Scarlet Hollow

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?

it the best visual novel I have ever played

♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ what?

good story, good dialogue, great music, plenty of things to do, and a development team not shrouded in controversy, all you can ever ask for a visual novel, 10/10 IGN

This game is so peak, can't wait to play AT LEAST 10 times.

The game is great! Give it a shot! The story is very well written and quite deep. It grabs you immediately. The atmosphere you're thrown into is difficult for me to describe but it feels quite unique. It manages to put you in an almost constant state of unease without being a cheap horror that relies on jump scares and shock factor. There are many possible routes you can thread upon and you can have several playthroughs that are considerably different. Additionally, the devs seem to be actively working on the game and besides adding more content to progress the game further, they also rework and expand the content that is already there which makes consecutive runs even on the paths you've already trodden before fun and interesting. With every run you find more and more details about the story. Overall a great game with great replay value! Highly recommend!

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.

I've played a number of visual novels, some to absolute completion, but this is on another level with the massive ambition. The game is always giving you a lot of dialog choices, almost an absurd amount sometimes, but it avoids common trappings of games using artificial choices and flavor text where it's basically plus one or minus one as a reaction and the higher score is how this character feels about you. In Scarlet Hollow, people do react to your choices and weight their feelings about you, and some people you just can't win over. This game also has a lot of illustrations, they go out of their way to show so many hand drawn locations and character reactions that often change from click to click, they really put in maximum effort. As of typing this, I've barely started episode 4, and in the current early access build, there's 5 finished chapters, a recent patch added 60,000 more words to chapter 5. It's something where I keep thinking about things I'd like to try in the next run, like at the start you pick two traits, I did street smart where you can lie to people, be sneaky, and read people, the other is a brawny strong man type, and the unique options on both are really fun. Then you get options like being book smart or having a natural connection to the supernatural, stuff that sounds like it would be great for a 2nd run, to better understand the esoteric things I can't comprehend now. It's a game that's very character focused, and everyone in the small town is really interesting to get to know, they put in a wide variety of romance options for anyone's taste, like I picked the girl who makes videos investigating the paranormal (which hasn't resulted in much until recently) but I can see the appeal of the burly muscle dad, or the town goth, there's also an old lady who knows more about the towns mysteries that is an option to, if you don't mind dating decades above. This was made by the people who did Slay The Princess, which I really do need to sit down and play more of that, especially as I get closer to the end of the early access content here, having their previous game with a ton of different paths to try out. It'll be cool when this game does get the full release version, and it would really be something time consuming to 100%, but with all the options and different traits, it feels like there's enough here to make each run feel different enough, like the vast options to deal with dangerous or mysterious situations, like I can't brute force my way out of everything, but someone with paranormal gifts could have a better solution. And the game opens with, you can't save everyone, you might not even save yourself. So I'm hoping the skills I have and the choices I make will turn out fine in my first run.