While I already knew I felt deeply for fictional characters — as demonstrated by my uncontrollable crying during Inside Out — I did not expect to feel so morally unsettled while playing Slay the Princess. That discomfort is not accidental. In Slay the Princess, the game’s looping structure, the narrator’s controlling presence, and a shifting set of internal voices all help to fracture the player’s sense of self, eroding perceived agency and reshaping moral responsibility.
At the start of Slay the Princess, I was given a simple direction: descend into a cabin and kill a princess who, according to the narrator, will end the world. If I hadn’t seen the game’s title, I would’ve been utterly shocked. Historically, players save princesses, not slay them. Furthermore, the narrator offers no evidence for his claims, granting me very little moral justification to take such drastic action.
That lack of explanation immediately produced tension. Approaching the princess for the first time, I felt an instinctive moral obligation not to kill her, but to understand her — who was she? Why was she being accused of such power? Interestingly, even while being guided — almost coerced — down the stairs with a knife, I still experienced the sensation of choice. I told myself I would simply talk to her — I didn’t need to kill her if the situation didn’t call for it.
In that first encounter, I resisted. When I saw no immediate reason to kill her (mostly because I couldn’t get a straight answer out of anybody), I tried to turn back, to ascend up the stairs and leave. The narrator wouldn’t let me go. As a second choice, I freed the princess, cutting her chains. But the moment I did, the narrator directly intervened. He took control. The game presented me with a flood of action “options”: a series of about 1000 “[SLAY THE PRINCESS]”s. At that moment, my illusion of agency collapsed — I had to slay her, and I always had. In return for slaying her, I died at her hand.
Then the loop reset.
I was back at the beginning as if nothing had happened. The structure restarted, but not identically. The cabin shifted in tone and texture and, more importantly, the voices multiplied. The narrator remained, but now the internal perspectives fractured. I still had the Hero — a sort of “moral anchor” — but I also had the “Cold”, who urged detachment. As the loops continued, I would eventually also hear from the Cheated expressing suspicion, the Stubborn resisting compromise, etc. Each voice presented itself as “me,” yet each also imposed a distinct moral framework. Almost as if it was too much noise inside my own head, I felt it somewhat destabilize my own internal sense of judgment — or at least my ability to properly think things through.
Sarah Stang, in “This Action Will Have Consequences: Interactivity and Player Agency,” argues that agency in video games is often not true freedom but a carefully constructed illusion (https://gamestudies.org/1901/articles/stang). Players feel responsible for their actions, even when those actions are, in reality, tightly constrained by design. Through its looping structure, Slay the Princess pulls back the curtain, making this illusion apparent. While it seemingly begins with moral freedom, it slowly reveals how much of this is actually constrained in a predetermined system, where each “choice” is just absorbed into an inevitable cycle.
Interestingly, as the loops continued and I began to lose that illusion of agency, I also began to notice my moral hesitation erode. While I had initially resisted killing the princess, in later loops, I would slay her without even a hint of hesitation. The game had worn down my expectation that any hesitation — talking to her, questioning the narrator — mattered. The presence of conflicting voices also further fragmented this process. As I mentioned earlier, it was overwhelming. Sometimes it felt like I couldn’t hear myself think, so I chose to not think at all.
In “How Evil Should a Video Game Allow You to Be?” author Simon Parkin notes that video games do not merely depict violence, they implicate the player by making them active participants in it (https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/how-evil-should-a-video-game-allow-you-to-be). As aforementioned, in Slay the Princess, I felt that my perceived agency directly correlated with my moral hesitation. When I felt no sense of authorship over that violence, I committed it without second thought. However, when the game had maintained a sense of agency, I felt morally responsible. I owed something — to the princess, to my own sense of right and wrong, to that internal “hero.”
By the end of the game, however, something unexpected happened. In the final loop, when the structure ceased repeating and the stakes became fixed, I chose to make peace with the princess and leave with her. Perhaps it was the absence of the narrator. Perhaps it was the disappearance of the internal voices. Or perhaps, finally, it was the restoration of a sense of singular selfhood — no longer fractured across loops, interpretations, and compulsions.
In retrospect, what Slay the Princess makes visible is not simply moral choice, but the conditions under which moral choice feels real.
