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.

It’s pretty obvious from the start that the whole setup is metacommentary on the nature of stories: In fairy tales and video games, saving the princess is the end goal, so once she is saved, the story, and thus the world, ends. The problem is that Slay the Princess can’t resist the temptation to try and connect this to a profound statement on real life, and the contradictions between those framings result in nonsense. See, the real explanation for what’s going on is that the Princess is actually the anthropomorphic personification of change, and the reason the Narrator wants to destroy her is because “change” includes death and entropy, so by killing her you can remove death from the universe.

As always, this is framed as objectively wrong, because every media creator is a suicidal pro-death lunatic; and as always, the point is made through trite and juvenile arguments that only work under the extremely manipulative and oversimplified scenario the story boxes you into. Yeah, if you torture someone forever they will probably prefer death, but that is an argument against torture, not against immortality. The Happily Ever After route added in The Pristine Cut comes slightly closer, but only slightly — it gives you more things to do in the torture box, but it still traps you in a torture box. Also, just, LOL at Happily Ever After making the Narrator ~realize the error of his ways~ when the Happy Ending didn’t, even though the Happy Ending was way worse.

Which brings me to the next point: The story is incredibly inconsistent. It can’t keep its own rules straight for more than one chapter. Killing the Princess in chapter 1, The Prisoner, and The Damsel does nothing, but in every other chapter killing the Princess allows the Shifting Mound to take her. Sometimes you need to bring the Princess out of the cabin in order for the Shifting Mound to take her (and this is in fact a major plot point in The Spectre), but sometimes (most of the time, really) the Shifting Mound can just reach in and take her while she’s still trapped. It’s painfully obvious that the game just abruptly terminates because the developers wanted to keep the branches to a manageable level, not because it makes any sense. (I can already hear the fanboys going “Well Ackshully the whole thing runs on dream logic so it’s fine it’s inconsistent” and no, that’s a cop-out.)

This also hurts the overall tone of many branches that try to present themselves as depicting a conflict so endless as to exhaust the participants, which is absurd when they’re only two loops max. When the Cage rants about how she’s fallen into despair because she’s convinced choice is an illusion I’m just like, geez, girl, it’s only been half an hour, give me the chance to try a few more things! (As if to highlight this, it’s ridiculously easy to prove her wrong and free her even at that point.) I get that there’s a limit on how much content the developers can produce, but I would have much preferred they removed a few branches (in particular, the Adversary and the Razor felt redundant) to give the others more depth.

I’ve heard the general opinion on the game is to enjoy the journey over the destination, because finding all the individual princesses is more interesting than the metaplot; I broadly agree, but even the individual scenarios are hampered by the logical and tonal issues. The opening seems very good, with tons of options that show the writers put a lot of thought into every question you might want to ask, but after that (coincidentally, where the demo ends) it just falls apart.

Personally, I’m also lukewarm on the individual scenarios because I don’t like torture porn, and Jesus Christ is this game full of torture porn. You can feel the shift in tone whenever violence is mentioned, as if the narrator is salivating over it; every injury is luridly detailed to a point that is honestly surrealistic, with the protagonist getting injured absurdly easily just to make for more ero-guro opportunities. And yes, in case you doubt it’s erotic, there are two Princess variants that turn that subtext into text, plus many more that are just blatantly fetishistic (including two that end in vore, I kid you not). The advertising is pretty open about this being both a gruesome horror game and a “love story”, so the interplay of sex and violence isn’t exactly a surprise, but it was still more intense than I expected or was comfortable with.

Which brings us to the elephant in the room: This is, at its core, a game about inflicting violence on a woman (at the urging of a male voice, at that). While the violence isn’t one-sided — the Princess gives at least as good as she gets — the gendered aspect of the violence adds another layer to this mess which, frankly, I don’t think the writers handled as well as they should have. They seemed to assume most players would intrinsically want to save the woman and be skeptical of the Narrator’s claims, but the Steam discussion threads show that they vastly underestimated just how misogynistic the gaming community is at large. They seemed to believe a game where you kill a woman instead of saving her is some kind of edgy avant-garde thing that has never been done before, which just makes me want to ask what world they’re living in where the gaming community hasn’t been getting off to the fantasy of killing women for decades. The tension between the Narrator and the Princess feels like it’s written as if it’s ignoring the gendered undertones and just presenting it as a conflict between two neutral parties… except the gendered undertone very much is there and present in real life as a whole, so to brush it aside feels irresponsible. The only times they do anything to explore gender dynamics are The Damsel and Happily Ever After, but all the other princesses are so alien they basically sidestep the issue; and as I said, the individual scenarios are deliberately structured so that they can only scratch the surface of concepts that require an excavation to do them justice.

So overall, the whole thing left me very underwhelmed. It used too many metaphors and spread itself too thin while trying to make an argument that is ultimately trite. “What if entropy was a sexy lady who unconditionally loved you?” is too many things to unpack and the story does not even come close to doing so.