This article contains spoilers for Slay the Princess.

Slay the Princess is, by necessity, a pretty twisty game. I say “by necessity” because the game’s premise is so simple that, if it merely followed it to its logical conclusion, it would bꦫe over in five minutes.

As the visual novel begins, you are in a forest. A narrator tells you that you are here to slay a princess chained in the basement of a nearby cabin. And though that set-up is barebones, it’s already a twist on what we normally assume we will need to do for princesses in games — save them. In fact, when I jotted the idea for this article down in my Notes app, I accidentally wrote the game’s title as Save the Princess. So Slay the Princess, just by existing, is subverting something that 💖we subconsciously understand as gamers who have been attempting to exfiltrate female monarchs from castle fortresses for 40 y🅺ears.

From that initial directive, the game twists further. When you open the door to enter the cellar where the princess is kept, she doesn't call up with the kind, gentle voice we expect from video game princesses. She's instantly domineering, and will kill you if you give her a chance.

This was how the princess acted the first time I met her, but her attitude is determined by whether you enter the basement empty handed or clutching a knife. The character's personality is different depending on how you approach her - treat her as a threat and she threatens you. Show her kindness, and it will be reciprocated.

If she kills you, you'll find another wrinkle when you begin again at the same place in the woods. This time, you're joined by a new voice that, in a mechanic reminiscent of Disco Elysium's Thought Cabinet, is determined by how you acted in the previous scene. Approach the princess with unconditional kindness, for example, and a hopeless romantic will join your retinue.

These twists are th꧑e point of the game; it calls attention to the way the story shifts and changes depending on how you decide to proceed. The biggest twist of all, for me at least, was doled out in a completely different, shockingly subdued way.

The game is presented from a first-person perspective, so you never see your character's face, except in brief moments when he looks into a murky mirror — and even then, the face staring back is a muddy shadow. But you do occasionally get a clear look at his limbs, and the text may make reference to his body. It's in these bits that the game most surprised me.

I first noticed that something strange was going on when, during a fight with the princess, she injured my character severely, knocking him onto the ground. This shot gives you a clear glimpse of his bare feet, which aren't human at all. Instead, they appear to be a bird's feet, with scales and talons. From then on, I was keyed in.

Each time the game showed the character's arms, they weren't covered in skin, they were covered in scales. His hands didn't have fingernails, they had twisty black claws. One bit of the Princess' dialogue refers to your character as having feathers, and then when I looked more closely at the character's arms, I noticed that there were, indeed, tufts visible at the elbows. My colleague Eric Switzer remembers seeing a beak in one of his endings.

Your character, for some reason, is a chicken man. In the paths I took through the game, I never got an answer as to why this is. But Abby Howard, the game's co-creator, artist, editor, and co-writer, offered an explanation for this choice on .

"The Player's design kind of evolved from making sure you felt distinct from the Princess. Since there are only two characters (technically), and you are supposed to be at-odds with one another, it made sense that the Player would be a bit monstrous and almost draconian to balance with the idea of a Princess," she explained in an AMA on the r/Games subreddit this fall.

"The bird elements were there from the get-go, especially considering the central themes surrounding death, so it was either going to be vultures or corvids, and corvids are cuter and more approachable. As cool as vultures are, they are nasty and famously not handsome. We had to make sure that even though you're a weird bird creature, you're still handsome in your own way, at least in the Princess' eyes."

The game neglecting to make any of this textual just makes it all the more fascinating. Slay the Princess treats its hero being a birdman as completely unremarkable, the same way most games would treat a human character in the lead. It's a bizarre choice and endeared me further to one of the year's most interesting indies.