You’re a brand new vampire, lost and alone. Which house will you ally with? Who will you grow closer to? Because even the simplest decision may drastically change your fate as the undead.
CONTENT WARNING – Suicide, Violence
Red Embrace: Hollywood lets you create your own new vampire (male, female, or nonbinary), as well as customize their appearance to your own tastes. With that down, you can also connect yourself with one of three vampire houses, each with various traits (Icari yearn for humanity, Mavvar are primal and bestial, and Golgotha have keen insight that sometimes breaks their minds) that can affect who you are.
Once you’ve created an identity for yourself, you’ll be set free in L.A.’s undead-filled landscapes, finding purpose for yourself among the Houses and warring factions. Various decisions you make along the way will affect your relationships with these various factions and characters, as well as shape who your character becomes, leading to one of the game’s many endings. Feel free to become whoever you like, as, like the game stresses, “you’re already dead”. May as well enjoy yourself.
Enjoying yourself might entail getting a bit closer to certain male members of the various Houses. There’s a vampire for everyone’s taste, offering grimly humorous, gentle & poetic, or fierce & rebellious creatures of the night for you to creep closer to. Not that you have to find romance to be fulfilled in your newfound immortality. Red Embrace: Hollywood is about finding who you are through your decisions, so let loose and see what kind of person you’d become with some newfound vampire powers.
Red Embrace: Hollywood is available now on itch.io.
About The Author
This visual novel has the not-so-pretty nature of humans their unattainable dreams of peace and happiness figured out. Definitely something worth thinking if you aim to better understand where the problems of humanity stem from. Understanding misery and its inevitableness. ( if you’re lucky/unlucky to be “saved” by someone still blinded by idealism, you will not understand how things we strive for are unobtainable )
I can see how some people are frustrated with the endings and romance, but I do appreciate how unconventional, dark and truly miserable it is, not to mention the food for thought it delivers.