You are standing at the top of a dark staircase. A voice tells you there is a princess in the cabin beneath you, that she is dangerous, and that you must slay her before she ends the world. You can go down the stairs, or you can turn back. You can try to talk to her, or you can slay her before she says a word. The choice is yours.
Except it isn’t. At least not entirely. By the time you reach the bottom and lock eyes with the princess, you have already learned that the world you are walking into was shaped by a version of you that came before. A version of you who made different choices, who the game remembers even when you don’t. Then, there’s the narrator, an omnipresent voice that speaks with total confidence. The princess shifts depending on how you treated her last time. And you, holding on to the illusion of complete control, are actually the last person in the room to understand what is really happening.
Slay the Princess, Bastion, and The Beginner’s Guide all hand you the controller and quietly keep a hand on the wheel. Each one uses a different mechanism — whether it’s a looping structure, a retrospective narrator, or a guide who speaks before you’ve had a chance to think in the first place — to manufacture the sensation of player choice while ensuring that control was never fully yours to begin with.
What these three games share is not just a one-time narrative trick, but a broader design philosophy. Each one creates the feeling of meaningful choice while slowly revealing that the player was never fully in control to begin with. Through the loop, the narrator, and the guide, these games turn manipulation into a core yet subtle mechanic. However, the manipulation is not there just to trick the player. It makes the player confront their own role in what happened, which is not something passive media can do as directly. In interactive games, you are forced to sit with choices you cannot fully let go of because, at some point, you were the one who made them. A film can show a character trapped inside a system they do not understand, but these games make you become that character, and then make you watch yourself realize it.
In Slay the Princess, the loop is not just a structural choice but the game’s central argument. From the very first moment, the player is handed a list of options; they can go down the stairs, turn back, try to talk to her, or slay her before she says a word. The range feels open, and the game seems to invite exploration. However, the framing is already set before the player has touched a single choice. The narrator has established the premise without giving the player any real information to push back with. By stating upfront that the princess is dangerous, that the world will end, that you must act, the player likely enters the world with a skewed perception. This lack of freedom becomes clearest when, in one version of the gameplay, the player refuses to kill the princess and tries to leave or resist the narrator’s instructions. Instead of simply accepting that choice, the narrator pushes back and eventually takes control of the player’s body, forcing the blade into the action the player was trying to avoid. In that moment, the game makes the illusion of agency visible. The player technically chose to refuse slaying the princess, but the system reveals that some choices only exist until they threaten the story’s underlying structure. Here, we see that the player is not choosing from a neutral menu of possibilities. Instead, they are selecting from within a framework someone else built, and the game lets them feel that only when they try to step outside of it.
The fact that the consequences of those early choices do not disappear when the loop resets makes this particularly unsettling. The princess transforms based on how the player treated her in the previous run. Violence produces something monstrous, a version of her that has already learned what the player is capable of. Curiosity can produce something more open, or at least something that reflects a different kind of engagement. The player is not given a blank slate but instead, each round adds another layer to what came before.
The fragmentation of the player’s sense of self also shows up through the voices that begin to appear, such as the Voice of the Hero, the Voice of the Broken, the Voice of the Stubborn, and the Voice of the Skeptic. At first, these voices feel more or less like internal reactions, almost as if the game is giving shape to the player’s thoughts in the moment of choice. But they also complicate the player’s agency. The player is no longer making decisions from a single, stable self. Their past choices have produced new internal voices that argue, resist, fear, or push back. In that sense, the voices do not simply represent the player’s mind. They show how the player’s mind has been fragmented by the loop itself. The player is always meeting a version of the Princess that their previous self helped create, while also carrying forward versions of themselves that they did not fully choose to become. Every run feels like a new beginning. It is not. It is a continuation of something already in motion, and the player is the last one to realize it.
The game’s design becomes most philosophically interesting here, and where Thomas Nagel becomes pertinent to the argument. Nagel argues that conscious experience is tied fundamentally to a single point of view, meaning that there is always something it is like to experience the world from within a particular position. He argues that this subjective character cannot be fully captured from an outsider’s perspective. The uncomfortable implication is that if experience is always bounded by perspective, then the player was never structurally capable of seeing the manipulation coming. The loop does not just exploit a momentary lapse of attention. It instead exploits the basic conditions of how any conscious agent encounters the world: from inside a single viewpoint with incomplete information and unable to step outside their own experience to verify what is actually happening. In this sense, the narrator’s framing feels like reality because, inside a first-person perspective, there is no view from outside it to suggest otherwise. Slay the Princess does not simply trick its players — it builds a trap out of the very structure of subjective experience itself.
