DELICIOUS ANALYSIS! Here are my favourite parts.
On Reese's character arc:
The obedience route also added an extra layer of development friction in Episode 5 for players romancing Reese, where some players expressed frustration over the similarities between how events proceed with “obedience Reese” and “matricide Reese” (the route where he still kills Doctor Kelly, but the player witnesses the action.)
To us, as writers, whether Reese commits a brutal and intimate act of murder in this chapter is the defining branching point for his personal journey, and whether or not the player witnesses the moment is secondary, and has a greater impact on how the player views Reese than how he views himself.
If the player witnesses Reese’s murder of Doctor Kelly, there is a brief moment of quiet before he flees the scene. Some players read this CG as the core of his personality in this route, but we can’t ignore the actions that precede it. Reese chooses to murder his unarmed mother in this moment, and he chooses to make it a painful and terrifying experience for her.
And later on, regarding Reese's romance arc in Chapter 5:
Anecdotally, some players have struggled with both the length and thematic exploration of player agency within Reese’s Episode 5 romance routes. Overall, we’re happy with how the more aggressive versions of Reese’s romance play out: he crossed a personal Rubicon by taking a life, and his controlling attitude towards the player echoes both his own past circumstances and the overall themes of the game. We particularly like the way Reese’s decision to attack Tabitha brings the player directly into conflict with her, and how the player’s one method of avoiding this conflict (by not being honest with Reese) mirrors Doctor Kelly’s relationship with him.
On the scene you get if you start Chapter 5 with Stella, and confront Tabby with her:
For the Stella romance route, this is the moment in Episode 5 where we throw players into the deep end, placing strain on their new relationship and putting Stella’s most headstrong qualities on full display in a way that places the player directly into danger. Something we wanted to explore with Scarlet Hollow’s romances was the player not really knowing who she was getting in bed with, both literally and metaphorically.
There’s always a moment early on in relationships when deeper, uglier, more vulnerable truths about ourselves and our partners are revealed to each other, and given the speed with which the player, by necessity, starts these relationships gives us a means to organically explore this space. This also lets us explore romantic relationships in a way few video games do, where instead of “locking in a romance” being an end goal, it’s approached as the start of something new.
On the Julius Tremaine basement confrontation:
The heart of the farms crisis asks the player how she would react if she met a stranger at the lowest point in his life. Will the player jump to the worst possible interpretation of the events laid out in front of her? Will she try and get a more thorough understanding before making a decision, or will she rush to a snap judgment?
The crisis also serves as a synecdoche of Scarlet Hollow as a whole. The player stumbles into a place that won’t let its occupants leave, where something terrible is slowly squeezing the life out of its denizens (especially the younger generation), while everyone else talks in circles around the issue without doing anything about it. And the player, despite having the loosest of relationships with the people involved, is forced to make decisions that change the trajectory of their lives.
On the "secret ending" easter egg that you get if you finish Chapter 5 with a hacked save:
For the most part, people reacted how we hoped they would to this ending: a quick “you got me,” followed by either quietly editing their file again to proceed unimpeded (until their games inevitably break at some point in Episode 6 or 7), or heading back to the beginning to play Scarlet Hollow as intended.
A tiny handful of people have reacted very strongly to this ending, going as far as to send hate mail or otherwise harass us online, arguing that by purchasing the game, they should be free to do whatever they want with it, and that it’s unethical of us to impede their actions.
We here at Black Tabby Games love and appreciate fanfiction and fanworks, but there’s a difference between creating in those spaces and attacking developers for suggesting that players engage with a narrative work as intended.
To the folks who have reacted aggressively to the inclusion of this ending (and only to these folks): is this who you want to be?
I can think of no other medium where I’ve seen audience members assert a moral right to edit a creator’s work and to not only personally declare those edits as valid, canonical alterations, but to expect and demand that a work’s authors publicly condone these actions.
Though often couched in arguments favoring collective ownership, this stance, to me, is rooted in consumerism taken to an extreme: a personal desire to so wholly have ownership over another person’s work that one is willing to strip away anything that causes discomfort, choosing only to engage with a sanded down idea of what a text could have been rather than engaging with the text itself.
If you do hold this mindset and you found this short section of a very long essay upsetting, then I ask you to take a step back and ask yourself why that is.
Again, is this who you want to be?
My favourite part: an analysis of the Tabitha confrontation scene and how Tabitha reacts. I took several failed attempts to get Breaking Point and Greater Good when geting all the achievements... Tabby, my nemesis....
This scene is complicated from a balancing perspective, not only because of the literally hundreds of variables going into it, but because we don’t want many players to get what they view as the “optimal” outcome.
Confronting Tabitha this early in the narrative is a risky move, and should be read as such by players. From a balancing perspective, we actually view the “impasse” outcome as the ideal ending to this scene, with the story continuing, but with an emotional tension between the two cousins that can continue to be chipped away at over the remainder of the game. Getting her to break down this early in the story should be a weird and rare worldstate that comes at the cost of the player’s other relationships. But when players know that there’s a “better” outcome on the table, they’ll usually do whatever they can to optimize for that outcome.
As with a lot of balancing in Episode 5, our hope is that this desire to optimize within the chapter will mostly disappear in the context of Scarlet Hollow’s full release.
The difficulty of the Tabitha confrontation particularly causes friction for players with the Keen Eye trait, where spamming the “I’m observant” button against a character who’s been keeping secrets from you understandably gets her guard up, making her much more difficult to overcome in this scenario. That said, Keen Eye also gets a lot of extra information over the course of the story, and should, by the end of the Estate section in Episode 5, realize that confronting Tabitha might be dangerous.
(...) With how Tabitha’s check is written, it should be the case that characters she perceives as more intelligent have a harder time with this scene, while characters she perceives as unintelligent can more easily catch her off guard.
A graph from the article showing the results breakdown for the question "If you talked to Tabitha, how did it go?" The caption reads: "44% of all players getting Tabitha to cry is too many… Seems like a buff is in order. A buff to Tabitha, that is."
Oh, so I took several runs at trying and failing to make Tabitha cry, but 44% of all players did it... Okay, Tabitha... I see how it is between us...........
