Feeling a little stabby? Slay the Princess is a branching narrative game where you…slay the princess (pretty straightforward, don’t you think?) Developed by Black Tabby Games, Slay the Princess will have you slaying every possible princess there is to slay, and maybe more. Every playthrough is different, so find out how your story will take shape.
Slay the Princess uses a couple common themes: repetition, life/death, and a phony narrator. Each of these themes are heavily rooted in the progression of the game. When starting Slay the Princess up for the first time, you are welcomed by a tacky “Chapter 1” and a Narrator instructing you what’s happening in the scene. From the very beginning, you can be sly and silly, going against what the narrator says or asking absurd questions. The Narrator will reply back in their usual exhausted way and try to get you to stay focused.
Almost every reaction in Slay the Princess has branching dialog, unless you’ve completely run out of options or stalled long enough. When there is only a single option it feels like a relief, but you also feel jaded because it wasn’t the choice you really wanted to make. Choosing a dialog or action option is the only thing you can do in the game, but Slay the Princess offers it in an overwhelming amount. I want to see what each path leads to, or at least peak around the corner, but all the choices can make it difficult to assume their outcome (probably the point of it, honestly). What’s interesting is that even though there are some obviously bad choices, you can still make them, allowing you to tempt fate or act silly and stupid.
Going back to Slay the Princess’ themes; repetition is a heavy gameplay mechanic. Whenever you die or the princess dies, you start back at Chapter 1, presumably starting things all over again. Some points start you at Chapter 2, but you are still revived in the forest, the narrator unaware of your recent death. Once you get through the first couple of iterations of dying and restarting, you get an understanding of how the game’s branching system works. Whatever mood you put the princess in in the first chapter transforms her into the embodiment of that mood in the next. The narrative “bottlenecks” at obvious points, and immediately triggers a whole set of princesses over another. Just by taking the knife or leaving it on the table sets off a small chain reaction. I think the repetition makes Slay the Princess interesting to a point. The right balance is figuring out how many times going through the same process will start being more annoying than interesting. I personally felt like it had me play through one too many times. If there wasn’t a narrative after every time you killed a princess, prepping you for the next restart, then maybe it wouldn’t have felt as much of a chore as it did by the end.
While the dialog in Slay the Princess never felt campy or unnatural, it was definitely confusing. There are multiple voices in your head, telling you to do one thing or another to cloud your judgment. When a game is telling you how to feel a certain way (like if your character said “I’m cold,” or “I should see what’s happening”), it puts restrictions on the player they were not expecting, creating what is known as cognitive dissonance. When the player character is forced into thoughts and actions you don’t agree with, you start losing a sense of control and disassociate from the game. By the end of my playthrough I was making wild actions because I just stopped caring about what was happening. I finally slayed the last princess because I wanted the prolonged dialog conversation to end. While the repetition and dialog branching mechanics are nifty, Slay the Princess has a difficult time finding reason into why things are happening. It was obvious that the scenarios were thought of first before the entire story came to fruition. I think what made the narrative difficult to understand was that it was both ambiguous and the topic fell outside the realm of perception. Slay the Princess talks a lot about gods and alternate dimensions in a kind of general way that is hard to grasp. The world will end if we don’t kill the princess, but…not this world, that world already ended. What does “ending” even mean? The game would probably reply with something like “there is no ending, we are one and everything flowing at the same time.” A lot of hokey fluff, if you ask me. I ultimately got the feeling that Slay the Princess didn’t have a point at all.
For being a narrative game, there is no story. Sure, the actions were cool, but they were separate from each other, like the different worlds in a Mario game. Slay the Princess wanted to bind all these interactions together as one, but there was no narrative glue that made it cohesive. The art style was interesting, as it changed slightly for each princess. There were times when the scenery dissolved, creating some cool effects. Everything was mostly white or black besides the splatters of red blood. The choices were squished in the top right corner, making it difficult to scroll and choose between them. The audio was the shining star, however, with its gallons of sassy voice overs and large orchestral swells. The dynamic audio fit along to the choices you made as the environment warped around you.
In summary: Interesting actions and small story outcomes, but without a tangible narrative things got dull by the end. Interesting art choices even though the user interface needs some tlc. The audio was fantastic and could live on its own.
