The Indie Informer

by

Jill Grodt

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My interest in Attu Games goes back nearly a decade. The development duo and I crashed into each other when I was working as an intern at Game Informer, and they were developing the studio’s debut title, Fuedal Alloy. When that game released, the team warmly promised to look me up again when they were ready to announce their next game. True to their word, the pair wrote to me in 2022– four years before today’s release– to fill me in on their latest project. That turned out to be Scarlet Deer Inn.

I was immediately smitten with the idea. A hand-embroidered narrative-adventure set loose in a medieval backdrop. I didn’t have any idea then of what the narrative would focus on, but my first hands-on with the demo hinted it was going to a place I hadn’t come close to imagining. A dark place. A place of blood and folklore.

Just outside the threshold of my homespun room lies the inn. Nestled in the back where customers never venture, the kitchen is a hearty first sight after leaving my bed.

Sight has been the dominating sense in my short experience so far. That’s what I expected, considering the attention-grabbing and unique art style. Dialogue boxes host decorative threads, both visual and spoken. Characters breathe with life as the thread introduces fluctuating animation, even as the character stands still.

Even in the large cooking chamber, with a myriad of elements to focus on, the embroidered cook is the first thing to claim my vision. Her cheerful expression and plump figure lift my spirits.

This is where my senses begin competing for mastery. Sound starts to take over.

The healthy hearth, home of the kitchen’s crackling cooking fire, triggers a heaping of stew-laden cauldrons to bubble rhythmically. The cook contentedly kneads dough on a solid wooden table that nonetheless creaks occasionally as it feels the force of her determined activity. Altogether, it’s a perfect ASMR loop one might play to induce a relaxing atmosphere.

But breaking into this domestic bliss is a clue that not everything is as it seems. Beyond our industrious cook and the youthful chalk sketches of geese on the stone walls, a table stands bloody.

Its surface holds scraps of mutilated fur, bones, and flesh alongside a cutting board and knife — this last stabbed unsettlingly upright into the wood. The fruits of this bloody labor hang in the rafters. The meat will no doubt bless one of the stews boiling behind it.

This scene is perfectly fitting in a kitchen. Where else would an inn employee choose to butcher meat than in a kitchen? Despite this, the tone of the scene sends a chill down my spine.

Most, I imagine, will walk right by it without a thought. But a small window just above the table aims a wickedly gleaming bolt of light right at the scene, cautioning aware players to take note. Ignore this warning at your peril.

I can pick at a few rough stitches in Scarlet Deer Inn. The lack of on-screen button prompts produces frustration, puzzles are not always intuitive, combat is unwieldy, and there may be one too many sprinting sections. Though for most of these, I appreciate something these uneven threads introduce. No button prompts equal more immersion, and those sprinting sections trigger some of my favorite music in the game.

Of those aspects of the game which may inspire love or loathing, I adore the ending. Like a ghostly tale told around a campfire, there are few satisfying answers to make players feel they’ve definitively concluded the experience. However, as in the grimmest of stories, the ending enables the game’s fearsome mysteries to fester in my imagination to live on longer than Scarlet Deer Inn‘s short runtime.