Slay The Princess Review - Can You Be Her Hero, Baby?

You're going to hear a lot about the hidden gems of 2023 in the next few weeks as everyone finalises their game of the year lists. How 'hidden' these games are is relative - to your friends who only play 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Call of Duty and EA FC, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Alan Wake 2 is a hidden gem. Staff at TheGamer have been going to bat for little indies before we lock in our lists, and games like Cocoon, Venba, and 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:A Space for the Unbound have been thrown out as hidden gems. But no one is talking about Slay the Princess, though that's less a statement on how much of a gem it is, and more a symptom of just how hidden it is. This violently ethereal visual novel is one of 2023's darkest secrets, and I can only hope more people discover it before long.

The concept of Slay the Princess is simple - you must slay the princess. But then, must you, really? Who am I to tell you your destiny? Who is this game, and its mysterious Narrator who can only tell you that your quest is crucial to saving the world, but cannot tell you why, or even why you were chosen to do it. You must slay the princess, but you don't need to. This is how your story is told.

Slay the Princess, the Princess as the holy one ready to rule you

As the game begins, you are walking in the forest, informed you are on a quest to slay the princess. This Narrator describes y꧋our surroundings, and your internal monologue as The Voice of the Hero responds as instructed. Maybe they🍸 push for more details (few are forthcoming), maybe they reluctantly agree, maybe they enthusiastically race off. Either way, you end up at a basic cabin wherein you find a door, a table, and a knife. You take the knife off the table, open the door, and head down to the basement, where you meet the princess.

This is consistent in every story. The rest is up to you. As you talk to the princess, you mould her, and reality, around your responses. You can die, or kill her, or free her, all in any number of ways. Whatever happens, you are soon back in the forest, with a new Narrator (or perhaps the old one, lying) telling you to go slay the princess. Different voices in your head join you on your journey, depending on the options you take. The Hero remains, but can be joined by the Cold, the Broken, the Smitten, and many more. The cabin changes too, becoming more decrepit, more fortified, more ot🐲herworldly. As does the princess, shaped by her experiences with you. And it all races towards the same inevitable (or is it?) conclusion, ready to start all over again.

Slay the Princess, the Princess as a broken ghost haunting you

Though you can do anything you want at first, over time your options become more limited as the game blocks off pathways you've already taken. However, this saves you from annoying sections of doing the same thing over and over, and has a metatextual justification if you go looking for it too. As you explore threads to their various ends, you see the final form of your actions, collecting new narratives each time, as the real purpose for slaying (or not) reveals itself.

Visual novels can often fall into being too passive, too desperate to tell you their story rather than have you experience it. Slay the Princess counters that, not only by giving you a variety of options to either explore your current state deeper or move the story onwards, but in the way it sometimes rebels against your choices, or allows you to rebel against the game's own framework with them. It's nothing on the level of 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Doki Doki Literature Club, but it's a clever use of the form nonetheless.

Another hidden gem of a 2023 indie that plays with the form is 168澳洲幸运5开奖🥀网:Paranormasight: The Seven Mysteriꦦes of Honjo, which is likely to feature in TheGamer's overal top 10. The jury is out on whether I can convince enough people to try Slay the Princess to get it there.

While several things change in the game, it's the transformation of the Princess herself that made it so compelling to search along each path. Body horror, metaphysical trauma, romance, and bloodthirsty revenge all contort her into different shapes. There were a lot of cliches a game like this could have fallen into, but each Princess beyond the initial one was surprising and layered.

The extra voices themselves, a little less so. Being defined by a single characteristic like The Voice of the Smitten only leaves you so much room, and I understand that the nature of the game requires a simple hook for each of them, but the more voices you get the less you want to explore each angle, because they all chime in. There's an attempt to weave humour through the game - even the Voice of the Hero is a bit of a hapless wannabe - but that undercuts the horror and tension everywhere else. Visual novels live and die by their writing, and while Slay the Princess has enough going on besides that, some of the conversations made me want to slay Slay the Princess rather than rescue it (and certainly rather than hear it out).

However, this only happens on the pathways when you push it in directions that add a lot of voices ⭕to the mix, and then lean into the optional playful banter the game offers. The Princess - the undisputed star - always plays it straight, sinking her nails deep int♒o your soul and scoring your skeleton. Slay the Princess is a fantastic, fascinating journey, and anyone looking for a game that keeps them on their toes, explores the dark side of heroism, and throws up some more cerebral scares (so, anyone who liked Alan Wake 2) needs to check this one out.