Imaginary Worlds - Scarlet Hollow Draws a Picture of Success

Episode Date: January 28, 2026

Scarlet Hollow is a successful indie video game – and that’s no small feat. It’s been a long journey, and the game is made almost entirely by two people: Abby Howard and Tony Howard-Arias of Black Tabby Games. Along the way, they even took a break to make another hit game called Slay the Princess. I talk with Abby and Tony about how animating Abby’s drawings allowed them to build a game where the players have seemingly endless choices and romance options in a Southern Gothic town under threat from supernatural forces. After a three-year wait, chapter five of Scarlet Hollow is finally being released in February.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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You're listening to Imaginary Worlds, a show about how we create them and why we suspend our disbelief. I'm Eric Malinski. There are two types of video games that I love to play. Role-playing games or RPGs, where your choices have a big impact on the story, and independent video games, which can have a very distinct, artistic. sensibility. The technology to make a video game is pretty accessible now, but that means the market is flooded with indie games. Thousands of them are vying for your attention or trying to get funding from small donations to wealthy investors. Even if a game is a hit, that doesn't mean the studio is

stable. In 2021, I did an episode about an incredible indie game called Disco Elysium. But after their success, the team splintered apart with acrimony and lawsuits. Other indie game studios that I've covered have grown too fast until they burst, or they got bought by bigger studios. That's why I've been so impressed with a little studio in Toronto called Black Tabby Games. Most of the work is done by two people, a married couple named Abby Howard and Tony Howard Arias. They develop the stories together, and then Tony focuses on the game design, while Abby does the drawings. That's right, their games are hand-drawn.

And they have a game called Scarlet Hollow, which captured my imagination. It's a horror mystery game that takes place in a small southern town. And the game looks like a graphic novel come to life. We don't hear the character's voices. The dialogue is text on screen. with music in the background, and the player gets multiple choices as to how they want to respond. Tony and Abby have been releasing the game in chapters,

and Chapter 5 of Scarlet Hollow is finally coming out in February. Fans like me have been waiting over three years since the last chapter was released. I asked Tony and Abby if they ever feel like they bit off more than they could chew. No. No. Really? Yeah. Like I feel hitting individual scenes, it always feels so tackleable. Like basically, each scene that we come across is just like, okay, it's a puzzle and we can solve it. And that's really the only part of our work that I feel truly matters, I guess. Sometimes in the thick of individual scenes, do I feel like we bit off more than we can chew? Yes, but then we finish said scene and continue forward. Well, I mean, episode five is taking a while. That's how I was.

wondering if this or how come it's taken a bit longer I think well we spent two years making another game yeah that other game they made is called slay the princess it's also a horror game but it's more of a dark fairy tale and slay the princess has voice actors reading the dialogue and narration that doesn't happen in scarlet hollow but the reason we took a two-year break to focus primarily on another project was just that like Scarlet Hollow was not selling enough to make it all the way to the finish line.

We took a big risk with Slaid the Princess and like it was a measured enough risk where if it hadn't gotten the reception that it got on its announcement, we would have put less resources into it.

But it paid off and we're very comfortable now. Wow. So the success of Slaith Princess is, helping you finish Scarlet Hollow. Oh yeah, for sure. And now Scarlet Hollow sustains itself pretty well.

So like Scurlet Hollow has become so much more popular due to slay the princess. There's a lot of like black and white thinking in the world in general, but also like in video game fandoms in particular where it's like even within our community,

people pit our two projects against each other. And it's like, you know, some people argue that, well, Scarlet Hollow is the real passion project and like Slay the Princess was just a cash grab or whatever. I love all my children. Or that like, well, they should keep doing things like Slay the Princess because Scarlet Hollow is like a big commercial failure.

