Notes for Game Design as Narrative Architecture
Slay the Princess
Content warning: The following analysis and screenshots contain spoilers for Slay the Princess. Some screenshots also include graphic violence.
Game Overview
- Title: Slay the Princess — The Pristine Cut
- Creator: Developed by Black Tabby Games, co-created by Tony Howard-Arias and Abby Howard. Tony served as lead writer, game designer, and creative director; Abby was the lead artist and contributed to the writing.
- Platforms: Windows and Linux PC, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation, and Xbox.
- Target audience: Adult players who enjoy narrative-driven visual novels, psychological horror, branching choices, and dark humor. The developers state that the game is not intended for children or players who are easily disturbed; the game is rated Mature 17+.
- Official website: slaytheprincess.com
Playthrough Summary
I played for approximately two hours, completed one full playthrough, and reached one of the game’s endings. The game begins with a simple premise: the player is told to travel through a forest to a cabin and kill the princess imprisoned in its basement to prevent the end of the world. Through dialogue and action choices, the player can decide whether to trust the narrator, interact with the princess, or attempt to kill or free her. These choices shape the story and the player’s experience of the princess. The game’s branching structure and repeated encounters encourage players to question what they have been told and how their own choices affect the narrative.
Narrative Strategies in Slay the Princess
Evocative Spaces:
At the beginning of the game, the Voice of the Hero accompanies the player to meet a princess imprisoned in a basement. This setup recalls familiar stories in which a hero rescues a princess. The game then creates a contrast: instead of rescuing her, the player is told to kill her. This twist raises questions—Why must she die? Can the narrator be trusted?—and encourages the player to keep playing to find out.
Enacting Stories:
Several voices, the narrator, and the princess try to influence the player’s choices. However, the player can decide which advice to trust and which action feels right to them. The game then responds immediately to that action with new dialogue, character reactions, and story events. The player therefore helps enact the story through their decisions.
Embedded Narratives:
The game reveals information through small clues rather than explaining everything directly. The narrator may seem like a neutral guide, but his words can hint at hidden truths about the world and the situation. Visual details also carry clues: the cabin’s decorations change between loops based on the player’s earlier actions, suggesting the tone or direction of the next encounter. Changes in the princess’s gestures and expressions can offer further hints about what she is feeling or what may happen.
Emergent Narratives:
The game is known for its many possible routes and endings. In some choice-based games, a choice may produce an immediate response but have little effect on what happens later. In Slay the Princess, choices can shape the princess’s immediate reaction, influence how she and the player interact in a later loop, and contribute to the ending. The combination of a player’s choices can therefore create a distinctive version of the story. These stories take shape through play, while still following paths designed by the creators.
Subgenre and Narrative Affordances
Slay the Princess is mainly a choice-driven visual novel with branching routes and a time-loop structure.
The visual novel format lets the game focus on dialogue, character reactions, and atmosphere. Its many carefully worded choices allow players to express different attitudes, while branching routes show the consequences of those decisions.
One thing that makes Slay the Princess’s choice system unique is how detailed its options are. For many questions, the game gives the player several responses with different tones and personalities, so they can choose the one that best matches what they think or feel.
The choices also help create the experience the story wants the player to have. For example, seeing “Slay the Princess” repeated many times, with a less noticeable “Warn her” option hidden among them, can make the urge to choose violence feel overwhelming.
At other moments, the player has NO genuinely different choices. The menu may show greyed-out options alongside several selectable ones that all say the same thing, perhaps with only a different adverb. This makes the menu feel as if it is responding to the player and revealing something about the situation: the character has run out of options and cannot change what is happening. That feels more immersive than being given a single choice to click through, because the player has to confront their lack of control.
These details make the choice menu feel like a mind at work: sometimes crowded with competing voices, sometimes fixated on one impulse, and sometimes searching through options only to find that some are no longer possible. The game brings its mechanics and narrative together, using the act of choosing to make the player feel the character’s confusion, urgency, and limits.
The game’s immediate feedback also makes its choice-based gameplay feel intense. I never felt that I was simply reading a quiet or boring visual novel. I was constantly unsure whether to trust the Princess or hurt her, because either choice could quickly lead to a disturbing or heartbreaking scene. This makes every decision feel risky. The game uses dialogue, character reactions, and sudden changes in the story to create suspense without relying on action-based controls.
Criticism
I think the game’s innovative format is stronger than the story it contains. Reviews and recommendation videos often focus on its opening premise: you are a hero who must kill a princess to save the world, and you have to decide whether to trust her. I found this premise compelling, but the story felt too limited after that. Most conversations with the Princess revolve around whether we will escape together or try to kill each other. The game includes long philosophical and psychological discussions, but I did not feel that the story gave me enough concrete experiences to connect those ideas to.
The game is effective at creating strong emotions, but I felt that its story did not fully fill out the framework it sets up. It also relies heavily on the “princess” stereotype. The game describes itself as a love story, yet I did not experience many scenes where the Princess and I built a meaningful connection. Any sense of attraction seemed to depend largely on her being a beautiful princess. If the character were replaced by someone less conventionally attractive, such as a goblin or a werewolf, I am not sure the romance would feel as convincing.
I was also taken out of the experience by the game’s repeated emphasis on the player character being male, including frequent use of “he” and some assumptions that felt male-centered. Given the game’s concepts and themes, I did not feel that the player’s gender needed to be emphasized so often. I would have preferred a more gender-neutral approach.
I also felt that the voice acting and music did not match the quality of the artwork. The hand-drawn visuals are striking, but the audio sometimes gave me the impression of a smaller budget and felt less polished by comparison. This made the game’s presentation feel uneven.
What did the game attempt to draw empathy towards?
The game seems to explore many complicated ideas. By calling itself a love story, it suggests that the player might learn something about intimacy through their relationship with the Princess: being sincere may invite sincerity, while suspicion can create distance and mistrust. It also suggests that projecting an ideal image onto someone—the “perfect princess,” for example—can make it harder to see who they really are. The game raises other philosophical questions about identity and the fear of change, too. It uses many of the narrative techniques I discussed earlier to bring these ideas forward, but what players take from them depends on their own interpretation. As some players have said, it may be a game you enjoy most when the creator’s and player’s “brainwaves line up.”
Personally, I did not come away feeling that I had learned or understood a clear lesson. What stayed with me more was the immediate horror atmosphere and the Princess herself, whose characterization I found very effective: she is beautiful and dangerous, like a monster wearing human skin.
