Slay the Princess is a game that allows, no encourages its players to perform acts of evil. It at first offers justification for these acts, but they are quickly stripped away one by one until the player is left with nothing but themselves, forcing them to confront their own actions. They are (literally) a god. After all, it is their choices that impose suffering and torture on the characters.
And yet people love this game. With over 20,000 reviews on Steam, it sits in a rare category of being both highly popular among the masses and highly rated among critics. Could it be that these 20,000 players enjoy being evil or, at the very least, condone the evil acts you commit in the game? While I am not the biggest fan of Choose Your Own Adventure type narrative games, I too was intrigued by the game during my first playing and, upon completing the story, was compelled to play again. Only then did it become clear to me that actively participating in evil acts is necessary for the player to engage meaningfully with Slay the Princess.
During my first playing, I doggedly decided I would not “slay” the princess and help her escape. I would Do the Right Thing! This led to the most unsatisfying ending out of all the endings I achieved in which the (infatuated) player and princess leave the cabin and live happily ever after. I found it unsatisfying because the story lacked any kind of conflict. I hadn’t gone through any obstacles, internal or external. I simply clicked the button for “escape with the princess”. Why was the princess in the cabin? What happens next? What about this whole “end of the world” thing?
Of course, slaying or rescuing the princess is besides the point. The point of the game is to collect as many endings as possible. This is what I understood after the game reset for the first time, and, with this philosophy in mind I set out to do exactly that. I slayed the princess, trapped her for eternity, burned us both alive, and allowed her to possess me to name a few of the many endings I explored. I was embodying the spirit of exploration and it was fun, for about an hour or two. While focused on collecting endings, I realized I had been neglecting the story. Skipping through dialogue and cutscenes, and not really putting too much thought into the choices I was making beyond “Oh! This one looks new, lets try it”. I had distanced myself from the story and, as a result, was no longer complicit in the actions I took.
In her work “This Action Will Have Consequences”: Interactivity and Player Agency, Sarah Stang describes how players of the Walking Dead feel real emotions like guilt, concern, and fear for Clementine, an NPC. She goes on to attribute these feelings to player agency: the knowledge that the choices the players make will affect “what kind of person Clementine becomes and how she acts”. By focusing on collecting endings, I had trivialized the narrative and characters within it. While I could still make distinct and informed choices, I has lost any sense of agency, and as a result, engagement with the story.
By the time I reached a true ending to the game, I was checked out. I clicked through the ending credits confused. So many people praised this game highly, and yet I felt underwhelmed. What was I missing? Stang cites Smethurst and Craps who claim complicity is “founded on a combination of interreactivity and empathy”. A few days later I decided to revisit the game with the promise that I would allow the dialogue to play in full. The experience was completely different. As the princess bites through her arm to escape, I let the raw sounds of crunching and gnawing play out and found myself truly unnerved. Almost without thinking, I move my mouse to slay her. While before I was compelled to Do the Right Thing, or explore new endings, now I was acting on instinct, responding to the twists and turns of the story. Over time, I found myself building empathy for the princess who seemed to be doomed to eternal torment. So, I attempt to outwit the narrator and free her, the real her. I enter the basement and promise to save her. The knife clatters to the floor which I pick up in order to free her. The narrator compels me to slay her instead. I resist. And so on and so forth.
Without the option to slay the princess, the game falls flat without any stakes. Without the emotional connection to actively participate in evil actions, the narrative is trivialized and the game feels underwhelming. It is only by choosing to engage in potentially evil actions can the player feel complicit in their actions and build a sense of agency and frustration at that agency being taken away.
Hi Daniel, your response on Slay the Princess is very insightful, and I feel that we had many similar initial impulses when playing the game. I also began with receiving the Damsel ending, being nice to the princess, and not understanding the particular world the characters inhabited. Eventually, as I, like you, began to “collect” endings, I also began clicking through them quicker to learn more about the world they lived in and reach the eventual ending of the play. However, on my end at least, I felt very engaged with the in-between segments in the Long Quiet where we were talking to the Shifting Mound, as I felt like there was continued intellectual exploration there about the surrounding world and context of why such a bleak situation was occurring. In that way, the playthroughs up until that point began to feel harder and harder to distinguish as their contexts were so similar, also feeling complicit and unthoughtful in my actions. I wonder if there was developer intent to this – that our moral compass has the potential to erode or be ignored over time in the face of an unrelenting violent world.
(For context I am commenting to make up for my class absence on 4/17/26!)