Game info

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 come alive with horrors, just in time for your arrival.

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 you may not make it to the end in one piece.

Scarlet Hollow is an immersive horror-mystery with sharp writing, impactful choices, and meticulously hand-drawn art from award-winning graphic novelist Abby Howard.

Features

• A heavily branching narrative where your decisions (actually) matter. The relationships you forge and the decisions you make will dramatically alter your journey.

• Terrifying and funny. Charming characters and snappy dialogue flip to pulse-pounding dread and horror at a moment's notice.

• 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.

• No jumpscares. All of the horror in Scarlet Hollow comes from building tension and dread (and some disturbing imagery).

• Original monster designs inspired by Appalachian myths and cryptids. You won't find any predictable vampires or zombies here.

• Touching romance. Whether you're into goths, dads, paranormal investigators, mysterious recluses, lo-fi beats to study and water your plants to, or actual monsters, we've got all your bases covered.

• Hundreds of meticulously hand-drawn and traditionally inked backgrounds. Every background in the game is drawn by hand and inked on massive 19x24 inch paper.

• Countless immersive sprites. 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.

Black Tabby Games

Black Tabby Games is an indie studio founded by Real Married Adults Abby Howard and Tony Howard-Arias. Their games tell the kinds of stories than only games can tell, and fall at the intersection of horror and humor.

In addition to her work in video games, Abby is the acclaimed cartoonist behind works like The Last Halloween, The Crossroads at Midnight, Junior Scientist Power Hour, The Earth Before Us, and many more.

Before co-founding Black Tabby Games, Tony worked a variety of positions for a variety of publishing and tech companies, including building organizing technology for political campaigns.

Abby and Tony live in Boston with Spoons the cat, Wednesday the snake, and Nubs the axolotl.

Contest entries 2021