The loop makes this structural trap almost impossible to escape. By the time the player begins to understand the structure, they have already changed the princess, already accumulated voices they did not choose to become, already acted within a world shaped by a version of themselves they can no longer access. The moment the narrator pushes back against the player’s resistance and tries to force the action anyway, the gap between apparent agency and actual agency becomes very difficult to ignore. However, even that moment of recognition arrives too late to undo what has been done already and the game does not resolve this discomfort.
Bastion extends what Slay the Princess begins, but it shifts the mechanism of control in a quieter way. Both games use a biased narrator, but in Slay the Princess, the narrator works alongside the loop. In Bastion, the narrator becomes the structure itself. There is no reset that makes the player visibly repeat their mistakes. Instead, there is Rucks, whose voice follows the Kid through every broken piece of the world, narrating his actions in past tense as they happen. This creates a strange effect: the player is acting in the present, but the story already sounds like it has been decided. Early on, this made the game feel almost entirely within my control. As the Kid, I moved through scattered pieces of floating land, fought enemies, collected fragments, and brought them back to the Bastion. Because the world is so broken and empty, each successful action feels like progress. The game makes rebuilding feel natural before the player has any real reason to question what rebuilding actually means.
Here we see that Rucks becomes a powerful mechanism of control precisely because he never needs to force anything. He does not need to directly force the player into a choice, but instead simply makes one path feel obvious. Through his narration, restoration is framed as repair, responsibility, and moving forward. The player is not told that evacuation is wrong, but rebuilding the Bastion is presented as the natural response to a shattered world. This is more subtle than Slay the Princess, where the narrator eventually exposes the limits of agency by trying to override the player’s body. Bastion does not take control away in one clear moment, but instead, it teaches the player to want what Rucks wants. The player keeps rebuilding because it feels like the only meaningful thing to do, even though that desire has been shaped by Rucks from the beginning.
A major turning point comes through Zulf. When he first appears, his presence feels like relief. After so much time spent moving through a lonely, fragmented world, finding another person makes the Bastion seem less like a survival project and more like the beginning of a shared future. Bringing Zulf back feels like another step toward restoring order, which serves as another confirmation that rebuilding is the right thing to do. The game, up to that point, has given the player very little reason to think otherwise. Rucks does a skillful job of framing each new fragment collected as progress and each enemy defeated as clearing the way. The current state of the world being ruined, silent, and waiting makes restoration feel not just desirable but necessary. Zulf fits neatly into that logic as his arrival makes the Bastion feel purposeful.
This significance that Zulf carries is why his betrayal matters; it breaks the simplicity of what the player thought they were doing. When the Kid returns and finds the Bastion damaged, it does not just feel like lost progress. It forces the player to look differently at the entire project of rebuilding. The Bastion is not a neutral safe place. It is tied to a longer history between Caelondia and the Ura, a history the player did not fully understand while carrying out Rucks’ mission. Zulf’s attack on the Bastion does not come out of nowhere. It comes out of a history Rucks never told the player. The Calamity was not just a disaster that happened to Caelondia; Caelondia caused it, and the Ura paid the price. When Zulf discovers that, he stops helping rebuild the thing that destroyed his people. His betrayal is only a betrayal from inside Rucks’ version of the story. From outside it, it makes complete sense. That is what makes it so disorienting: the player has been rebuilding the Bastion for the whole game without knowing what the Bastion actually represents. When the player comes to this realization, they do not proceed with clarity but with doubt. By the time the final choice arrives, they are already unsure whether anything they built actually meant what Rucks said it did.
This realization is what gives the final choice its weight, and it is also where Nietzsche’s concept of amor fati adds to the argument. Amor fati, which is the love of fate, is not simply the passive acceptance of whatever happens; it is an active embrace of reality, including suffering and loss, rather than a wish for things to have been otherwise. The concept does real work here because it clarifies what the evacuation choice actually is. It is not giving up on the world. Instead, it represents a refusal to pretend that restoration can undo what happened, that rebuilding Caelondia will resolve the history that destroyed it in the first place. Restoration, in this light, is not hope, not avoidance. It is the option that lets the player pretend the Calamity was a problem to be solved rather than a consequence to be lived with. Evacuation asks something harder: that the player accept what occurred, take the people who remain, and move forward without erasing the past. What makes this choice feel earned rather than arbitrary is that the player arrives at it through disillusionment — through Zulf’s betrayal and everything it reveals about Rucks’ framing. The player wanted restoration because Rucks shaped that desire. However, the game slowly, quietly dismantled the premise behind it. By the final choice, evacuation is not the easier path. It is the one that requires sitting with the fact that some things cannot be undone. The player reaches amor fati not through wisdom but through having been led astray long enough to finally see it.