And it's like, well, both of our games were passion projects. Scarlet Hollow now is profitable on its own and is doing quite well. Yeah. And most importantly of all, I am excited to finish it so that we will have made some like this. Yeah. Like I'm excited to see what the final product is going to really look like. And just I will feel very accomplished for having made something so complicated. Yeah. No, it's, it's going to be great. So what if, like, let's say some somebody comes to you, I love your game. By the way, I'm also a billionaire. So you can have a few million dollars. Like,

what would you do with that money? Well, we wouldn't take it. Yeah. If they were asking us to do something especially, I wouldn't take it. Or if they just say here, no strings attached, you know, like, what would you, would you, would you do anything? Is there anything you've, some, some wishless thing you've been wanting to do? There's something else we want to do, but we're good. Yeah, we're, we've, like, mapped it out. We know how much it's going to cost. So, yeah. This is the second episode we're doing on what people want from an immersive experience in a video game. And I wanted to talk with Abby and Tony about Scarlet Hollow because the game is so

reactive to your choices. In Scarlet Hollow, you don't know what your character looks like. The game has a first person perspective. But you do know that you've come to the town of Scarlet Hollow in North Carolina to attend the funeral of a relative. Then you get sucked into all these supernatural mysteries. You also get to know the locals. who are richly drawn characters. And if you're interested in any of them, well, the game engine is set up so that you can date some of them.

My character ended up in a relationship with the character named Stella. Stella is a content creator and a cryptid hunter. I also hit it off with her dog Gretchen. Gretchen is a pug who talks like a Southern Bell, although I'm the only person who can understand her, because when I began the game, I had a choice of different traits, and I chose the ability to speak with animals, which to me seemed like a no-brainer.

In fact, at one point, I felt the need to tell my wife that I seemed to have an imaginary girlfriend in a fictional town with a talking dog. She laughed because she did not feel threatened by animated drawings in a video game. When Tony and Abby started brainstorming Scarlet Hollow in 2020, their first thought was that the game would be full. focused mostly on dating with horror elements in the background. And romance options have become really popular in role-playing games. But Tony says when he plays those games... An issue that I repeatedly have run into is the way that it feels so removed from what you're actually doing, where like the romance subplot feels disconnected from the main story, where, you know,

know, you start a romance arc with a character, you get your three scenes, and then they're just kind of a doll who repeats the same three lines to you for the rest of the game. It's like, good job. You succeeded at dating this character. Yeah. If you pull it off, you get a warmer in a kind of creepy way set of lines, whereas all of the characters that we've written for Scarlet Hollow are intended to feel like living, breathing people in the world. And for some of them, like, you don't even get to confess your feelings or make a romantic bond until the very end of the story. But for some, it's earlier on. And they continue to be active participants. And then the way your new

relationship relates to the narrative continues to shape things as you go. So with the players making choices early on, is the game also kind of adjusting and trying to figure out, well, is this player? What's their personality? Like, how are they reacting to everything? And then do I, as a game, you know, as a sort of an intelligent game, do I react to this differently? Well, the first thing I would say to that is we're not really trying to define the player's personality. And our approach to this is looking at how other characters individually view you. Because much like in real life, you can be very warm and open and chummy with one person and then incredibly closed off and hostile to another. So this is another way where kind of the dating sim aspect is more of kind of an

exploration of relationship in general of just you are closer to this person and that informs the story in a way that it doesn't make the characters feel like they're all isolated from each other of just this town already had a web of relationships. You had, even though you'd never met any of these people, a relationship with them, they had decided part of who they thought you were. And then how your actual actions then shape their secondary perspective on you really shapes the way that the story plays out. But it can often wind up the case where you feel like you're missing out on important content if you're not romancing anyone. Whereas is there content in Scarlet Hollow that is drastically different from other paths that are gated to certain romances?

Yes. But there's also content that is significantly different, unique, and similarly deep that is locked to not having a romance at all or not having a given romance. Or any given action that you have. So the game shouldn't feel more shallow if you choose not to romance anyone, nor should it feel more shallow if you do try to romance everyone. We try and constantly strike a balance where no matter what you do, it leads to, narrative developments and the game is reactive to it. Sometimes this causes us more trouble as writers that I think it's worth. One of the most common things we've seen from players over time is a constant desire to avoid the plot. Oh, my gosh. Or it's just like, oh, wait, wait, to avoid the plot?

