I only played the demo so Idk what was supposed to happen, but the demo was disappointing for me.
The core loop was really short. Your choices are basically go to the cabin, go to the basement, interact with princess. The narrator is very sus. He doesn’t cite his sources, he doesn’t tell you anything. And you just spawn somewhere randomly and are tasked to go slay this Princess. And no matter how you try to escape or turn down the offer, you still have to go and do it. On my first run, I wanted to talk to her, but I picked the knife so and I was not going to drop it. I refuse to give up the knife because we can still talk even when I’m holding a knife sis. I killed her which was the goal, and when I respawned the narrator was like, “oh but you died”. The goal was to kill the Princess, not to kill the Princess and live. Are you good? After that I tried to turn around and leave but that doesn’t do much.
Anyways, on the second try I tried to save the Princess to see where that would go. Her biting her hands off and cutting off her hand to escape the chains was such a power move, although the rest of it was confusing. Like why didn’t you chew your way out before if that was possible? And why did she kill us? She could have just taken the knife from our hand and left to break down the door. If the narrator could just take control of MC why didn’t he just do it from the start. My expectations were in the wrong places unfortunately. This game makes no sense to me and I’m really sorry but I’m not a fan of the incomplete, sketchy art style. Even in the splash art that they have for the game, you can see the sketches for anatomy on the princess that are not erase. I enjoy sketchy styles but when even guidelines marks aren’t cleaned up, I’m just confused if that was a stylistic choice and why. The voice acting also really bothered me. Why did she try to sound so sultry and sexy and flirty? Was there something in the story that prevented her from having a normal person’s voice? I understand the game was developed by a duo one of which was a woman, but it was giving male gaze/oversexualized character design. Especially since narrator is some bird man. I do like that there were a lot of options even though they like lead to completely nowhere.
A lot of questions are left unanswered because it’s a short demo so I tried searching it up but the lore seems kind of confusing. Who are they that locked us in? Who are we? Who is the narrator? Apparently the narrator is called the long Quiet and the Princess is shifting mound. And the narrator is an echo of his formal self, which is very fantasy, multiple worlds, gods and stuff. It was not the story I was expecting and too philosophical for me to understand. I thought it would be just something simple like an unexpected story where usually you slay Dragons to save the Princess, but this time you have to slay the evil princess instead.
