Well, 'tis the season. Not that season, the better one. The spooky one. I didn't make any big plans for horror games this month by way of last year's Itchy, Tasty Spooktathlon but I did have a couple of items I wanted to check out for when it was thematically apropos to do so. The first of those is Red Bow, a short narrative-focused horror game from one-person dev team Stranga (if you automatically said that name in an Australian accent like I did, you might not be surprised to hear the dev is Australian). The game follows a young girl named Roh, notable for the bright red bow in her hair, who finds herself waking up in a series of nightmarish lands between the worlds of the living and the dead. Unsure of where she is and why she's there, she explores each one to find a couple of lost souls in need of guidance: it's the player's task to find out how to settle these tortured spirits.

I initially thought this game used RPG Maker, since it adopts a familiar 16-bit top-down RPG perspective, but it's actually an AGS game: I guess the two can be fairly interchangeable if you're a dev with a small budget and stories to convey in the interactive medium. Each of the game's three main scenarios follow the same pattern: you explore, you talk to NPCs, you find items, you use those items where applicable, and then you resolve the conflict and return, briefly, to Roh's room where the next episode is due to begin. The interface is simple and each scenario is so short that you're unlikely to be stuck for long with no idea how to proceed; in fact, the number of interactive hotspots can usually be counted on both hands. Rather, the challenge comes in how you choose to approach the problems of these potentially harmful monsters in dire need.

Last year I played a horror game called Immure that set up a similar morality-based format: in that game, along with Red Bow, each scenario had an easy path that often involved destroying the dangerous avenging spirit and a more involved, more challenging path that offered a more altruistic and empathetic solution to the problem, albeit one that wasn't as immediately clear as the quick and forceful route without a little extra digging and some reading of subtext. An example in Red Bow would be the very first chapter: you are introduced to a dispassionate long-neck woman ghost named Kubi (named for the Rokurokubi, as many of the game's spirits are based on Asian mythology) who tasks you with collecting the soul of Akira, a woman who is found hanging by her neck in her cabin though very much conscious. Akira is terrified of Kubi and refuses to move on until the protagonist can present some truth as to why Akira ended her own life; and in doing so, finally help her accept her fate. At this point, the player is to return to Kubi and offer an item that symbolizes Roh's response to what she's seen: there's three options total here, one that offers a quick and easy resolution, one that required listening to and understanding Akira's perspective, and another that required a bit more digging after the fact that makes the particulars of that whole scenario that much more clear. These chapter endings, ranked from bad to good by the color of their associated achievements (I'm not sure I've seen a game take advantage of achievements in that manner before), also determine the final ending the player receives after all three scenarios are concluded, giving the game a small amount of replay value.

There's not a whole lot to Red Bow beyond a handful of these puzzles and the slightly open-ended nature of your answer to each scenario's dilemma. Since each chapter will take roughly thirty minutes to an hour blind (and about five minutes if you're replaying for a better conclusion) the game's over almost as soon as it's started. The pixel art has a decent sense of lighting, useful for developing the atmosphere in a horror-adjacent game like this, but is otherwise fairly rudimentary with a small pixel resolution that doesn't allow for too much detail. The monster designs are suitably creepy, though lose some of their terrifying edge due to those same limited pixels. The writing would be better were it not for an ungodly number of typos; especially dispiriting given the end credits include four proofreaders. However, some of the author's empathetic sensibility manages to shine through as Roh realizes she doesn't have all the answers these suffering creatures need, nor can she necessarily provide the succor they desire, but she can lend an ear and intuit the source of their pain, giving them a chance to forgive themselves in lieu of being the right person to offer it. The designer included a dedication to a deceased family member in the credits, but it's evident even before then from the game's themes that the topic of death and exoneration has been weighing on their mind along with what they might say to the people they lost should they meet them again on the path to the afterlife. For as much as the game was over in a flash, there's a heart to it that made it more appealing than most games in the genre that don't really go for themes beyond "ghosts are scary y'all".

Red Bow wasn't exactly a roller coaster of jumpscares nor a deeply challenging wild goose chase that has you running and hiding from invincible monsters every five minutes, unlike most of its peers, but a bite-sized quest in the Yume Nikki mold of repurposing an old-school RPG aesthetic as an atmospheric and trippy adventure game. I think I longed for a little more of everything from Red Bow: more impressive visuals, a more polished script, and a few more scenarios or puzzles to solve before its abrupt ending. As it is, though, it's hard to summon too much vitriol for a game that goes for thoughtful over gratuitously scary, and empathetic over arbitrarily cruel and violent. I can always get plenty of the gory stuff from the more shooty horror games I've been hoarding, if needs must. (Incidentally, the developer released another game in the same vein earlier this summer called Ashina: The Red Witch, and it looks to have improved on everything I wished was better about Red Bow. Might have to pencil that one in for a future IGotW entry.)

Rating: 3 out of 5.