This indie aims to break the curse of self-absorption in RPG relationships

Black Tabby Games on making romance and friendship feel real, even if it hurts RPGs have a relationship problem, and it's all about you. You help someone for a reward. You encourage someone to change so they suit your preferences. You make someone love you because you picked the right things to say. For Abby Howard and Tony Howard-Arias of Black Tabby Games, putting you at the center of relationships makes friendships and romances shallow. So for their horror RPG-slash-visual novel Scarlet Hollow, they set out to find a solution. "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 says. "And it's just this very solipsist structure, where a player feels like the only real person in this setting because the flow of time, the progression of events, agency itself, is only really assigned to the player. So we wanted to see: what does an exploration look like if it's the other characters who are expressing this agency and you're at their whim?" Scarlet Hollow follows a young adult visiting their family home in rural North Carolina, but ancient gods start mucking around with th