The Haunted Hoard: Red Bow (PC)

When horror games were in their infancy, they were on hardware that could hardly provide the important visual element that can so effectively sell a terrifying moment or horrific creature. Still, despite being restricted to pixel art or limited polygons, games found ways to still sell their horror with their art, some even using the limitations to their advantage. Silent Hill‘s polygonal monsters are strange and ethereal precisely because it’s hard to truly make them out in their native resolution, and even some modern games like Lone Survivor can embrace an intentionally limited look to create eerie looking creatures despite their pixelated visuals. Your imagination fills in the gaps, but problems with this approach arise if you lean too heavily into the player inventing a more horrifying appearance for the creatures, and that’s where Stranga Games’s Red Bow makes its biggest misstep.

 

Red Bow has you play as a child named Roh who repeatedly wakes up in her home after dreaming of visits to strange locations. Roh is sent to a few different areas like a road to nowhere and a derelict ship to speak with spirits who exist in a place between life and death, the little girl tasked with helping them escape Limbo. Speaking with the ghosts will reveal the tragic events of their lives, after which you must find out a way to either help them meet a permanent violent end or help them achieve redemption so they may pass to the other side, but it is not truly a matter of judging the spirits. Deciding their fate is usually picking between two options that involve having or using certain items while considering the circumstances of the stories you were told. It’s not always as straightforward as picking between one action or another as one may take more steps to complete, but the path you pick for getting the ghost to leave Limbo doesn’t feel as weighty as it should be since the importance of certain actions or items can sometimes only really become clear after you’ve experimented with them and thus potentially committed to a path.

Much of the horror derives from the spirits you encounter, the lingering guilty ghosts meant to have striking appearances that could very well shock you if you decide to do an incredible amount of leg work in regards to imagination. The deliberate pixel art style is not a problem in regards to finding items of importance, and the environments can often be moody thanks to having a good amount of detail despite the art direction. The ship has a rainstorm, the road to nowhere has a creeping mist, and the store at night uses its light effects well. These could play host to some nice atmospheric horror elements, but the monster design is incredibly lackluster. The deliberately basic appearances of most of the characters you encounter continue to rob some interesting concepts of their punch. A man whose face is stretched across a wall instead looks like a smiling ornament rather than the gruesome truth of his situation, and the reveal of the game’s final spirit, perhaps the one intended to be most shocking, is robbed of its weight because it lacks the detail to truly make the concept horrifying. Some designs manage to be decent, Kubi the long-necked spirit has some of their impact despite their in-game appearance being much weaker than the visual used in the concept art, and a bloated blue spirit aboard the ship comes across well because its size allows it to, but the game even seems to recognize its limited character art fails it and has a more detailed image of a ghost with a scary face appear in a devoted window to try and have the impact seeing it in its small pixelated form could not.

 

This wouldn’t be as much of a problem if there was a lot more narrative or gameplay substance to Red Bow. Red Bow is a fairly short adventure where you walk through a limited set of areas, interact with what you can, and then take whatever action is needed to progress the story. Some can lead to an unfortunate end for Roh but you can save any time to prevent that setting you back too far, but most of the puzzles beyond deciding how to deal with the area’s spirit are fairly basic. Checking the right spot, using a fairly obvious item from your small inventory, and mild interaction with the environment like pushing ladders is what the puzzle element asks from you usually. Perhaps the most complex puzzle in the game involves scaring a cat, in that it takes two steps because it decided to add a small but not particularly interesting complication to how you get fire involved in the puzzle.

The part that is meant to carry weight is of course how you resolve the spirits’ dilemmas. On paper many of the stories are fairly sad and not really flawed save for how quick and bare some of them are, the game hoping to enhance its monster designs with them but not really getting visceral enough to fill in those gaps. Still, they could have done their job decently with the proper substance to them, and having you use the context of the stories to determine an ending for them is an interesting approach to puzzle solving. There are multiple conclusions to the game, albeit ones that aren’t too interested in how they vary, so mostly it comes down to you deciding if you’ll try one solution or another provided you figure out both. They better solutions are often not too straightforward so having a happier ending behind paying closer attention to the situations is a smart approach, but if it had spent more time with the ghosts and their stories in a similar vein to how Death Mark handles its specters than they could have a greater impact.

 

While the limited pixel art style is a conscious choice despite its failings, Red Bow has a few other little problems that clearly weren’t intentional. In this short game that lasts about an hour, there are quite a lot of typos in the already limited dialogue, to the point where they aren’t really negligible errors. You can still get the intended point of what is being said, but it certainly can’t be skimmed over because of their relative frequency. Perhaps a stranger issue occurs in the very first spirit area, the road to nowhere having a path you can go down to the side and meet a different character before you encounter the long-necked spirit Kubi. The spirit you speak to down the path already assumes you met Kubi and Roh speaks like she has, so if you accidentally skip the intended first encounter you can throw yourself into a mildly confusing situation. Since so much of the main puzzles are tied to the conversations with the spirits as well, an oversight in the order you can speak with them opens up room for missing out on vital clues. Other technical quibbles are a bit easier to push through like the inventory not always opening first try when the button is pressed, but for a short and limited game it’s surprising how many small problems weren’t addressed.

THE VERDICT: The deliberately retro art style of Red Bow does not pair well with a sequence of somewhat generic ghost story concepts, neither having the proper impact because simplicity wins out over detail. The concept of solving the mournful spirits’ problems in different manners is an interesting idea and one where the otherwise simplistic puzzles actually find some decent footing, but this short game lacks any real punch because it wants the player to fill in so many gaps when it comes to its horror aspects. The environments are moody but some of the serious spirits are almost laughable because of their sprite design, and with typos and technical issues adding small hitches to this quick adventure, it’s hard to immerse yourself in something that feels like it was made in a hurry.

 

And so, I give Red Bow for PC…

A BAD rating. Red Bow is the kind of game that doesn’t really burn you as you play it, but coming out the other side it feels hollow. It has a few possible hooks it throws out and then doesn’t do much to deliver on them, wrapping up stories quickly or failing to draw out their emotion because of the limitations it chose to embrace instead of defy. It seems to be going for a Game Boy Color aesthetic, but that system knew it could whip out more detailed images by putting in the effort or cutting away to still art so it can create an effective image without hitting on its technical restrictions. Having better looking ghosts probably wouldn’t help it climb out of the hole of being a rather plain approach to horror but it could have something to make up for the bite-sized plots that don’t have the time to sink in with their eerie implications or the room to get really dark or detailed in how they unfold. Embracing the judgment angle more could have helped it rise out of its ho-hum puzzle design as well. If your choices had greater weight or were reflected beyond a quick wrap-up to the area then they could have more a meaningful impact and linger with the player instead of being just one stop in a sequence of short stories.

 

Red Bow doesn’t have a doomed design. Almost every part of it could be salvaged, even the art style, if they were given more care, attention, and thought.  So much of it feels thrown together unfortunately, like the developer was rushing to complete it and didn’t think to double check their work or really ruminate on how a scene could be made more effective. It’s practically punch-clock horror, setting up some scenarios that could be disturbing or scary but not approaching them with enough heart to really make them effective. Stranga Games has a few horror games under their belt and some that come highly recommended, so I can only hope that Red Bow was a slump or perhaps an idea pursued with less passion than the rest of their catalogue.