Scarlet Deer Inn, An Embroidered Tale

Follow the story of Elise and her strange adventure

Scarlet Deer Inn Welcomes You To The Slavic Countryside

Inspired By Medieval Europe

Scarlet Deer Inn welcomes players into the life of Elise, a simple and normal mother of two. She’s no one extraordinary, nor is she a hero that merits an epic to be written about her. However, her strange circumstances will make her explore places around the countryside full of the interesting and the unusual, as well as drawing her into dark and terrifying situations inspired by Slavic folklore. It plays out as a narrative platformer with an emotional story and will feature a rather broad and colorful cast of characters accompanying the protagonist.

As an adventure platformer, players will follow Elise and her adventures around medieval Europe, not only meeting various characters but will also get involved in their daily lives and their individual stories. However, it’s not always going to be a walk in the park—the dark underground dungeon sequences will have Elise maneuvering through the pitch-black environment, armed only with a quickly burning torch. Developer Attu Games noted that there will be “a little bit of light combat here and there, but nothing too complicated” and will feature more of the gameplay in an upcoming trailer.

While there are not many details about the story as of writing, the Scarlet Deer Inn demo will be out this week on August 8th, so stay tuned for more!

A Unique Blend Of Embroidery And Animation

One of the game’s best selling points is its use of embroidery in its character animations. Based on the trailer alone, all characters—including the adorable ducks and donkeys—are all embroidered in real life before being digitized into artwork for the game. According to their FAQ on the game’s Steam community logs, the embroidery is prepared beforehand on the computer, with each frame in the animation replicated in vectors for the embroidery machine software to create. Once the embroidery is created by the machine, the finished product is scanned back onto the computer to be edited in Photoshop, digitally erasing the cloth to only leave the character frames, The frames, outlines, and shadows are then put together to create the actual animation in game.

Visually, it is very appealing and definitely a treat for the eyes. As it is coupled with beautiful hand-painted anime-inspired backgrounds, the art style for the game is definitely something never truly seen before, especially with a labor-intensive process cycle. Their specialized method was created after trying out different types of procedures to incorporate embroidery, like embroidering the entire scene, or not using outlines, or a different type of thread, among others. This embroider-scan-digitize technique exhibits the best result for their vision.

Despite the large amount of effort needed to create a game through real embroidery, the trio at Attu Games stick to their concept. When told that it would be easier to just do it digitally, the developers responded, “It would, but it would ruin the very reason we are doing it. It's a lot of fun to try to make real stuff and use them in a digital game. Everything does not necessarily have to be highly efficient, and it appears that many people enjoy it.”

Atta Games, The Czech Husband-And-Wife Team

Attu Games is a small indie game development studio founded and based in Znojmo, Czech Republic, consisting only of three core employees—powerhouse duo Lukáš and Eva Navrátilova and their good friend Kuba Špiřík. Everything in their games are made in-house, from drawing, the animations, music, and publishing. They are self-taught, purely doing stuff that they love. The studio has quite a bit of a repertoire of games already released, but the central embroidered concept for Scarlet Deer Inn was already in their minds since 2014. The game then came into fruition in 2019, after their previous game Feudal Alloy was released.

Scarlet Deer Inn in particular takes inspirations from Studio Ghibli movies, The Witcher series, and Night in the Woods, as well as medieval Europe and Slavic folklore, the latter of which will make a large appearance in the overall main story. They have also cited fellow medieval Europe-based video game Kingdom Come: Deliverance as an inspiration for a “believable narrative with a believable setting.”

All It Takes Is A Viral Tweet

Hi, I'm making a game where all characters have embroidered animation. pic.twitter.com/nMgNOsCNKc
— Eva Navratilova (@EvaBalikova) April 29, 2023

While Scarlet Deer Inn is not their first game as a studio, it was the first one to create massive headlines and went viral on X (Twitter) last April 2023. The video was a simple cut-and-pasted together video, first showing a snippet of the gameplay before cutting into a video of the embroidery process for the main character Elise’s movements. This post garnered over 26 million views as of writing, with 41,000 reposts and 258,000 likes, and even attracted the attention of video game industry veterans such as Fallout: New Vegas’ game designer Josh Sawyer, Prince of Persia’s creator Jordan Mechner, and The Binding of Isaac’s Edmund McMillen.

It definitely put a spotlight on the game in its early stages, and attracted both positive and slightly negative reactions. Most of them praised the concept, calling it “absolutely brilliant” and “a beautiful and unique way to animate a game.” However, the less positive responses did acknowledge it as an interesting and novel idea, yet questioned the developers on how time-consuming and if the whole process was actually worth the money and labor spent on it.

"I'm still not fully aware of what caused it. I don't want to sound stupid, but we expected people to be interested in our game and to like it. But definitely not to that extent. That was not normal,” Eva Navrátilová shared to CzechCrunch last June 2024.

The Adventure As A Mother

Making gamers play as a common mother from the idyllic European or Czech countryside seems to be a little bit of an unusual choice to most, but Attu Games said that it makes the game more human and normal. “We were looking for a natural and believable reason why someone should go into danger. And after all, a mother has the greatest motivation when she has to protect her children. She has the best reason to risk her life. I think that's a universal thing that people all over the world understand.” Having a female character was also inspired by Hayao Miyazaki’s works in Studio Ghibli, where he often has a strong-willed female protagonist as the star of the show.

Scarlet Deer Inn’s full release date is not set in stone just yet, but Attu Games hopes that it will be released this year. However, the demo will be available to play later this week on August 8th! This will be available for download on their Steam page.