In many role-playing games, relationships serve the player’s ego. You perform a helpful deed to receive a reward. You offer advice to mold a character to your liking. You navigate dialogue trees to engineer love, turning intimacy into a transactional power fantasy. For Abby Howard and Tony Howard-Arias, the creators behind Black Tabby Games’ Scarlet Hollow, this design creates shallow, solipsistic connections. Their horror RPG-slash-visual novel, set in a troubled rural North Carolina town, radically subverts this convention. Instead of placing you as the central agent fixing everyone’s problems, Scarlet Hollow makes you subject to the agency, quirks, and entrenched lives of its characters. This article explores how the game’s philosophy transforms romance and friendship into complex, unpredictable bonds where you are not a matchmaker, but a participant navigating a web of pre-existing traumas, desires, and immutable flaws.
The Solipsism Problem in Traditional RPG Relationships
“In some RPGs, like Mass Effect, you lead a conversation that’s about the other character, but it’s also about you and how you can fix their problems,” Howard-Arias explains. This structure fosters a feeling that the player is the only real person in the setting—time, events, and agency revolve around them. Black Tabby Games sought to invert this dynamic. In Scarlet Hollow, you are often at the whim of other characters. Their actions, born from decades of familial history and personal context, drive the narrative. The game examines what it means to feel trapped: by family legacy, by inherited relationship models, by static perceptions in a small town. This web of entrenched problems is the primary factor shaping how characters interact with you, not how you change them.
No Golden Route: Consequences and Interconnected Lives
Howard-Arias critiques a childish aspect of games: the prevalence of stories about heroism without real sacrifice. “What is good without sacrifice?” he asks. Many games offer power fantasies where doing the right thing guarantees a better outcome. Scarlet Hollow rejects this. Choices impact relationships, sometimes positively, sometimes negatively, based on their effect on the other character’s life. There is no magic solution to make everyone happy. Picking one path means relinquishing another, and the game’s dense interconnectedness ensures the forsaken option could be as valuable as the chosen one. This creates authentic stakes, moving beyond reward-driven interaction.
The Exception: Tabitha’s Therapeutic Catharsis
The developers intentionally created one instance of an ideal outcome—making your cousin Tabitha cry in a therapeutic moment in Chapter 5—and made it exceptionally difficult to achieve. Tabitha, who often appears as a potential villain, has no definitive “bad guy” label. Breaking through her shell requires a specific series of actions across the entire game, likely necessitating a guide. Even this pivotal moment isn’t treated as a simple turning point. It influences her behavior, but subsequent choices are also filtered through your entire history with her. Ultimately, the scene is about her catharsis, not your achievement.
Romance Without Frictionless Resolution
Howard and Howard-Arias identify a troubling trend in modern media where close relationships lack friction. Problems are resolved merely by talking, as all parties inherently want the same thing. A flaw is corrected once pointed out. “And that is not how it works,” Howard laughs. Scarlet Hollow’s romantic relationships deliberately run into immutable traits or fervent desires of the other person. You must then reckon with what that means for your connection. Stella will always insist on confronting Tabitha in Chapter 5, regardless of your wishes and often leading to poor outcomes. Oscar, the librarian, expresses affection by revealing his peculiar nature—a trait you cannot alter. These elements are not good or bad; they simply exist, defining the person.
Accepting Moral Complexity in Love Interests
This principle extends to all love interests in the game. Depending on the person and route, certain actions may be hard to view as benevolent. Wanting the best for your partner doesn’t preclude them from doing horrible things. This moral complexity is central to Scarlet Hollow’s narrative purpose. The game refuses to sanitize its characters for player comfort, presenting them as full humans with problematic, sometimes damaging, dimensions. The romance options thus become explorations of compatibility amidst fundamental differences, not quests to engineer a perfect partner.
Agency Belongs to the Characters, Not the Player
The core innovation of Scarlet Hollow is its redistribution of agency. The flow of events is not dictated by player choice alone but emerges from the cumulative histories and current motivations of the town’s inhabitants. Your role is to navigate this existing ecosystem, not to redesign it. Relationships evolve based on how your actions intersect with a character’s lifelong context, a mess you can never fully predict or control. This design fosters a sense that other characters are truly autonomous, with their own goals and timelines that don’t always align with yours.
At its heart, Scarlet Hollow challenges the player-centric relationship model that dominates RPGs. By embedding romance and friendship within a framework of pre-existing trauma, unchangeable flaws, and distributed agency, Black Tabby Games creates a narrative where connections feel earned and real. There is no matchmaking here; you cannot play puppet master to the hearts of Scarlet Hollow. Instead, you participate in bonds that are messy, consequential, and deeply human, where the final measure of success isn’t a reward, but the nuanced understanding that comes from engaging with another person’s uncompromising self. “At the end of the day, if we sit down and we treat all of our characters with humanity, grace and empathy, that’s all that anyone can really ask for,” Howard-Arias says. The game embodies this ethos, offering relationships not as puzzles to solve, but as people to meet.
