There’s never been a better time to Slay the Princess
11.11.2024
By John Walker, Contributor
“You’re here to slay the princess. Don’t believe her lies.” Such is the context with which you first approach a cabin in the woods, which features a basement that contains a princess chained to its walls. Who is she? Who are you? And who is the Narrator, a voice that accompanies you, imploring you to not speak to this stranger, not ask any questions, and just plunge a knife into her heart? With vast numbers of ways to respond to every scenario, and the internal conflict as a player of wanting to do what’s right, but also what’s interesting, what unfolds is an interwoven tangle of dozens of possible pathways creating a version of the game entirely unique to you.
That’s the game. Some woods, a cabin, a knife, a basement, and a princess, described by a narrator. What follows is hours of experiencing these elements in dramatically different ways based on the many choices available to you. Perhaps you refuse to take the knife. Perhaps you try to befriend the princess. Maybe you refuse to enter the cabin at all?
“The initial scenario for the game,” says co-developer and Lead Writer Tony Howard-Arias, “with ‘woods, cabin, knife, princess, narrator,’ is so simple that you can follow any permutation of actions to their logical end. So, that was an interesting thing to do, right?”
Despite this modesty, when you play Slay the Princess, what’s being achieved feels just overwhelming. While trying to avoid any serious spoilers, this is a game where you will encounter that setup of woods/cabin/knife/princess over and over again, and how you respond to it each time causes absolutely wild changes in the narrative, sending you down such different paths that you begin to suspect it has to be faking it, that this route is so complex, so integral, that it was surely forced, your sense of choice an illusion. Then you test it, reload a save, make a slightly different decision among the six you were presented with, and find yourself experiencing something completely different.
“We wanted to make sure people’s choices were clearly impacting the narrative,” says co-developer and the game’s astonishingly prolific artist, Abby Howard. “Say, an action you have leads to one path no matter what, and it feels jarring, like you didn’t do that—every time we ran into one of those, we decided to split it again.” By split it, they mean create an entirely other narrative path to ensure the player feels their choices are validated.
In a game where you do (in some sense) repeat the same initial scenario multiple times, you’d imagine it’d be possible to save a lot of time and resources by reusing art. Even here the game seems to go the extra seven-hundred miles.
“6,300 images,” says Tony when I bring this up. I ask Abby what her motivation is to work that hard, to create so many different drawings for each location, each princess, each ending. “I want it to feel like the actions that are being described are happening in front of you,” she says. “It’s a core of my design principle, to bring in the feeling of being immersed in an environment, versus having something described to you and having an image that vaguely suggests what’s going on.”
“Most people can’t draw at the pace that Abby draws,” adds Tony. “Most people who make visual novels are writers and programmers first, and they hire art out. The cost of producing as many images as Abby made for this game would have been astronomical.”
An Immaculate Conception
When you play through to the end of Slay the Princess, you only experience a small amount of what the game has to offer, despite feeling like you’ve encountered such complexity and narrative closure. There are paths that contain vast amounts of expositional dialogue that feel as if it’d be impossible to understand the game without them, and yet chances are that you missed other examples of this in your own playthrough. On top of this, the game remembers which choices you’ve made, which versions of the story you’ve encountered, and weaves this information together to create the dialogue as the game ends.
So it’s all the more remarkable to learn that the more recently released Pristine Cut version of the game adds in another three core paths to discover and an enormous number of expansions to the existing paths, adding potential third chapters to many routes (reaching a third chapter of any path is a rare treat, adding even more reason to replay and replay). It also features an entirely new ending, 1,200 new drawings, and 2,500 new lines of voiced dialogue. In total, it’s a 35% bigger game.
One of the most interesting motivations behind the changes was a conflict between the two developers. As Tony puts it: “[It] was a result of Abby and I holding contrary visions for how encounters should end.” The original game had deliberately included “anticlimactic” conclusions to paths deliberately to try to evoke a sense of disappointment in the player. “In my admittedly worse vision,” says Tony, “most of the route’s endings were more anticlimactic, to make you feel like the [spoiler] was robbing you of a satisfying ending.”
“The problem, of course,” adds Abby, “being that you are robbed of a satisfying ending and it doesn’t feel good!”
“I’ll be the first to admit a lot of writers like to say, 'I’m going to play with this contrarian idea for how something should be written, it’ll be intentionally unsatisfying, and that’s good art,'" responds Tony. "And it’s like, no, because if you’re doing the right job, you can make something unsatisfying in the right ways while also concluding properly. That’s what I wanted to address.”
This definitive version of the game is the default version now, rather than a DLC or upgrade. And it’s been wonderfully successful, too. Over half a million copies have sold, which allowed for The Pristine Cut and also furthered development of Black Tabby Games’ equally brilliant episodic adventure Scarlet Hollow. It’s a joy to see a game that could (perhaps usually would) go under the radar receive the broad success it deserves.
You can grab the wonderful Slay the Princess — The Pristine Cut right now on Epic Games Store.