So that didn’t work out.”

“I wasn’t in love with my next book,” Howard, an artist and graphic novelist, says. “A lot of my work was kind of kid-focused. And I really like horror, I really like complicated subject material, and I wanted to continue to pursue that. So we basically just turned to each other one day, after having conversations with friends of ours about visual novels, and we’re like, ‘Well, why don’t we try one of those?’ And then almost immediately, Scarlet Hollow became a thing.”

Scarlet Hollow follows a young adult visiting their family home in rural North Carolina, initially to attend a funeral before things quickly go off the rails. It’s technically a visual novel, though Howard-Arias says that under the hood, it functions like a traditional RPG. Traits you pick at the start of the game influence certain outcomes and scenarios, for example, and it tracks choices and consequences in ways similar to a Larian Studios or classic BioWare game.

Howard and Howard-Arias wanted to challenge players’ expectations and push them to think about characters and choices in ways the team believes RPGs often don’t do, or pretend to do before giving you an easy way out. Howard-Arias points to situations like the conundrum of the possessed child in Dragon Age: Origins as an example. The quest presents you with a difficult choice — one that you can circumvent entirely with the right item, if you know where to look. Big dilemmas with easy solutions are not good stories, he says, nor are the ones that let the player decide everything.

Early versions of Scarlet Hollow included one that mimicked different types of dating simulator, where every character’s story eventually turned into something more horrible and less romantic. Howard wanted to tell more complicated stories with weightier consequences, though, and quickly discarded the idea of keeping characters separate in a dating sim. Another early version included typical RPG systems like inventory, but Howard-Arias realized it added nothing to the experience aside from familiarity. So they ditched the imitations and relied on their strengths instead — choices, consequences, and horror.

Especially horror. It’s one of Howard’s biggest strengths and oldest passions. Her parents were keen on the genre, so it was a frequent companion during childhood, and it eventually became Howard’s preferred framework for looking at the world and telling stories.

Image: Black Tabby Games

“That level of abstraction [in horror], just the slight shift from the normal to something that is off, is really the draw for me,” Howard says. “It’s a nice way to kind of safely distance yourself from topics by making them more abstract, by adding a supernatural element that does not exist in the real world, so you can process the real world in a way that’s a little bit safer.”

Making players feel like something is a bit off, a bit unfamiliar, was essential for Scarlet Hollow. Early in the game’s development, Howard settled on a small southern town as the setting, partly from her own experience growing up in North Carolina and partly from thinking about novelist Shirley Jackson’s works, such as The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle. Jackson’s stories all feature variations on similar themes, such as the tension between your public persona and who you really are — and, more pertinent to Scarlet Hollow, the horrible things that happen when people see what you’re hiding.

The setting and concept are familiar enough, so Howard set about putting almost everything off-kilter from the start. Your family home is haunted. Your cousin is potentially a monster (not literally); your neighbors are too (actually literally, in some cases). The animals are mutating. And there’s a sneaker-wearing god following you around, but he’s not good or evil. He just is. Every character and situation is carefully calculated so you can’t quite find an easy analogy to real life.

If the player felt comfortable or believed they could find a strong parallel, then they might pass quick judgments, label characters as good or bad with no in between or — the worst scenario for Black Tabby — feel like they know what the “right” answer is. The goal for Scarlet Hollow is that there would be no right answers. Heroism isn’t easy. Every victory comes at the expense of something else. The team hopes Scarlet Hollow challenges people to think about why people make the choices they do and how context influences those choices, something Howard-Arias always felt let down by with his favorite games. Mass Effect, for example, lets you pick “evil” options, but these routes only lead to more deaths, or fewer things to do, or special equipment. They rarely explore what being evil means to the character — or what being evil means to you.

Image: Black Tabby Games

“I think it’s very important to look at the world and try to truly examine even the people you find the absolute most abhorrent,” Howard adds. “It is really important to still hear what they’re saying, to hear what their internal world is like and understand why they justify what they do, especially if you want to tell complicated stories people can engage with.”

That kind of engagement presents a unique challenge, though: hoping people get the point. One instance in Scarlet Hollow‘s fifth chapter, released in February, is a good example. A certain combination of events and consequences can lead Stella, one of the first friendly characters you meet in the game, down a dramatic path that ends with some very dark deeds. A vocal segment of Scarlet Hollow‘s audience decided that, since Stella had the capacity for evil, she simply was evil and always had been that way. It’s not the ideal outcome, the Black Tabby duo says, but it’s an inevitability for any story with something worth saying.

“You’re going to upset people, and you just have to take it,” Howard says. “Which, I think, is a very healthy way to create things, because otherwise you always wind up at the beck and call of someone. Someone is always going to be angry. There is no perfect piece of media that will protect you from that, and sometimes, the more your media is trying to be perfect, the harder the fans will be on you. If any little piece is out of line, they’ll be like, ‘look at what you’ve done.'”

“And if you strive as a creator to make every single person happy, are you saying anything at all? Howard-Arias says. “Or are you just making content (“a distraction” Howard adds) to be consumed and then forgotten?”

A small group of loud, discontent players aside, Howard and Howard-Arias have found that their players enjoy the challenge. They want complicated characters and complex situations. You can see that in the lengthy essays people post on the game’s subreddit and the often even lengthier responses they get, and in the game’s 98% positive score on Steam. Scarlet Hollow has something they aren’t getting in other RPGs.

Howard and Howard-Arias have spent more than half a decade mapping out Scarlet Hollow, drawing thousands of images by hand (Howard’s doing), and writing thousands more lines of dialogue (shared work). There’s no voice acting, and it doesn’t have some of the features you’d expect from RPGs. However, it’s also the work of just two people working with a limited budget, something they hope isn’t lost on their audience.

“There’s this mentality that I feel must come from too many years of disappointment and rug pulls, where people have this attitude of ‘well, you can’t expect your choices to actually matter in video games. That would be too hard,'” Howard-Arias says. “I feel very good about being able to leave a definitive statement with Scarlet Hollow. This was an extremely difficult project, but we are a two-person team, and we did this. And everyone else is gonna have to look at this and know that it’s possible, and maybe that’ll push us to really embrace interactivity and agency within crafted stories.”