Video games have always had a strange relationship with morality. They give players freedom: the freedom to explore, to experiment, and sometimes to do terrible things. Yet, that freedom raises a serious question: how far should a game let you go before “choice” becomes empty spectacle? The New Yorker article How Evil Should a Video Game Allow You to Be? takes this problem seriously, especially in its examples of Grand Theft Auto V and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. But Slay the Princess pushes the question further. My argument: games should allow players to be as evil as possible only if that evil is not treated as a joke, a power fantasy, or a detached mechanic. Evil in games should matter. It should make the player uncomfortable with their own reasoning. That is exactly what Slay the Princess does.
The New Yorker article makes a useful distinction between violence that feels meaningful and violence that feels empty. In Grand Theft Auto V, for example, players can run over pedestrians, fire rockets into crowds, or treat human life as a disposable part of the sandbox. The point is not that the game literally causes violence in real life, but that it lets players perform cruelty with very little moral weight. The world resets around them. The consequences are minimal. The violence becomes less like an ethical decision and more like entertainment. That is what makes it troubling: not the presence of evil, but its trivialization. When a game lets you do horrible things without making you reflect on them, it turns evil into a toy.
The same problem appears in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2’s “No Russian” mission. The mission is famous because it forces the player into a terrorist attack on an airport. It is shocking, yes, but the shock is the point. The scene asks the player to participate in something morally appalling and then sit with the discomfort. Still, the article suggests that even that discomfort can become complicated. The mission can feel like a test of how much cruelty a game can stage rather than how deeply it can challenge a player’s moral thinking. In other words, violence becomes memorable, but not necessarily transformative. The player sees evil, but does not necessarily understand it.
That is where Slay the Princess is different. It is not a game about random violence or cinematic shock. It is a game about justification. The whole premise is built around a command: go into the cabin and kill the Princess.
She is chained up. She looks harmless. The Narrator insists that she must die because the world depends on it. At first, the setup sounds simple, even clean. But the game immediately starts breaking that simplicity apart. If you kill her, she does not just disappear. She returns in new forms: the Damsel, the Tower, the Witch, the Nightmare, the Fury, the Razor. Each version changes the meaning of the original act. Killing is not closure. It is escalation. The game keeps asking whether the player acted out of duty, fear, obedience, cruelty, curiosity, or self-deception.
[After choosing to Slay the Princess in the routes, the Voice of the Contrarian says “I didn’t actually think our actions had consequences]
This is what makes Slay the Princess so effective as an argument about evil. It does not let the player hide behind the idea that the choice was “just gameplay.” Our actions directly DO have consequences. The princess is not a target dummy. She responds. She changes. She remembers the structure of your violence, even when the details shift. If you kill her when she seems innocent, the game does not congratulate you for making a bold decision. It forces you to confront what that decision means in a world where innocence, guilt, and monstrosity are unstable categories. If you spare her, that choice is not automatically virtuous either. The game complicates mercy, too. Sometimes kindness leads to danger. Sometimes refusal becomes its own form of harm. The point is not to assign a morality score. The point is to show how badly humans want easy moral categories, and how little those categories hold up under pressure.
[The Narrator forcing the player to confront the princess. You cannot run away, but instead reveal your own motives to why you must Slay the Princess]
What Slay the Princess understands better than many other games is that evil becomes interesting only when it reveals something about the player. In Grand Theft Auto, evil can feel detached because the game is designed to make consequences light and temporary. In Slay the Princess, evil has interpretive weight. Every action produces a new version of the story, and that story starts to implicate the player. Are you slaying her because you believe the Narrator? Are you doing it because you enjoy the power? Are you resisting because you want to prove you are good? Even refusal can become suspicious. The game keeps peeling back the player’s motives until there is no simple answer left.
[Interesting how it’s a meta commentary of one of the voices saying “I don’t even know what I would do if I were in the driver’s seat of that kind of power.”]
That is why I think the best answer to the question “how evil should a game allow you to be?” is this: as evil as it wants, but never without moral friction. Evil should not be forbidden, but it should also not be free of consequence, interpretation, or emotional cost. A game should not merely permit harm. It should force the player to feel the instability of the choice. Slay the Princess succeeds because it does exactly that. It turns evil into a mirror, and what the player sees in that mirror is not just a villainous action, but the uncomfortable logic that led them there.
[A different style of mirror always shows up in the cabin depending on which voice is in your head. Evil is in the mirror which is reflected onto us]
In the end, that is the real power of the game. It does not let evil remain external. It makes evil personal, recursive, and hard to excuse. That is a much stronger moral design than simple punishment or simple freedom. It shows that the most interesting games are not the ones that let you do anything, but the ones that make you understand what doing anything actually costs.
And yet, we also should remember that choosing evil may be choosing peace 🙂
