Scarlet Envelope: Tale of a Golden Dragon

Review

Game Description

“Once upon a time, in the small but mighty Kingdom of Severin, the Princess acquired the egg of a golden dragon. When the dragon came of age, he escaped the castle and beat a path of destruction across the countryside, burning down villagers’ homes. 🔥 Terrified, the royals announced a generous reward for saving their kingdom, with one condition — the hero must use their HEAD, not their sword…”

Personal Experience

In my review for the last chapter of Scarlet Envelope, I noted how one of the series’ greatest assets is its willingness to reinvent itself with every chapter. While that chapter was probably my least favorite of the series (though still mostly fun), I knew that the next chapter would look and feel very different. Was I ever right! Tale of a Golden Dragon is not just a radically different experience, it may have been my favorite of the series! Overall, this delightful experience took exactly 90 minutes to complete—let’s dive in!

Narrative

Tale of a Golden Dragon is Scarlet Envelope’s most whimsical and charming tale of the series, mixing a fairy tale setting with modern sensibilities and humor, reminding me a lot of the Society of Curiosities’s excellent FairyTale Files series. Though where FairyTale Files have a Gorey-esque, macabre style, Golden Dragon skews more towards the cheerful. Instead of tracking the dragon down to slay it, you’re trying to save it.

The experience is a pleasantly multimedia one, supplementing its paper components with a fun website experience that reminded me of an old-school roleplaying game. Like a good old-school roleplaying game, it comes with a really pretty world map that acts as the keystone prop for the entire experience. (I need to track their artist down to some maps for my D&D world!) I don’t want to spoil too much, so I’ll just say that between the paper map and the website I had a lot of fun navigating and exploring their fantasy world.

Puzzle Play

The puzzles in this installment were well-written and a lot of fun. While the online component is a major part of this experience, I appreciated that most of the actual puzzle solving was done with the printed paper components. They really nailed the difficulty in this installment with the puzzles feeling satisfyingly challenging but never too esoteric or obtuse.

The puzzles were completely colorblind friendly this time, no color distinction required here! As usual, there was a very helpful hint site with progressive hints to nudge you along, if needed.

Recommendation

The Scarlet Envelope series is always a fun time and always a fresh time, reinventing itself over and over again. I highly recommend the series and suggest playing through in its intended order. However, if you’re just going to pick one to purchase, Tale of a Golden Dragon would be my top pick!