As October came to fullness this year, oozing with spooky things like an impending election, I picked up Black Tabby Games' Slay The Princess (a recommendation of my wife) as an escape. I didn't know much about the game, but knew it was a visual novel with a new spin on the "rescue the princess" trope. On a dark and stormy night, I fired it up on my PlayStation and completed it in a sitting. It was a treat. Also full of tricks, to be fair, but certainly a treat.
It's been MONTHS since I posted anything to my blog. Longer than I'd like, as writing makes me happy, but life happens sometimes. For me, at times, that life often includes gaming. I don't write reviews of all the games I play, just the ones that I find worth writing about after the fact. This is definitely one of those, but Slay the Princess is a rough game to write about.
I've done my best to avoid spoilers in the following review; It's a difficult line to walk with a game like this: teasing a reader to check out the game, without telling them so much about the game that it loses sparkle.
CHAPTER ONE: THE HERO AND THE PRINCESS
You are 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.
This game opens with a screenshot I've linked here - a message that I feel does a perfect job of setting the tone of the game while avoiding any spoilers. From the start, there's no doubt that this is a horror game; the only question is what sort of horror lies ahead.
There is technically a way to complete the game in about 6 minutes, but to say more about it would be poor form. Most players will play the game and die a lot, and it will therefore take them longer to reach a (more complete) ending for their efforts. This is as it should be, and makes for a rich experience of perhaps three or four hours.
They're good hours, particularly if you're into other games that subvert your expectations of the narrative. Doki Doki Literature Club! (another game that isn't at all what it appears on the surface) comes to mind, though I don't mean to imply that this is derivative of that. Slay the Princess stands as it's own original work, and a gorgeous one at that.
CHAPTER TWO: THE WRITER AND THE ARTIST
I would be remiss to leave the art and writing quality unmentioned; they're the two components that constitute the game after all.
The writing and narration are both great; the game is fully voiced with about a dozen-ish characters, and has more content than you can fit into a single playthrough. More than that, there's no "throw-away" content to this game - every line of dialogue, every scoffing remark, and every pencil stroke in the art adds to the players' experience.
As I engaged with some of those characters, it was fun to watch them interact in ways that feel extremely organic; none of the actions in the game felt forced to me, and I couldn't really find any lose ends. There's some great foreshadowing, and you can tell that even the color and placement of in-game text was handled with care. Loved that.
The game's art pulls you in after a while.
The game's artist is Abby Howard - the whole team consists of her and her husband. Check out the About section for Black Tabby Games if you'd like, it's pretty adorable. Abby is a Canadian cartoonist with a bunch of projects that I'm unfamiliar with, but after playing the game I'm interested to check them out.
She did a wonderful job in Slay the Princess of illustrating a world that feels at times romantically magical and at others utterly horrific. The narrative shape of the game reinforces that split as well, so you find yourself (the player) experiencing a sort of sensory rollercoaster between those two extremes.
Go play it. This is a great one for Halloween. I don't really have any critical notes either, so it gets a full ten pristine blades out of ten. Enjoy it.