Yeah, to avoid the plot. Like, ah, I, if I'm roleplaying this character, I wouldn't go into danger. I wouldn't do this. I would just stay home and listen. Can you do that for me? Can you make it so that I stay home all week? and yet something still happens that's interesting and engages me. It's quite the challenge.

Yeah. And for like the longest time, we just said no. And then coming off the heels of Slay the Princess, we decided what we wanted to do when we returned to Scarlet Hollow was provide those options to make the first two episodes feel deeper, broader, more open-ended and free for exploration. So you can try to run from the plot. You can set no to characters. more often.

Well, it's funny because you've empowered the players so much, and you've given them a sense of so much free will, that do you find that sometimes they ask too much, you know, that they go from empowered to entitled in some cases, it turns of... If you get a mouse a cookie, he will ask you why they can't stay home more. Yeah. Why can't I leave town?

Why can't I leave the story? There's definitely something when you're writing a choice-based narrative like this, where you want to make sure that these choices feel satisfied, because that's really what people are looking for is to have a satisfying outcome to an action. So if we wind up starting a scene based around an action and we can't come up with something that would be a satisfying way

that this would feel like part of a natural narrative versus feeling like you're running up against a brick wall or just kind of going down some path that is ultimately more boring than anything else in the story, then we decide we have to fix it or we have to find some way around it or we have to just kind of put up the brick wall

a little sooner. On the note of players asking for things that are bad, though, one of the most common requests we get is asking us to implement a silent playthrough where you just pick not saying anything the whole time. It's a pretty common thing you see when somebody first starts the game because there are a lot of choices to just not respond and say, like, remain silent. So people are like, I bet there's a playthrough where if I just click that every time, it'll be different. But it's just like it's a less interesting playthrough. It's something that's interesting on paper, right? But then in practice, it's just like, okay, well, you're just sitting here is a witness to every scene.

You're barely meaningfully weighing in. And then if we were to do that, we would need to have characters react to the first time you ever choose to speak. If you choose to bring up. Which would be like every member. you in the game would need something where everyone suddenly was like, you've never said a word. Right. I mean, one of the things I love about the game, I mean, in terms of one of things I love in general about role-playing games and especially your game is the idea that there's certainly no wrong

or right choice, that every choice has pluses and minuses. Every choice, you know, comes with consequences. You know, how do you write towards those to make sure that they're always interesting? It's not the classic Choose Your Own Adventure book where you find the gold or fall into quicksand. Exactly. Yeah. Because that's unsatisfying. As we were saying, you want to make sure that if somebody decides to do something, you don't just say, well, that was the wrong choice and punish them for it because we want to explore that. We want to be able to have this person explore the story from the perspective they've chosen. Yeah. And a lot of it is about positioning who consequences fall on because a stumbling block, a lot of games make, like a lot of choice. driven games is, oops, I picked the wrong answer. I died. And we don't have death because death

means you reload and it means that you break character. It means you break tension. You have now explored death as an option and it just means that you have to restart the game. We want people to feel terrible but keep going. Yeah. And to not feel like, oh, if I just went back and did things differently, maybe it'll be better. Yeah. Why do you think we like this though? Because I I mean, are we gluttons for punishment? Because I am, sometimes I'll play games and have terrible outcomes and feel awful, but feel great about having done that at the same time. Well, like, forces you to explore something, right?

