Scarlet Hollow

Peak in its purest form

Very spooky. Love the ditchlings. Weird little fellas :3

it's good. the game sits at the back of my mind at all times, every time i replay the game i see something new. as a result of playing this game, i have felt every single emotion. i wish i played this sooner 11/10

Incredible art, incredible choices, mind-bogglingly deep writing and paths. If you're coming from Slay The Princess, then enjoy the same great writing in a fully fleshed out story. What I'd love to see is full voice acting like we had in Slay The Princess, but with the absolute labyrinth of dialogue paths, that's understandably something that might be a bit of an undertaking.

compelling plot with great variety, and truly a game where your choices do matter. It also mimics the experience of tabletop where the player can do the most unexpected things, like in EP1, you can troll by replacing mac and cheese with rats. WTF, dude?

I wish there was a 'maybe' for recommending it. At its core, Scarlet Hollow is a good game. It's very well illustrated and competently written. It's engaging. Its chief weakness is that the player agency is a little lacking, at least so far. You get certain 'big decisions' within some acts, but I've yet to feel any immediate impact from them. Though, I seem to have had a pretty good route my first playthrough here - and there are at least two decisions I hope would make a very large impact. Still, if the little details matter at all, it's at such an imperceptible level that I feel unrewarded and incomplete for engaging with them. Compared to their previous work, "Slay the Princess", it simply lacks the pacing and impact that made that game exceptional. Part of the issue there lies in these weird off-shoots and little character explorations, which only serve to reinforce the lack of player agency when forced upon the player character against their will. This makes the story feel much more 'told at you'. Especially where past events are concerned. Speaking of which, this game nearly necessitates some kind of journal for keeping track of your family history. I read every snippet of dialogue, and in chapter 5 I still have very little idea who key players are. My apologies for soft spoilers, but I have literally 0 investment, or notion, in/of who most of these characters are. Personal problem? Perhaps. But even here in chapter 5, I only even remember what's immediately apparent and narratively reinforced. For these reasons, sadly, I can't TRULY recommend it at this price, despite genuinely enjoying it. The full release might alleviate some of these problems, and tie some threads together. But even considering that, the narrative disjunction between chapters makes this feel too incomplete to me. And let me be clear: I do love the game. And the developers. I realize this review is much, much more critical than most. But it isn't meant to diminish the talent at play here. Rather, I hope it will be be of some small use in honing the game before release. I'm about to start a new playthrough, which might change this review considerably. But I wanted to get my thoughts down here on my first experience, because it is an important experience. [EDIT] Playthrough 2, enjoyable so far. Different enough to be fresh, which makes it much more viably worth the price.

The names of the achievements alone is worth a million stars.

Will probably update this review after I've done a few more runs but it's clear that lots of thought has been put into each trait and how it affects dialogue options and approaches to given situations. The responsiveness and story branching is quite incredible too! As for the story itself, I've been having a blast. Widows Bay if it was a visual novel vibes.