“Scarlet Deer Inn: The Embroidered Adventure Game Making Waves in the Gaming World”

The Czech game Scarlet Deer Inn from the Attu Games studio did a hussar trick. Over the past few days, the embroidered adventure has been able to attract huge attention from players and media from all over the world. At the beginning, he stood alone simple tweet. On April 29, developer Eva Navrátilová drew attention to a fact that is already well known to us. Namely, that each block of character animation is first created on a sewing machine before being transferred to the digital world.

Although this is nothing new for us and we have already seen hints of the process before, a brief post on Twitter attracted a lot of attention. To date, almost 20 million people have seen the said tweet. Almost 234,000 people liked it. Almost 36,000 people retweeted it and over 2,800 people responded to it with comments. Great attention was also given to the following contributions and Eve the number of followers increased by leaps and bounds.

But more importantly, it undoubtedly increased the awareness of the game itself and certainly the number of wishlists on Steam. In practice, it was already manifested in the way that even during the past holidays, Scarlet Deer Inn penetrated, among other things, the pages of many global gaming magazines. For example, websites wrote about the game PC Gamer, DualshockersGerman PC Games or Japanese 4Gamer.net. But also a number of other sites.

Understandably, the topic also resonates strongly on various discussion servers. Individual articles and their authors compare the aesthetic elements to, for example, Studio Ghibli films (the developers themselves subscribe to this aesthetic, after all) or last year’s Pentimento, which came with a different, but also very distinctive stylization. Like on Twitter pointed out like Honza Modrák, a similar viral post can go a long way in building awareness of a new game. Years ago, for example, the hit Beat Saber did it, whose videos spread like wildfire on Facebook.

“We were pleased when Edmund McMillen also gave us feedback or retweeted Jordan Mechner and Josh Sawyer, whose brilliant Pentiment is one of our inspirations.”

And what do Attu Games themselves say about success? Of course, they are primarily happy. According to Eva Navrátilová, however, it is not just the work of chance. “By far the biggest influence on the success of that tweet is the game itself. It is interesting at first glance and done in an unconventional way. Moreover, nowadays, when more and more things are digital, AI generated and unoriginal, surprisingly many people appreciate that someone does something physically and differently than others,” Eva told Vortex. “You can see from the responses that there are enough people who, for example, don’t understand why we make it so complicated when it can be done simply with a digital texture, or advise how they would do it better. But the overwhelming majority are completely enthusiastic about the game. We were pleased when Edmund McMillen also gave us feedback or retweeted Jordan Mechner a Josh Sawyerwhose brilliant Pentiment is one of our inspirations,” she added.

Despite the fact that the authors certainly did not expect such high numbers and, according to Eva Navrátilová, they would be happy for 2 thousand likes, the interest did not surprise them that much. “We are doing everything possible to counter this. For years we have been studying the market, all competitive games, their marketing and results and player reactions, all kinds of odds and marketing tips and the like. I try to try different things and most importantly, to share regular posts and interesting things from the development in the long term. But still at least 90 percent of success is the game itself. If she’s not interesting at first glance, the best marketing wouldn’t help,” he says. You may therefore be surprised that, according to her, even such a viral tweet has less impact on wishlists than one might think. “In 48 hours we collected about 9 thousand, which is surprisingly little compared to the absurd numbers of that post. For comparison, Unrecord had, with only slightly greater reach, 600,000 wishlists per week,” points out Eva Navrátilová.

What is the reason? “It’s probably because our post broke through into the mainstream, where most people don’t buy small indie and weird games like that. Our game is aimed at a narrow group of players, and even if so many ordinary people like it, in the end only true enthusiasts will buy it,” thinks Eva. But the authors got a kick out of it and they want to honestly continue to collect wishlists a little bit every day until the publication. Attu Games invites you to an action-adventure with an emotional story, interesting characters, a dark dungeon full of monsters and a world inspired by Slavic folklore. The weapon here represents the beam. The main heroine is Eliška, a mother of two children. Although she is said to be nothing special, an unexpected tragedy forces her to go on an adventure, according to the authors.

But I think it’s also interesting that the game was originally supposed to offer classic cartoon graphics. So it was presented in February 2021. We only learned about the new embroidered styling last fall, because the team changed the aesthetics in the meantime. Now he is celebrating such success thanks to her. See our older articles for more details on the Scarlet Deer Inn. You may also recall Attu Games’ previous game called Feudal Alloy. Attu Games is made up of married couple Eva Navrátilová and Lukáš Navrátil.