Like, I feel like there's two main approaches to this type of interactive narrative, where one is essentially like some form of power fantasy wish fulfillment where, what if I could just do the right thing and it works out? And then I keep doing that again and again. And that's what you see in typical, uh, especially action RPGs. So, like, that's, that's one option. But the other is using interactivity is a way to kind of safely explore, like,

kind of the darker sides of human morality and choice to present you with a complicated, a hypothetical scenario where no one's actually being hurt, which in real life, which means that you have the freedom to see, you know, what outcome works best for you. Yeah, I feel speaking of things people have asked us before, having people ask because for each major decision point, because we have major decisions and also like tons of minor decisions in every single episode, but for the major ones, there are usually three outcomes. One that is a save that you don't always get. That one's dependent. And then two that have consequences. Basically, you can try to save somebody and then somebody else might pay the price.

somebody has asked me at once or a few times at this point how I write the things that aren't good basically just why have you chosen to write things that aren't just the best outcome how do you possibly decide to sacrifice anyone and for me it is actually writing the good outcome that is always the most boring because it's barely an exploration of anything things just turn out okay wow few that was a close one is nothing to me because the tension is broken there was no consequence that means next time you can tell yourself it's okay It turned out all right last time. So as long as I just get through this, things will be okay.

And that's just not how life works. But I like I do feel like the occasional good outcomes that you can get on major decisions in Scarlet Hollow work because they exist in the framework of the larger story where it's like it's not like it's a play through where nothing bad happens. It's a playthrough where, oh, thank God, I got a reprieve for once. and where the reprieves fall becomes interesting. Where it's like, so to give context to listeners who haven't played, when you start Scarlet Hollow, you get to pick two of a set of seven traits. And these are things like being strong, being hot, talking to animals. But which traits you pick can change the feeling of the narrative.

Because for instance, like if you pick powerful build, the physical strength one and keen eye, the observational one, you get those. saves at the very start of the game. So the first couple chapters feel like a couple of close calls, but then it rapidly plummets to like lower depths from there on out.

Versus if you pick a different choice. And the first two episodes, people are suffering and perhaps having a very bad time around you. And then in episode three, suddenly you come in and are able to save everyone. So I know that you have looked over the data in terms of the choices people make.

And that has actually helped you as you've been writing them chapter by chapter. What surprised you and what adjustments have you made along the way? There's a big one. Yeah. The most fun one is that people are extremely easily swayed by whoever talked to them most recently. Yeah, that was wild. I feel like I found out so much about the way that people think. And it's like held across the board. So, so like in episode three, first of all, I just say, I know people in real life where that's true for. I mean, it's a lot of people in real life, right? But in episode three, like during the big incident, depending on a choice you make earlier in that chapter, it changes what characters joins you as a companion for it.

Each of the two options has a very different opinion on what you should do when you're hit by the big decision. Yeah, they basically pull you down one path or the other. And when we first looked at the high level of the data, it was like a 50-50 split between the two choices. And then when we drilled down to what the split looked like based on who was your companion, it was like 70, 30 in favor of what that companion said. We just went back and changed like what the last line of narration or, you know, who the last speaker was and low and boat, like they weren't gargantuan shifts, but it was like a five to 10% offset based on that, which was nuts.

Video games with big budgets, otherwise known as triple A games. often have 3D animated characters. And computer animated people often fall into what's called the Uncanny Valley. Their skin, hair, and fabric of their clothing are hyper-realistic, but their eyes are kind of lifeless. Even if the voice acting is excellent, I sometimes can't suspend my disbelief with these types of characters. There are no voice actors in Scarlet Hollow.

You read the dialogue on screen, but the expressiveness of Abby's drawings makes the characters feel more real in my mind. Even though the animation is limited and the colors are kind of muted. I asked Abby and Tony if that was always going to be the style of the game. I can't help it

because I basically have been learning slowly the style of Scarlet Hollow as I work on it. It's a difficult thing because a lot of people who play AAA games and are looking for kind of the huge budget hyper-realism. they need that. They don't really like stylistic kind of choices. It brings them out of a narrative for somebody to not look like a person as much as possible.

That being said, I think that learning visual language and learning simplification and kind of understanding the abstractness of the human form is like a pretty important thing. And I think that because they're not trying to be a person, you fill in the details of them being a person. And it kind of makes you feel connected to them. Yeah. And I mean like one of the things. that works really well with our form is the way it lends itself to reactivity, where because Scarlet Hollow isn't voiced, and because it's done by one very fast artist, we can have a

larger breadth of scenes and reactions and emotional states of characters instead of like this, this funneling that higher budget things do, where, oh, you quickly pick between three options and they're fundamentally the same. You get a line different and then they have to put you back in the main scene because they had to pay for that cut scene, you know? You're watching a movie where you occasionally press a button, but if you were to set the controller down, it would be fundamentally the same experience.

