Black Tabby Games on the episodic nature of Scarlet Hollow
Fans have taken to Southern gothic horror, early-access visual novel Scarlet Hollow quickly, despite its in-progress development status. The game currently consists of four released chapters and has 777 user reviews on Steam, 99% of which are positive. But these players might be surprised to find out that the original idea for Scarlet Hollow was much different than what the visual novel actually became.
“The first idea was kind of dating simulator for demons and monsters, but also kind of like a horror anthology at the same time,” said co-developer Abby Howard. “So you would go on a bunch of different dates with people and they would all end in some kind of a horror story. But then we wound up kind of…It developed from there. And it does not resemble anything like that, really, now.” That said, players of any gender (you get to choose your pronouns and name) do still have six romance options, of both the human and monster variety, available to them in Scarlet Hollow.
A desire to connect the stories within this anthology is what ultimately led to its transformation, and its episodic format. Howard and co-developer Tony Howard-Arias created a meta-narrative behind the scenes to connect each tale. Howard is “a sucker for lore,” so she couldn’t bear to cut ideas that weren’t tied directly to the larger story, instead insisting on finding a way to tie them in. This process caused the project to evolve and eventually led the pair to realize they were now dealing with an entirely different beast. That said, the episodic format still fit, as the player spends exactly seven days in the titular coal mining town.
Horror is a genre the team at Black Tabby are die-hard fans of, particularly Howard. The first book she ever read was William Shakespeare’s Macbeth, all because it had a severed head on the cover.
“I didn’t like reading as a kid,” Howard told Gayming. “But it turns out, I just didn’t like reading books for kids. My mom was overjoyed, she loves Shakespeare. She was like ‘wow I have a child who is very smart and cool,’ and I was like ‘I like that there’s death in it.'”
In line with this love of genre, Howard has put out other horror content before Scarlet Hollow, including the anthology The Crossroads at Midnight. This book includes five stories that delve into what it looks like when someone is desperate enough to seek solace in the unnatural. Howard also created a horror webcomic called The Last Halloween.
Howard’s passion for horror re-ignited Howard-Arias’ love of the genre as well. They had cycles of interest in horror, but didn’t stay invested due to good old fashioned childhood staples of overzealous parents and overly cautious teachers.
“My dad really likes horror and was excited to have a child he could share things with, but then he shared too many scary things at a very young age. I still think six is too young to watch The Terminator,” Howard-Arias told Gayming. “I had another phase of being into it in middle and high school, but got in trouble with some teachers for being into horror because they thought it was gross and they thought I definitely might be unwell for liking it. But then I started dating Abby and it reinvigorated that passion.”
The passion these two share for horror is apparent in Scarlet Hollow. The Southern Gothic story oozes spooky, from its art style to the actual plot points and often devastating consequences of your actions. The game takes place across seven chapters, four of which are currently available to play. Players follow a customizable protagonist as they return to the small mining town in North Carolina that their estranged family lives in. Their aunt has died, and the protagonist is simply looking for a quiet retreat while they try to comfort her grieving cousin. But there’s much more in store for them here.
Scarlet Hollow’s release set-up is interesting, as it’s an early access game on Steam. This method has provided the team at Black Tabby with more flexible options for their episodic releases, which was necessary to fit the mechanical format of the game’s storytelling.
“We originally tried to go for the sort of like Life is Strange model of the Steam page is the first episode, it’s free, you buy other things as DLC,” Howard-Arias said. “And there were a few things about that approach that didn’t feel like they were immediately working. One of them was the kind of decisions you make that carry over between episodes are really complicated. And we didn’t have a good apparatus in place to let people say, jump into Episode Two or Three in a vacuum.”
“The way we’ve built the game, it’s been easy enough to set up so that if you just save at the end of an episode, when the next one drops as an update, you just load that save, and it immediately continues.”
This flexibility isn’t the only benefit to the episodic, early access release system, however. Scarlet Hollow is Black Tabby’s first game, which comes with its own set of challenges and hurdles to overcome. But by releasing one episode at a time, the Howard and Howard-Arias are able to see how fans react to each chapter, the choices and consequences within, what bugs players might have encountered in the wild, and instill confidence that the game’s Kickstarter funds are being put to good use.
“Another part of the episodic release is that we can build community as we release, because of course, this is our first game,” Howard said. “But this way, people can kind of piece together little things as they go, they can keep seeing that, yes, we are, in fact making this game and we will finish it one day.”
Though the fan response has been so positive, there have been some worries about how the episodic pacing impacts players’ face time with certain characters/love interests. But the Black Tabby team assure us it’s much better this way.
“When we were first writing Episode One, we were trying to be more balanced in our approach and make it so that you met every romance option on that day,” Howard-Arias said. “It was so boring and repetitive.”
“I like when there’s context for the relationship you build with with people in a game, instead of just who you choose to spend time with just kind of arbitrarily,” Howard said.
“Like, Thane didn’t show up until Mass Effect 2,” Howard-Arias added.
Waiting for new episodes of Scarlet Hollow can be borderline painful at times; this story and its characters are exciting and compelling in a way that makes you just want to keep going. But the team at Black Tabby have a method to their madness, and the game’s overwhelmingly positive reviews indicate they’re on the right track.
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