Absurdity in Slay the Princess: An Essay on Violent Contrasts

Introduction

“This is a love story”, proclaims the trigger content warning screen as the game opens. Haunted by lilting piano melodies – us, the “Hero”, the player character of Slay the Princess, is met with an immediate juxtaposition: the simple, safe, hand-drawn, storybook aesthetic crossed against the warning that this is a psychological horror game. The title, too, is centered around a contrasting dichotomy. Slay the Princess – not Save the Princess? “Slay”—associated with masculine chivalry, violence, to kill. “Princess”—gentle femininity, kindness. How is this a love story? 

Little did I know that this precise tonal contrast was the emotional core of the game. I knew next-to-nothing about the game going in, besides assumptions from Butch’s vague amusement last week when asked if the story was linear. I hadn’t seen reviews, read no spoilers on the Steam page. In this way, I was able to evaluate the game holistically, evaluate my initial reactions, impulses towards violence—or its opposite—as the game design suggested. And immediately when I played — the interactivity of the game felt in tandem overwhelming, burdensome, exciting. 

Aided by its hand drawn art style and lack of tutorial narrative, it is in the unique juxtaposition of storybook, fairytale tropes with stark player-enabled violence that creates an absurdist story – the primary reason that Slay the Princess elicits such decisiveness and willing violence in its players. 

— The Framing of Absurdist Principles in Slay the Princess

In Martin Esslin’s Theater of the Absurd, the 1960 seminal work defining absurdity as a genre, he writes that absurdist work “depicts the irrationality of the human condition” (Esslin, 5). The genre of absurdist storytelling, arising during the Cold War, was meant to depict an existential world that itself did not make sense, a place that global extinction could be immediate and human-wrought, that was hallmarked by anxiety, confusion, fear and ultimately passive acceptance. Absurd constructs do not follow logic, do not present answers, but invite the audience to continue forward in empty and confused worlds, without “faith, meaning, and genuine freedom of will.” (Esslin, 6). Yet, his writing, before the rise of interactive fiction, was for the nearest interactive form of art – live theater. Still, “[the video game] medium has a unique capacity to inveigle, and even implicate, its audience through its interactivity” as Parkin writes for the Atlantic, and that “a skillfully designed game might use this participatory perspective for artistic purpose—offering profound, affecting statements about the human condition.” (Parkin)

Thus, Slay the Princess I feel begins as an interactive game-mediated example of absurdist theater, refined to comment on violence in the modern age, primarily in its early-game lack-of-tutorial explanation structure. A game that arose in a similarly bleak cultural moment, there seems almost to be no world presented outside the simple, repetitive, stuck construct presented. The path, the cabin, the basement, the princess. The player does not have a strong sense of their own identity, it is only later in the game we realize we’re not “people” but a bird humanoid.  And, the world is not static, but changes in illogical ways based on the player’s own belief and choices, against how branching interactive fiction works as expected. Eventual deviations from the path are punished through the game loop ending – the “world” being destroyed. 

But these game mechanics are not immediately made obvious to the audience. Initially, we are driven by curiosity, but without a clear understanding of the overall power, meaning, or structure of what is encountered, though the title screen reassures: “whatever horrors you face in these depths, see them through.” (Slay the Princess). The initial impression and structure of Slay the Princess evokes classical fairytale tropes – a forest, princess, and narrator – and through the unique, hand-drawn, childhood-evoking artistic style, invites audiences to expect a game with a logical storytelling strucutre, with a plot consistently predictable between runs and consistent tone. Yet, this is not the case. Plotlines vary dramatically and wildly based off of singular player choices, ranging from violent, gory ghostly mutilation to peaceful matrimonial ennui. Vast juxtapositions in the world destabilize the audience’s understanding of it. 

Similarly, illogically, the death/endings do not signify what a normal ending signifies – the scope of reality is not what it normally is. In terms of information: the narrator only exists in one world, but the Princess and voices hold knowledge over multiple deaths and cycles, and the Shifting Mound and player character presiding over it all. It is these particular game mechanics, served by the audience’s lack of initial understanding about these mechanics that cultivates an absurdist narrative – creating confusion and anticipatory fear in its cognitive dissonance with common fairytales.

– Blood and Violence in Save the Princess –

Absurdist work is not illogical for the sake of being illogical. It is pointedly designed to be illogical to invite the audience to question the world they themselves live in.

To illustrate, Esslin writes: 

“If the characters [in absurdist work] change their personality halfway through the action, how consistent and truly integrated are the people we meet in our real life? And if people in these plays appear as mere marionettes, help-less puppets without any will of their own, […] do we, in fact, in our world, still possess any genuine initiative or power to decide our own destiny?” (Esslin, 5-6).

This quote directly and significantly reflects the mechanics of Save the Princess. The Princess changes personality dramatically and quickly. We are unsure who knows what, and when. We do not have full autonomy either – choices are pushed, controlled and constrained by both the Narrator, Voices, and Shifting Mound at certain points. We believe we have autonomy, yet are stuck in an endless, empty loop construct. We as players may believe we are acting as moral agents in deciding to save or slay the princess, but as Stang writes for Game Studies, “Videogame interactivity, and the sense of control that it elicits in players, is illusory” (Stang). 

This illusory nature is made extremely clear through the course of the game. The world of Slay the Princess is its own agent, uncontrollable and unpredictable. We are faced with a construct and existentialism we do not understand, tracing paths pre-determined for us by (on one level) the game developer and (on another level) the Shifting Mound/Narrator. The audience, through stark dichotomy, is psychologically invited into cognitive dissonance regarding the princess’s identity. 

And it is this precise illusory nature of choice that invites the player to feel comfortable committing acts of violence. Through artistic conversation with Esslin’s absurdist theater that reflects bleak truths of reality, in selecting or causing violent ends to the Princess—and to be clear, these are incredibly, starkly violent ends, ranging from stabbing to cutting to strangulation to drowning – the player is not a direct moral agent. Though the game is interactive, they eventually act with alientation towards the Princess – not as a moral agent would “react to dilemmas with a moral stance rather than with logic or strategy” (Stang), but the opposite. It is logically and strategically that the player searches for new vessel endings for the Shifting Mound, end the game, receive an achievement, discover a new path. The player seeks to provide order and logic to a situation that initially seems so unordered, and can justify the violence. The game cannot be beat with solely kind endings – there simply aren’t five vessels that don’t end with some act of significant violence either inflicted or incurred. 

The world the player inhabits in Slay the Princess is dangerous, gameplay coded and driven by the necessity of death and committing violence. In this way, the player cannot act as a moral agent and also complete the game. They are not evil, and do not feel evil, through the framed absurdity of the situation, and therefore are prompted to choose significant acts of violence decisively and strategically to progress the game – filling the empty world with an ending. 

 

Citations:

Esslin’s Theater of the Absurd: https://www.jstor.org/stable/1124873

Stang’s Game Studies: https://gamestudies.org/1901/articles/stang

Parkin’s How Evil Should A Video Game Allow You To Be: https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/how-evil-should-a-video-game-allow-you-to-be