Scarlet Hollow

Between it's gorgeous visuals, deep and intriguing characters, genuinely unnerving supernatural elements and a plot that continually confounds and mesmerizes me, Scarlet Hollow has so many strengths that regardless of your tastes you will find something to love here.

I picked this up on Steam when it only had 3 chapters out, and despite each chapter only being about 2 hours of play at a top end, I managed to log nearly 50 hours before chapter 4 came out. The writing, characters, and atmosphere are just incredible- and the system it has for branching narrative based both on your decisions and your choice of character traits at the beginning makes each run almost completely unique.

Scarlet Hollow is a beautifully illustrated horror visual novel that actually has the branching paths that other games attempt to boast, but never feel fully realized. As someone who loves Telltale games, this is that but cranked to 11. Depending on decisions you make, even just in dialogue, you can find yourself in a wholly different world state than someone else, seeing scenes that you would not see had you said or done something different. This gives the game so much replayability, there is SO much to explore and it's not even fully released. The characters are well-written and interesting, the horror aspects are incredibly well done and unnerving, and the mystery at the core is endlessly fascinating. And it's got a killer soundtrack to boot!

This is the type of story where the developers have taken almost every player choice into consideration and this shows. The downside of this may be that the wait for new episodes rises exponentially but imo it's worth it.

This game exceeded my expectations of what a visual novel could be, with fantastic art, writing, and characters, and the sheer number of choices the player character has. Both in terms of roleplaying/characterization and choices that affect how the world and story evolve over the course of the days, creating a varied amount of unique world states while keeping the scope of the game reasonable. I'm extremely pumped to find out how the story progresses and how it all eventually comes to an end! Also, 10/10 Dustin content. God bless the little mans. May he never suffer illness or pain.