Yeah. So you're talking about, though, Abby, I want to ask you, you said you're kind of figuring out the style of Scarlett Hollow as it goes along. Because you guys are in Toronto, right? But then you grew up in the South, Abby, right? Yes. I'm from North Carolina. But yeah, the South is like a very specific kind of thing.

And you're talking about, I think, your grandmother's from Mississippi. So like what did you bring to create that Southern Gothic vibe? Well, I suppose that's kind of just the soup of everything around me growing up. This is very much what I know of just the amounts of North Carolina. My cousins live there. I think it's gorgeous up there. And kind of the culture, all of this is, they're people who live in my head, I suppose. So their voices are very real to me.

The culture of the South, like Stella, I think, is a very southern character and that she's really friendly. She's very polite and kind of like gregarious, but then she's very private in a way that you wouldn't expect from somebody like that, especially some of the most recent scenes

that we've been working on. I'm very happy with some of the parts of Stella that are coming to the surface. I asked if they each had a favorite character in the game. I thought Abby would say Stella, since they invested so much time in her. But she mentioned a mysterious character named Wayne, who the player still doesn't know very much about.

Tony said his favorite character is Tabitha. She is the cousin of the player's character. She's wealthy by the standards of this town, but Tabitha is a bitter young adult. I think that she is the most complicated character in the story. I like her antagonistic. nature. I like the way she justifies her behavior to herself. She's a very fun character to write. Usually it's the harsher characters that are more fun to work on in general. Also, too, the longer

you play and the more time you spend with her, the more you get to know her, the more you are rewarded by getting to know her, that there are sides of her that in some playthrus you may never see. Absolutely. Some playthru, she's purely an antagonist and in others, it's ice queen that you're slowly defrosting. People love to defrost an ice queen. They do. I also asked who is the hardest character to write. And they both answered, Oscar.

Oscar is the town librarian and a single dad. So you can romance him if you want. But unlike Tabitha, he is very warm and open. So why was Oscar difficult to write? Oscar strictly because of how many permutations of his world exist, his daughter can be disabled by the end of episode two. Even if she isn't disabled, she can either be a happy-go-lucky teen or somebody whose friends are buried alive. He can lose his house in the third episode.

The manner in which he can lose his... house is dependent on, you know, choices that you made. If his daughter's injured, things can happen to the town doctor. And all of these different factors multiply into each other. So it's not just like, well, there's three of this Oscar, three of this Oscar, three of this Oscar. It's like, well, you have to multiply that first three set of circumstances by the next two. And that gets you six. And then that gets multiplied by the next two, which gets you like 12.

And all of those have to feel satisfying, interesting, and, like, distinct. And distinct. So we can't just, like, blend them all together and say, well, even if you made all these choices, they didn't really impact his character because that's not what we're doing. Yeah. And going back to kind of the question about how, like, the South kind of factors into this. Like, so much of this. And I don't think this is unique to the South is about kind of family and how it ties you to a place and how that can kind of, like, either root you or make you feel trapped. And I feel Oscar is written.

Each person in the story kind of has an aspect of this that we're exploring. And for Oscar, it's very much like the average person in this town who even if they tried to kind of get out because he like went to school outside of town. Like it draws you back in because of the family that you have there because of like the history you have there because of just the fact that it's hard to get away. Yeah. I mean like I don't even think that's fully unique to the South and that's part of the appeal of the game. right? People are inertial creatures. It's so easy to fall back to where you started if you don't build up enough momentum to break free. That's not even a small town thing. I mean, it's just kind of how it is. Yeah. It's like how can you move past something that seems like the entire world to you. And it's like it's not even it's not a bad to. It's not a bad thing to stay where you grew up your whole life. Like Oscar in the story is basically coming back and saying, well, how can I make this like a better place for people to live? Like, if I'm going to be here, I might as well do something with it.

