[Beware spoilers for Slay the Princess.]
You’re on a path in the woods. And at the end of that path is a cabin. And in the basement of that cabin is a princess. You’re here to slay her. If you don’t, it will be the end of the world.
So begins Black Tabby Games’ 2023 Slay the Princess. It’s a straightforward moral question: do you slay the Princess or not? Video games have prompted players to make morally questionable choices for years, putting them “into the minds of terrorists, murderers, and abusers” (Parkin, 2013). Parkin argues such violence is only meaningful when it empowers players with agency to make “challenging decisions with little possibility to predict the consequences of their actions without any system of evaluation or reward” (Stang, 2019), and then provides consequences for the player’s decision.
Unfortunately, Slay the Princess weakens its violence’s meaningfulness by minimizing and gamifying its consequences. Slay the Princess, on its face, fits the brief: the player faces a weighty moral choice (slay the titular Princess or spare her?) with deliberately imperfect information: the Narrator insists the world will end if she lives, yet both he and the Princess remain evasive about the whole situation.
Whatever the player chooses (slay the Princess, rescue her, or something in between) in Chapter 1 shapes Chapter 2: the Princess’s form and personality reflect the player’s Chapter 1 choices (e.g. manifesting as a maiden, a witch, a monster), and new Voices provide commentary on how making the titular choice in Chapter 2 might go differently from Chapter 1. But the game leaves no room for players to wrestle with the consequences of those choices. In my first playthrough, I left the Princess chained in the basement. She escaped and killed me. In Chapter 2, I simply reappeared on the path as if nothing had happened. When I tried to walk away again, the Narrator stopped me.
No matter what the player chooses in Chapters 1 and 2, they die and wake up in The Long Quiet, a space between worlds, where the Narrator lectures them about their choices. But if I’m not in the other world experiencing consequences for my choices, why should I care? The impact of my moral choice is minimized and its potential subsequent violence is no longer meaningful.
The Princess also inhabits The Long Quiet as an entity called The Shifting Mound. She acknowledges the choices (or “perspectives”) the player made in Chapters 1 and 2 and then asks for more perspectives. This gamifies the player’s choices as collectibles rather than meaningful decisions, “embedding the morality of the players’ actions in the game design and … taking away the player’s moral responsibility, making the process of self-evaluation just another element in the game system and not a part of the moral interpretation of the game experienced by the player” (Sicart, 2009 as quoted in Stang, 2019).
Worse, The Shifting Mound declares previous choices are “useless to us now” and she means this literally: choices the player made in previous runs are grayed out, forcing them to choose differently. The most wild example of this happens if the player refuses to “bring new perspectives.” The Shifting Mound responds, “Then we will be here forever” and the game auto-quits. This doesn’t encourage critical engagement with morally complex material, it transforms ethical choices into a checklist.
Slay the Princess has a deeper message about the nature and importance of change, but it’s lost in its mechanical demand for variation. The Narrator opposes change (hence wanting the Princess dead), yet the game requires players to change every run. Instead of meditating on morality or transformation, I found myself resource collecting: had I made sufficiently different choices to unlock a new “perspective” for The Shifting Mound? The game fails to let the player “make morally-heavy decisions … [that] truly shape the narrative outcome” (Stang, 2019), stripping away the very engagement that could make its violence meaningful.
So, you’re at a crossroads in a video game. And at the end of that crossroads is a choice. And in the wake of that choice are consequences. You’re here to experience them. If the game doesn’t let you, what’s the point?
