Scarlet Hollow Episode 1 Review (PC Game, 2020)

content warning: gore, gun violence, animal suffering

Scarlet Hollow is a horror/adventure game in the form of a visual novel.  You play as an estranged family member attending your aunt’s funeral. You never met her or even saw your ancestral home because of a falling out in your family. For the next week, you’ll be living with your cousin Tabby, who you also never met before, as you wait for the funeral service of one of the last members of your family.

The further you go into the town of Scarlet Hollow, the stranger things get. The bus stop has one bus arrive and leave each week. Tabby’s home is a dilapidated manor on the side of a cliff. More buildings than not are boarded up and abandoned in the town. No one bats an eye that the town’s most famous resident is a cryptid hunter on YouTube. The strange, wonderful, and horrifying things you notice are just daily life in the Holler.

Scarlet Hollow is the debut game from Abby Howard, the cartoonist and graphic novelist behind The Last Halloween, Junior Scientist Power Hour, and Earth Before Us. Her work in horror features large ensemble casts of unlikely friends in a world of inky crosshatching and sprawling shadows. In Howard’s work, monsters are real and bring the worst traits out of the people who have the misfortune of discovering them. Her work also reflects reality with diverse casts that look like the actual world.

The branching narrative options of Scarlet Hollow can allow for multiple playthroughs of the game. After choosing your name and preferred pronouns (he/him, they/them, or she/her—non-binary characters exist in this world without consequence or judgment), you choose two unique traits out of seven options that define how your story will go. Maybe you want to talk to the many animals in the game to gain insight into what happens in the town. You could also choose to be incredibly strong so more physical tasks don’t pose problems. You can also be a flirt, an empath, or very intuitive. Each trait offers different dialogue options showing what is really happening in the story.

I’ve played through Episode 1 twice now. The different experience I got just from being able to talk to animals turned a piece of psychological horror into a work of supernatural tragedy. It’s in the content warning, but I have to stress that there are animals in pain in this game. Something bad is happening in the town, and some local animals are the unfortunate warning of impending doom. It’s all fun and games befriending a pug named Gretchen or setting up a side quest of one day petting the unimaginable snooty but fluffy cat Frou Frou. It’s quite another when a deer lets you know it faces unimaginable pain or a chicken is questioning why it’s still alive.

Here’s the thing. Being able to talk to animals is a patch that was added last month. I could not have had these exact experiences when the game released in September. Sure, I could see what was happening, but I couldn’t hear the poor animals express their inner turmoil. Instead, I was getting warnings of the unseen influence of the creeping horror settling on the town the week of the funeral. The overall arc of the story is the same; the tone, dialogue, and specific actions are very different depending on your choice of traits.

Scarlet Hollow is weird fiction. There are creeping influences of Gothic, horror, sci-fi, and fantasy lurking in the mines, mountains, and forests of the Holler. The story is set in the near future. Your new friend Stella, the cryptid hunter, has a successful YouTube series that most of the town accepts as fact. There are monsters living in the mountains, just like there’s a weekly potluck or a diner with the best biscuits in the county.

The game explains its rules and lore in reasonable bits and pieces scattered through the game. It just feels like there is so much more hidden in the world that you can’t know yet. The town of Scarlet Hollow is huge. You get to explore Tabby’s home, the diner, and the mountains. You meet a handful of characters. The further you go into the game, the further you get from your original questions.

Perhaps the scariest realization of all on my second playthrough is the timeline. Episode 1 is just Monday. You still have six days to the funeral and seven days total before you can leave on that once a week bus and never return. By the end, you realize things will only get worse as the week goes on.

Scarlet Hollow: Episode 1 is available for free on Steam, Itch.io, and GameJolt. Chapter Two will go on sale in May 2021.

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