Everyone Stella knows is in town. She has, like, you know, a comfortable network of friends. Yeah, ties to the past as comfort. She doesn't have comfort outside of town. She has comfort inside of town. And, like, that can be fulfilling, right? And then for Kanika, she is an exploration of just, like, desperately wanting to get away and feeling like you can't.

There is no getting away. And you're just, like, wasting your time thinking one day things will be different, but not today. Kanika is the manager of the general store. For the player's character, she is a potential love interest and an ally in your quest to understand these supernatural elements

that are deeply embedded in this town. I asked Abby and Tony if that is the main theme of the game, our relationship to a sense of place. Oh, yeah. Yeah, I think the anchoring qualities of places, the way that like past events scar people and things, even long after everyone involved with those events are dead. The way a choice someone made 100 years ago still means that your life is going to be shaped a certain way.

And are you responsible for that? Do you decide to lean into that? Do you try to reject it? Yeah. What are the obligations of family? What are the many ways the struggle? the struggle around power transference between generations happens. And this is an area where I feel like Scarlet Hollow really benefits from being a game instead of a book because it directly puts you as an agent in this scenario and forces you to reflect on these themes and all of these different permutations and configurations and to weigh in on something. Because sometimes when you read a very thematically rich book,

you can ponder the themes a lot, but then ultimately you're not obligated to make a choice regarding them, to make a choice of like, this is what this means to me, this is what I'm prioritizing. Whereas the game forces you to do that, and then the supernatural and, you know, fictional elements move pieces around so that, it's kind of looking at a more raw reflection of yourself, free from a lot of the biases that

you build up over time. Well, that also reminds me when you're talking about the different versions of Oscar, how much our choices define us. I mean, I think that people have this fantasy of like, well, it doesn't matter where I'd be born or what would happen to me. I'd still be me. And that's just not true. And I just think that that's so, you really see that when you as the gods of this world, this multiverse, are seeing all the different ways that Oscar could change depending on or how any of them could change depending on the circumstances of their lives and then you as the character are affecting that in terms of your the ripple effects of your actions too.

It's really fun. It's a very fun way to try to tell a story. So, I mean, you just put out, you're finishing up chapter five. It's going to come out very soon. Do you already know this is going to have so many chapters and you already have plotted the entire story out? Yes. Before we started work on episode one, yeah.

Yeah. We like to have our endings in mind. I think it's pretty important when you set out, especially if you're writing a mystery. Right. That doesn't mean like pieces of connective tissue don't change over time. But the major beats and the major revelations and the broad shape of the conclusion, those are always things that we try and start with immediately because we need to make sure

that things are correctly building to the point that they need to build towards. In a way, that's all we're asking from episodic storytelling. Hook us in at the beginning and stick the landing at the end. I have faith that when the final chapters of Scarlet Hollow are released, the ending will feel earned and satisfying, no matter which ending I end up creating for myself. That is it for this week. Thank you for listening. Special thanks to Abby Howard and Tony Howard Arias.

My assistant producer is Stephanie Billman. If you like this episode, you should check out my 2019 episode, Choose Your Own Adventure, where I explore the history and mechanics of role-playing video games. I also did an episode about the Uncanny Valley in 2018. We have another show called Between Imaginary Worlds. It's a more casual chat show that is only available to listeners who pledge on Patreon. In the most recent episode, I talked with Thaddeus Pets. Tapki about the new Robin Hood show on Amazon,

and why the myth of Robin Hood keeps getting retold over and over and over again. They latch on to the ideas of somebody who does stand up to bullies, whether they're swashbuckling, whether they're violent. No matter how you portray the Robin Hood one way or the other, he is a figure who is punching up. and I think that is what speaks to people at the end of the day. Between Imaginary Worlds comes included with the ad-free version of the show that you can get on Patreon. You can also buy an ad-free subscription on Apple Podcasts.

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