Obviously, you are not going to slay her after only just meeting her because you were told to, and the game is called Slay the Princess. But you cannot save her—the world is on the line. You keep her chained, telling yourself it is the only practical option—safe for you, for her, for the world. But she was right in the end—you do come to regret that decision. How evil should video games allow you to be? Slay the Princess answered in a way Simon Parkin did not anticipate.
Parkin argued that evil in games is justified only when it adds meaning and that designers have a moral obligation not to degrade players with consequence-free, gratuitous evil. However, his argument relies on a key assumption: that players begin from a neutral baseline, with evil being something you opt into. Slay the Princess challenges that assumption. Its real horror isn’t the evil it permits you to do—your complicity was decided before you even knew what you were complicit in, and the game then systematically peels away the illusion that you could have been anything else.
When initially playing, you are presented with three options after meeting the Princess: slaying the Princess, saving the Princess, or leaving the Princess chained up. While you can abstain from slaying or saving, you realize, as the Princess frees herself, declaring her anger toward you and holding you complicit in her jailing, that, despite your desire to avoid harm, you have simply facilitated the continuation of her agony. This resonates with the illusion of agency Sarah Stang discusses, as game designers often construct a false sense of neutrality, allowing players to believe inaction is safe. She observes that video games cultivate the illusion of meaningful choice, even when the outcome is predetermined. Slay the Princess exploits that illusion deliberately. The third option is not a real escape for the player but a trap. You are made to feel the weight of your complicity only after it’s too late to undo. You weren’t given a good option. You were given the feeling of one.
Even saving the Princess wasn’t truly an option. When you try, the Narrator locks the door, arms you with the “pristine” blade, and floods your choice boxes with a sea of “Slay the Princess,” forcing you to hunt for the single resist option buried among them. When you try again, even that disappears. You are left with only slay. The Narrator doesn’t just limit your options–run by run, he corrupts your moral vocabulary until resistance isn’t an inconvenient option, it’s an absent one. Stang distinguishes between being an agent with genuine autonomy and being an agent of someone else, merely following their will. You begin the game believing you are the former. The Narrator ensures you become the latter—not through a single dramatic cutscene like in BioShock, but through slow, quiet erasure.
In the end, as the voices multiply—including the Narrator’s—you find yourself disregarding them entirely. Instead, you begin listening to something else—your own voice, the voice of the player. As the weight of your complicity compounds, the Narrator’s constraints feel less like guidance and more like chains. You find yourself genuinely caring about the Princess and wanting to save her—not because the game instructed you to, but because you recognize something in her situation. This is where Slay the Princess most clearly answers Parkin. He argues that darkness in games is justified only when it carries meaning and avoids degrading the player through empty or consequence-free violence. The game doesn’t make meaning by limiting what you can do; it makes meaning by making you face what you’ve already done. Your past choices, especially your attempt to stay out of it, come back with emotional weight, turning your complicity from an idea into something felt. By the time you want to do something different, the game has already made it clear that you can’t fully escape what you’ve done. In this way, Slay the Princess fulfills Parkin’s demand for meaningful darkness better than restriction ever could: it ensures that evil is not just performed, but internalized.
Parkin framed his dilemma incorrectly. The issue isn’t how much evil a game should allow you to be, but whether a game can make you feel responsible for a situation you walked into before you understood it. Slay the Princess answers that reframed question with a bold yes. And you even get a kiss out of it, albeit after having to slay her a few times.
