Author Archives: St. Elmo's Fire

Slay the Princess

  07/28/2026       St. Elmo's Fire      1 Comment

I was surprised to see we never reviewed this. That was probably because I was still sorting through my feelings on it back when it first came out and then forgot about it, but it attracted my attention again after I started reading The Fury of a Shattered Mirror and I watched the new content added in The Pristine Cut.

If you’re not familiar, Slay the Princess is a visual novel where you interact with various iterations of a trapped princess. The narrator is a distinct character with an agenda: He insists that the Princess will end the world if she is freed, so to save the world you must slay her. No matter what you do in your first meeting, you end up dying horribly, wherupon the scenario resets, but with the Princess altered to reflect your actions and opinions towards her in your first meeting. The narration also uses a similar schtick to Disco Elysium, with each scenario granting you additional voices alongside the Narrator with their own personalities and suggestions.

My overall opinion is that this game isn’t nearly as clever as it thinks it is.

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   Horror, Video Games, Visual Novels     

Darkest Dungeon 2: Secrets of the Coven

  05/29/2026       St. Elmo's Fire      10 Comments

So I thought I was finished with Darkest Dungeon 2 after I reviewed it on release, but it turns out that while I wasn’t looking they released a whole new game mode that’s more like a strategy game. In general I think the new game mode works a lot better with the core gameplay, but that’s not what I want to talk about. What I want to talk about is one of the story modules that goes with it, which is “What if witches were actually inhuman monsters and it was okay to kill them to the last?”

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   Roguelike, RPGs, Video Games      ,

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33

  01/07/2026       St. Elmo's Fire      13 Comments

Expedition 33 presents a post-apocalyptic world where a monster known as the Paintress has painted a number on a huge monolith; every year the number goes down by 1, and everyone older that number dies instantly. Every year people send out expeditions to find and kill the Paintress, but none have succeeded or even come back. I was intrigued by this premise for its similarity to Final Fantasy X, the best Final Fantasy, as well as the promise of an older cast, as this sort of setup is usually an excuse to create a cast of sexy 20-year-olds (or teenagers).

It was a profound disappointment. I’m used to being disappointed these days, but this still impressed me with just how bad it was.

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   RPGs, Video Games     

Lisa: The Painful

  11/01/2025       St. Elmo's Fire      6 Comments

This is a sequel to LISA, which Farla reviewed a long time ago but which I’ve never played. It seems pretty self-contained though. The game follows Lisa’s brother Brad following an apocalypse that causes all women to disappear from the world. Brad stumbles across a baby girl and chooses to raise her as his daughter. She inevitably gets kidnapped, so Brad must go on a journey to rescue her.

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   RPGmaker, RPGs, Video Games     

Downtime

  10/01/2025       St. Elmo's Fire      Add Comment

Sorry for the unexpected downtime; something was pinging the server an absurd number of times and used up our allocated bandwidth for the month. I suspect it was spambots, so I’ve shored up our anti-spam defenses. Hopefully things will be fine now.

Housekeeping