There is a moment in Slay the Princess that arrives like a trapdoor. You descend into the basement, knife in hand, the Narrator’s voice in your ear: she must die, or the world ends. You hesitate. She looks up at you and says, softly, “You know you don’t have to do this, right?” And then, whatever you choose, the loop collapses. You are back at the top of the hill. The cabin glows in the dark. She is waiting again; and she remembers.
The game’s title is a command, not a premise. The Developer presents you with what looks like a moral choice: kill her or spare her, love her or fear her, and then, loop after loop, systematically destroys the premise that the choice was ever yours to make. This is not a design flaw, but the argument.
Sarah Stang, in her 2019 Game Studies essay “This Action Will Have Consequences,” argues that video game interactivity is fundamentally illusory. Players operate within pre-scripted possibility spaces, reacting rather than truly acting. The much-celebrated “agency” of choice-based games is more sensation than fact, and games that market themselves on moral weight are often the least honest about it. Most reduce ethics to resource management, or to a good/evil alignment slider. Slay the Princess takes this critique and makes it the engine of its horror. The Narrator, controlling, panicked, increasingly unhinged, is every game that has ever told you your choices matter while steering you down a predetermined corridor. The diverging paths he offers, cobblestones in the void, always funnel back to the same basement, the same girl, the same question.
What separates Slay the Princess from most hollow interactivity is that it doesn’t hide the rails — it puts them on stage and makes the player watch. The game’s between-loop structure, where fragmentary “Voices” from past playthroughs argue among themselves, enacts Stang’s observation about “phantom narratives”: the paths you didn’t take haunt the one you did. The Voice of the Paranoid mutters that the Narrator is sending you to your death. The Voice of the Smitten insists this is all a conspiracy against love. The Voice of the Cheated suspects “the powers that be” are running some kind of sick joke. They are all right. They are all you; plural, parallel, none of them free.
But the game goes somewhere Stang’s framework alone cannot reach, and this is where Simon Parkin’s 2013 New Yorker essay becomes essential. Parkin argues that video games carry a moral weight distinct from other media precisely because they implicate rather than invite. When we watch violence in a film, we are spectators. In a game, the story halts until we press the button. The knife in Slay the Princess is not a cutscene, you choose to pick it up, or you don’t. And the Princess remembers. Each loop she returns changed: wounded, wary, monstrous, or furious, shaped, visibly and specifically, by what you did to her last time. “Were you lying to me this whole time?” she demands, blade in hand, blood on her chest. “You’ve made a terrible enemy,” she hisses from the floor, coiled and certain. “I won’t forget what you did, and I’ll never forgive it.”
This is Parkin’s point made visceral. He writes that a game creator has no moral obligation to fictional characters, but does carry one to the player, who “can be uniquely degraded by the experience.” Slay the Princess sidesteps degradation not by softening its imagery but by ensuring every act lands on the player’s conscience with full force. When the Narrator screams “Stop trying to resist me! I’m trying to get you out of here alive!” while your only available options scroll down the right side of the screen are [Slay the Princess.] [Slay the Princess.] [Slay the Princess.], the gap between player and perpetrator collapses entirely. The game has named what most violent games hide: that you are not being given a choice. You are being issued instructions and asked to feel good about following them.
The game’s freshest and most unsettling move is its answer to this. After enough loops, the Princess herself articulates the trap: “Those paths lead to Worlds you’ve already seen, and to perspectives I have already made my own. They are useless to us now. Inaccessible. The only paths of value are those that are yet untread.” She has, through accumulated experience of being killed and reborn, come to understand the game’s structure better than the Narrator does. The player, having frustrated themselves trying every branch, knows exactly what she means. The illusion of agency hasn’t just been exposed, it has been handed to a character who has suffered its consequences, and she has made it her own philosophy.
The frustration of the loop, then, is the point. You are not frustrated because the game is broken. You are frustrated because you have finally understood the terms you agreed to when you picked up the knife, or didn’t, the first time. Most games offer the sensation of agency while quietly denying it. Slay the Princess makes the denial explicit, painful, and meaningful. The Voice of the Cold, somewhere between lives, puts the usual bargain plainly: “The ending was the tedium. You locked us in a cabin and sent that cabin to an endless void, and then you told us we were happy.” It sounds like a complaint about a bad ending. It is also a precise description of what most games do to players every day, and what this one refuses to do.
References:
Slay the Princess (2023) is developed by Scrambled Eyes and published by Love Sucre.
Sarah Stang, “This Action Will Have Consequences: Interactivity and Player Agency,” Game Studies 19.1 (2019).
Simon Parkin, “How Evil Should a Video Game Allow You to Be?” The New Yorker, September 17, 2013.
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