If making video games the traditional way is like squeezing blood from a stone, then making Scarlet Deer Inn must've been like doing that using only your elbows. Developer Attu Games' newly released 2D adventure is a gorgeous mix of mediums that I have found no precedent for, and it's quickly enchanted players on Steam, where it sits at 87% positive user reviews days after launch. (Console versions are "set to follow as soon as possible," the devs say.)
Scarlet Deer Inn is officially described as "an embroidered dark medieval folk tale," and the devs mean that literally. Frame by frame, its sprites were stitched in cloth and then digitally brought into the game.
A lot of games have used this kind of embroidered or hand-woven art style. Yoshi's Wooly World and Kirby's Epic Yarn, both from Nintendo, come to mind. But in the entire history of video games, I don't know that anyone else has ever actually rendered every single frame of their sprites with physical embroidery that was then integrated into a game.
I've seen plenty of real models, sculptures, weapons, and even chickens used in games. We just saw a man turn photos of his wife into a horrible boss fight. Cuphead, with its pencil-and-paper animation, feels like a distant cousin. But I haven't seen anything quite like this.
This unorthodox, laborious approach to game art caused Scarlet Deer Inn to go viral online back in 2023, and now that the game is finally out, countless stitches later, the exact same thing has happened again.
"The last 4 seconds of this video made my mind explode," says an incredulous Twitter user sharing the game's trailer. "WHAT DO YOU MEAN EVERY FRAME IS HAND SEWN/EMBROIDERED ARE YOU JOKING????"
"This is hitherto unheard-of levels of creativity between mediums," adds another. "They have animation made from embroidering. Like, physically sewn thread and fabric. You're running around a character that was sewn into the game."
"What do you fucking mean they embroidered all the sprites," echoes a Bluesky post.
Back in 2023, I actually spoke to Eva Navratilova of Attu Games to ask, in so many words, why and how would you do this?
"Because we thought it was cool," Navratilova said at the time. "We simply wanted to give it a shot because we really enjoy various crafts and handmade stuff. A few people are using embroidery to create some amazing animation, but no one has yet made a real game with it. It's also exciting and fun. Even though there is a ton of 'unnecessary' extra labor involved, it is amazing to work on something new and creative.
"There is no connection between the embroidery and the story itself," she added. "We believe that it would change the feeling we want the game to have. We're trying to achieve the feel of the Studio Ghibli movies, not something like Paper Mario, Yoshi's Crafted World, or Kirby's Epic Yarn games."
Navratilova estimated that achieving this art style takes around "three times as long" as traditional animation. Main character Elise has hundreds of embroidered frames for her movements, and side characters may have dozens.
"The embroidery must first be prepared on a PC," she explained. "It means I take the finished frame-by-frame animation and basically redo it into vectors in embroidery software and decide a lot of different settings for threads, colors, stitch styles, angles, etc. The entire machine embroidery process is quite challenging."
The results speak for themselves. There's an inimitable texture to the thready silhouettes of Scarlet Deer Inn, adding eye-catching depth and detail to a short and simple-looking game.
