Your aunt’s dead, your cousin hates you, and you’re stuck in the dead-end town of Scarlet Hollow. Choose your path through a branching narrative so dense that you'll see less than 1/5 of the game on a single playthrough. You won't be able to save everyone. Good luck, and welcome home.
Modeled estimate, not a reported figure. How we estimate →
About
From the developers of Slay the Princess, Scarlet Hollow is an immersive horror-mystery with sharp writing, impactful choices, and meticulously hand-drawn art.
Coal mines sealed off after a deadly collapse. Strange creatures preying on livestock. Houses infested with vengeful spirits. The sleepy town of Scarlet Hollow has suddenly come alive with horrors, just in time for your arrival. This was supposed to be a quiet getaway in the rural mountains of North Carolina. All you had to do was finally meet your long-lost cousin and comfort her through her mother’s funeral. But now, each new day welcomes new nightmares.
You only have to survive a week. But can you get to the bottom of the horrifying mysteries haunting Scarlet Hollow before they claim your life?
The first five episodes are available now, with one major content update planned before the story reaches its conclusion.
Features
A heavily branching narrative where your decisions (actually) matter. The relationships you forge and the decisions you make will dramatically alter your journey.
A complex paranormal mystery. Investigate haunted houses, strange sightings in the woods, a deteriorating mine, and more as you try and piece together what happened in Scarlet Hollow.
Trait-based dialogue and role-playing. Scarlet Hollow's dialogue system is driven by role-playing elements that let you choose who you want to be. Are you quiet and observant? Hot and clueless? Can you talk to animals? 21 different character builds change how you interact with the world and how your story unfolds.
A dynamic relationship system that reacts to your every choice and changes how your story unfolds. People won't just like or dislike you. Become friendly rivals, bitter adversaries, best friends, or mild acquaintances with everyone in town based on how you approach the story.
Original monster designs inspired by Appalachian myths and cryptids.
No jumpscares. All of the horror in Scarlet Hollow comes from dread, tension, and a sprinkle of disturbing imagery.
A touch of romance. Whether you're into goths, dads, moms, paranormal investigators, mysterious recluses, or actual monsters, you'll find something waiting for you here. And if you'd rather avoid that entirely, your story won't be any less for it.
Hundreds of meticulously hand-drawn and traditionally inked backgrounds. Every background in the game is hand drawn and inked by Ignatz-winning graphic novelist Abby Howard.
Fully immersive art. Each major character has dozens—and often hundreds—of hand-drawn sprites that interact with backgrounds and capture a full range of lighting, emotion, environment, and outfit changes.
Genres
Stats
All-time low is the lowest price we've recorded for this game since we started tracking it.
Languages: English
Engagement
Hours played at review time, across 78 reviews with recorded playtime.
Reviews
Themes across 78 recent reviews and how positive each mention is. A keyword signal, not full sentiment analysis.
positive critical· bar length = how often the theme comes up
Reviews
Play it.
Incredibly written with so many branching paths it's a little bit frightening. Cannot recommend this game enough even to those who may not typically play "visual novel" style games. The horror elements are very present but more as a spice to the otherwise compelling narrative. On top of everything, the art is excellent. I am so ready for the final chapters...
Amazing game
there's a opossum in my dresser, and I love him more than life itself.
Downloaded this game when I saw it was on sale a couple months back, as I really enjoyed Slay The Princess. So far, I love it! I've barely gotten half of the achievements, yet I feel like I've seen so much. The traits concept is really interesting; I've yet to go through every trait, but I enjoy how they change the information you're given about the game's environment. Also Dustin is such a delight, I love him so much.
My flabbers are ghasted. I played through and then again with different character traits... and now again with different character traits. Different choices, different lore revealed at different times. Different outcomes for various characters. It's SO good. Definitely recommend if you like a moral quandary where there might not be a "good" result. I can't wait for more!
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.
I have never loved a dialogue tree in a game so much. Whenever I play a level I always picture the writer standing in front of a coarkboard full of index cards like that Its Always Sunny meme, and I mean that as compliment. Also amazing: the animation. It takes real talent to make cartoons scary.
This game is soo boring... If you like staring at the same images for 10 minutes every scene, and read nonsensical dialogues, this game is for you. It was a waste of my money
Amazing game, absolute peak
Related
Related
Trends
Modeled estimate over time, reconstructed from Steam's monthly review histogram.
Engagement
DAU/MAU are modeled from peak concurrent players (≈×8 and ×28) — Steam publishes no active-user counts, so treat these as rough estimates, not reported figures.
Audience
Audience
Games most often reviewed by the same players — an audience-affinity signal from our review sample, not full ownership data.
Estimated from the language of this game's reviews — a proxy for where players are, not official Steam demographics.
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