The Beginner’s Guide shifts the mechanism so completely that it is worth pausing to name what stays the same. In both Slay the Princess and Bastion, the manipulation operates through structure: a loop that traps the player inside their own subjectivity, or a narrator who shapes desire so quietly the player never notices. The Beginner’s Guide keeps the narrator but strips away the fiction. There is no loop, no fragmented world to rebuild. Instead, there is a guide speaking in real time, and that guide has an agenda. Davey presents himself as Coda’s friend, someone who can help the player understand who Coda is and what his games mean. However, from the very first level, he is not simply helping the player understand Coda’s work. He is shaping that understanding for them, inserting his own interpretations and turning Coda’s games into evidence for the story he wants to tell.
Davey’s hidden agenda becomes quite clear in two specific moments. In the Stairs level, Davey suggests that the staircase represents a small climb toward seeing Coda as vibrant and compassionate rather than cold or distant. From the get go, it is noticeable that this is a specific psychological claim about a specific person, which it is offered before the player has spent enough time with the game to have any basis for evaluating it. The player has not yet developed any sense of who Coda is, what his games feel like, or what patterns might be worth tracking across them. Davey fills that interpretive vacuum immediately, before it can become genuine curiosity. As someone who had no prior knowledge of Coda, I found myself essentially absorbing Davey’s reading as my own without fully realizing I was doing so. By the time I might have formed my own interpretation, his voice was already there, occupying the space where mine would have been. The same thing happens in the level ‘Down,’ where Davey frames Coda’s design choices around accessibility as direct expressions of his personal beliefs, collapsing the distance between what the game does and what Coda intended. The move is quite significant as it treats design decisions as transparent windows into Coda’s psychology, Davey subtly yet consistently shuts out the possibility that those decisions might mean something different, or that the gap between intention and artifact is itself worth sitting with. As a player, I was left feeling like I had no room to encounter the work on my own terms. This wasn’t because the games were opaque, but because Davey had already decided what they were before I arrived.
Roland Barthes argues in “The Death of the Author” that meaning is not simply deposited by the author and extracted by the reader. Instead, it is produced in the act of engagement itself. Every reader produces a different text because meaning is not fixed in the work, but lives in the interaction between the work and the person experiencing it. Davey’s narration is a systematic effort to instill a specific narrative before the player can produce their own, which is the precise opposite of what Barthes describes. What makes this particularly interesting is that Davey claims to be doing something else entirely. He presents himself as someone opening up Coda’s work for the player, inviting interpretation rather than closing it off. The gap between what Davey says he is doing and what he is actually doing is not a coincidence, it is the central to the game itself.
The reveal that Davey’s narration is really just projection makes this explicit in a way the other two games never do. Combined with the fact that Coda ultimately rejects Davey’s involvement in his work entirely, everything the player thought they understood about Coda is called into question. The readings were never about Coda; they were about Davey. And the player, who had no way of knowing that from inside the experience, absorbed them anyway. Unlike Slay the Princess and Bastion, which construct the illusion of agency and let the player sit inside it, The Beginner’s Guide constructs the illusion and then names it, turning the mechanism of control into the explicit subject of the work itself.
Across all three games, the illusion of agency is not a flaw in the design but a central theme of it. Each game is built around a mechanism that manufactures the feeling of meaningful choice while ensuring that choice was never fully the player’s to begin with. Each one builds toward a moment where the player can finally see the structure they were inside, but only after they have already acted within it, already shaped the princess, already followed Rucks toward a conclusion he had been nudging them toward the whole time, already absorbed an interpretation of Coda that was never really about Coda at all.
This is what separates these games from anything passive media can achieve. A film can show you a character trapped inside a system they cannot see. It can make you watch someone lose control, make choices they do not fully understand, move through consequences they did not anticipate. But you remain a witness. You sit outside the experience, observing it. These games make you the person who is trapped. You are the one who acted, who chose, who shaped the outcome. When the moment of recognition arrives, when the loop reveals itself, when Rucks’ framing becomes impossible to ignore, when Davey’s projection is exposed, you cannot step back and observe it happening to someone else. It happened to you. That is what makes the manipulation matter in a way it simply cannot in a passive medium.
What is worth saying is not just that these games deceive their players, but that the deception is the point. The loop, the narrator, the guide are not obstacles to meaning but central to it. These games could not make their argument any other way, because the argument is about what it feels like to be inside an experience you cannot fully see. A film can represent that feeling. Only a game can make you have it. That is what makes these games worth talking about.
