Scarlet Hollow November Progress Update!

Hey folks!

Another month, another update, and wow do we have a lot of progress to share with you! First and foremost, in case you missed it, Episode 5 finally has a release date! Your return to the Holler is set for Friday, February 13th 2026, on Valentine's Day Eve. We announced this release date with a painstakingly animated trailer put together by our dear friends over at SmallBu Animation, and you can check it out here:

We've also finally released our first alpha build to our testers. All in-all, it contains:

• 34 brand new backgrounds.

• 270 brand new sprites

• About 70,000 words of total content.

• 6 new tracks from our maestro, Mr. Boone.

Even though we call these builds "alphas," this section of the chapter is bug-tested, and effectively locked and finalized. While it's hard to get a full sense of scope, I'd say this means that roughly the first quarter of the episode, in terms of density, is essentially finalized. If you're interested in trying the beginning of the episode early, you can access this build through the Alpha Tester tier: https://www.patreon.com/posts/first-scarlet-5-142499990

Joining this tier also gets your name added to the alpha tester section of the credits when the next update rolls out!

No pressure to join, but the option is there.

We also wanted to use this update to talk about a small retroactive change we're making to pre-existing romance content. In the current live build, romance options essentially fully ignore your character's gender, but as time went on, we felt like writing their scenes this way stripped them of a little bit of character. You can still date any of our romance options regardless of your character's gender, but there's now a little extra dialogue referencing their preferences and history to make things feel a bit more organic.

This applies to:
Oscar
Stella
Kaneeka

And it will also apply to Sybil and Doctor Kelly in the future. But we'll leave the details for you to discover once the new update drops.

Work continues to go well, and we look forward to sharing more with you as we continue to progress.

Best wishes,
Abby and Tony