Horror is such a difficult genre for artists to work with. People think it’s easy because they have memories of more-comedy-than-scary slashers and B-grade films, bad acting and all. There’s also the perception that it’s not a particularly subtle genre, and therefore must be quite easy to work with. But horror is difficult and tiny things that break with atmosphere and tension can totally ruin an otherwise good idea. Scarlet Snowfall is filled with those tiny things.
I’ll start with the biggest issue I have with the game: Without having proof, I’m confident enough to say that there is plenty of AI involved in the production of Scarlett Snowfall’s assets. For one thing, the backgrounds are simultaneously far too detailed and yet far too generic. They have the kind of hyper-detail that AI tends to spit out, but it doesn’t always fit the brief. If the developers were using artists to create those backgrounds, they would have more unique qualities that fully fit the scene they’re supporting.
Additionally, there’s one particularly noteworthy location – a wooden hut – where there are several interior locations, and they are all significantly different from one another in both aesthetic and design. An actual artist’s work would be far more consistent.
Then there are some incredible moments with the CGs, which often depict highly-realistic looking characters, only for the in-game sprite of that same character to look so completely different that they’re unrecognisable. Again, if AI wasn’t involved, surely the artists would have aimed for some level of consistency between the way characters look in CGs, and how they look in sprite form.
I could be wrong and if so I apologise to the artists involved when the problem was poor project management allowing so many different aesthetic styles to clash with no coherence between them. However it’s pretty clear how this happened – Scarlet Snowfall was developed on a tiny budget, and the developers reached for technology solutions because a visual novel is actually very expensive and time-consuming when it comes to the art creation. Unfortunately, to get back to the original point, this is a horror game, and the clashing art styles and near comedic slapshot way they’ve been thrown together make it hard to become invested in the fear.
There are other issues that are likely not to do with AI. Almost none of the background music loops well, so you’re constantly hearing it stop and then reset. It’s one thing with the music, which at least has a linear progression of beginning, middle and end, so the restart isn’t overly distracting, but when it happens to soundscapes, like the sound of wind blowing, it’s immensely jarring. Another issue is the interface, which was clearly designed for a mouse pointer, and it’s incredibly difficult to figure out how to even highlight actions. Given that there are points where it wants you to manage an inventory and use point-and-click mechanics, this is frustrating beyond measure.
The saddest thing is that there is a potentially excellent story there. In fact, I managed to play right through to the conclusion, when I would have dropped most VNs of this presentational quality, precisely because the concept is so strong. The game’s set high up a frozen mountain, which two journalists have scaled to get to the bottom of a mystery. There they encounter a boy, who wakes up with amnesia in a frozen tunnel (a dead body next to him) and a little girl ghost stalking him.
Tonally it’s gunning for something similar to Project Zero (or Fatal Frame, if you’re based in the US). Leaning heavily into yurei tradition, the story is one that’s as much about melancholy and tragedy as it is a case of monsters running around slaughtering people. The setting is also evocative (we don’t get enough horror games set high up mountains).
Sadly for horror to work, it really needs to maintain a constant grip and build intensity on you, and structurally the game is not sound. Pacing is all over the place, the decision tree leads to any number of bad endings but there’s never anything particularly terrifying about them (and you usually only need to go back a few lines of dialogue to choose a different path). Characterisation is also very inconsistent tonally there wasn’t enough to distinguish each character from one another. Ultimately, rather than being characters in a nightmare that you feel empathy (and therefore fear) for, you end up seeing these characters in purely mechanical terms, for their role in moving the narrative forward.
Scarlett Snowfall’s translation is also far better than I would have guessed given the aforementioned inconsistencies and clear budgetary limitations. I would have expected endless typos, broken grammar, and total gibberish in places. What is there is actually quite competent. There are some sentences that could have used a heavier rewrite to read more naturally, but overall it reads comfortably and is a genuinely impressive step to take. Many other indie VNs could only dream of this standard in a non-native language.
It’s hard to be a solo developer, or a small team collaborating on a visual novel. It can be intimidatingly expensive, high risk, and potentially low reward. I can certainly appreciate the desire to just get something out there even if there are massive corners to cut. Unfortunately, while I can get a sense of the kind of story that the developers wanted to tell, this was the kind of horror that needed to be deep in atmosphere and intensity, and unfortunately, everything about the presentation of Scarlett Snowfall undermined the vision.
