RPGs have relationship problems, and they’re all about you. You help someone to get a reward. You encourage someone to change to suit your preferences. You make someone love you because you choose the right things to say. For Abby Howard and Tony Howard-Arias of Black Tabby Games, nipples You in the middle of a relationship makes friendship and romance shallow. So for their RPG-slash-horror visual novel red hollowthey set out to find a solution.
“In some RPGs, like Mass EffectYou’re leading a conversation about other characters, but also about you and how you can fix their problems,” Howard-Arias said. “And this is just a solipsist structure, where the player feels like the only real person in this setting because the flow of time, the progression of events, the agency itself, is only really assigned to the player. So we wanted to see: what would an exploration look like if another character was the one expressing this agency and you obeyed their wishes?”
red hollow follows a young adult visiting their family home in rural North Carolina, but the ancient gods are starting to throw things into disarray and the people are getting a little weirder than usual. Howard decided to choose a small town red hollowThe setting is based in part on his experiences growing up in North Carolina (as well as his love of Southern Gothic literature). But for Howard-Arias, who grew up in New Jersey, “small town” meant “Bruce Springsteen.” So he dug into Springsteen’s discography and came back with the theme of escapism, the desire to escape to something bigger and better as his primary focus. That, and the counterpoint: No able to escape for something better.
The pair uses that as a starting point to explore what it means to feel trapped in your life. Trapped by your family and the choices they made decades before you existed. Trapped by the way your parents raised you, you imitate their relationship model without realizing it, for better or worse. Trapped by everyone’s expectations, their view of you that will never change, because you can’t reinvent yourself and neither can they. This web of issues and context is the most influential factor that determines how people interact with you red hollow.
And the phrasing is important — the how they interact with You. It’s not how you change their life. You can change their way of life, but you can never predict how your choices will interact with other people. chaos that makes them who they are.
“The childish aspect of games as an artistic medium is that most stories and games are about heroism and doing the right thing,” Howard-Arias said. “With red hollowI feel the need to ask, what’s the point without sacrifice? What do we do as an artistic medium if we say that this is a story about heroism, but there are no stakes, no punishment, no risk for the greater good? There is no self-sacrifice, no examination of human nature. It’s a power fantasy that rewards you with better outcomes for doing the right thing.”
“In terms of character relationships, that means making certain choices will impact your relationships with other people, sometimes for good, sometimes for bad, depending on what you do with their lives,” Howard added.
In other words, there is no golden mean. There is no magic solution that will make everyone happy with you. Choosing one thing means giving up another thing, and the interconnectedness of all things within it red hollow meaning what you give up could be just as good or important as what you choose.
There is one small exception. Howard and Howard-Arias deliberately created one example of what you might call an ideal outcome… and made it extremely difficult to achieve. In the red hollowThe fifth chapter, released in February, you can make Tabitha cry in a therapeutic way. Tabitha is your cousin in the game, someone who expresses little positive emotion and, at first glance, seems like the villain. Actually no, because there are no definite “bad guys” in it red hollowbut it takes a series of specific actions throughout the game until chapter five to break through its shell — the kind of task you might need a wiki for.
In fact it’s an exercise in showing how fickle personality can be. Other RPGs might consider the “make Tabitha cry” moment a crucial turning point, a necessary step toward achieving a good ending. red hollow does make it affect his behavior for the rest of the chapter. But that’s not the only factor. Some of the choices Tabitha makes after the crying scenario are also influenced by your behavior up to that point. But in the end, it’s about him — not you.
The uncertain impact you have on someone’s life also applies to every relationship red hollownot just romantic ones. However, this has an additional level of difficulty. Howard and Howard-Arias are unhappy with the trend they see in modern media, where close relationships are devoid of friction. Problems are solved simply by talking about them, because everyone involved wants the same thing, and all it takes to fix someone’s weaknesses is to show that they exist.
“Then they’ll be like, ‘Oh my God, I’m sorry I have flaws. I’m going to stop having them soon,” Howard laughed. “And that is No how it works. Or you might have had three really great dates with someone and felt really close to them, felt sparks of love and affection, and then you hit a dead end where you want fundamentally different things. And where do you go after that? How do you solve it? That’s where reality comes from.”
All red hollowRomantic relationships follow that pattern, where you eventually discover an unchangeable trait or strong desire the other person has, then have to figure out what that means for the way you view your relationship. Stella, your first friend red hollowwill always want to talk to Tabitha in chapter five about what happened, even if you don’t want to, and even if it leads to a very bad outcome (which it often does). Oscar, the librarian, has a unique way of showing affection: letting you see how strange he is (and he can be very strange). That’s not good. That’s not bad. That’s just the way it is, and you can’t change it.
The same also applies to red hollowother love interests, to varying degrees. Depending on the person and the route you take, this may be more difficult No to label certain actions as less than good. Just because you want the best for your friends and lovers doesn’t mean they won’t do bad things. It is this moral complexity that is at the heart of the problem red hollowand that’s something Howard and Howard-Arias consider essential to telling a good story.
“In the end, if we sit down and treat all our characters, all our characters, with humanity, grace and empathy, is all anyone could ask for,” Howard-Arias said.
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