videogameblog

Slay the Princess

i'm finally free!! i never have to play another video game again. 'Slay the Princess' was the 100th game I completed this year and it feels pretty fitting.

I thought this was a really interesting approach to the 'choose your own adventure' genre of visual novel. You play through an extremely brief scenario over and over again, where you go to a house on a hill, enter the basement and confront a Princess, you you're instructed to kill. Thing will change based on your actions in your previous run, but these 'playthroughs' never last too long. One run might effect another, then that one might lead to another, but you'll eventually get your 'memory wiped' and everything starts from the beginning. You have a narrator in your head, who you can choose to ignore or obey. Initially it just seems like The Stanley Parable, but it's alot deeper than that. You eventually find out that the situation you're navigating will ultimately end with your surroundings being consumed by something called 'The Long Quiet' which is like the void? There's nothing in there but you and some unknown entity, which wants you to bring it Princesses of different personalities and backgrounds so it can consume them, gain their perspectives, and eventually construct a form of it's own. It kind of reminds me of the ending monologue of Metal Gear Solid 2 (i love mgs2!!) in the sense that it questions how we're shaped by our surroundings; and that 'being' requires more than the biological aspects. I said it was pretty fitting that this was my 100th game this year and this was why. I'm just like the unknown entity fr. I consume mass amounts of media in order to gain perspective!!

Besides the narrator, there's also a cast of other voices, each representing an emotion the character is feeling - Disco Elysium style. I thought it was really cool that there's only two voice actors (one for the player, one for The Princess) but they offer such vocal range that they can virtually talk amongst themself. At one point theres about 15 different voices having a conversation inside the player's head. The voice actor for the player's inner monologue (Jonathan Sims) is able to offer such distinct performances for each of them that they remain identifiable. Both Jonathan Sims and Nichole Goodnight (The Princess) give great performances which improve the experience by a massive amount. It wouldn't be nearly as memorable without them. Probably also has one of the best soundtracks of the year, I left the tab open a couple times when I was in the 'Long Quiet' area and was just listening to the music. It nails the atmosphere. The hand-drawn art is unique and beautiful, I took alot of screenshots playing this too. Really cool how minor changes to The Princesses facial structure can imply which 'personality' you're talking to.

I didn't 'unlock' every princess but looking at the achievements I must have only scraped the surface of what this game has to offer. There must be an insane amount of paths to go down; at one point I was trying to repeat my previous actions, and chose to skip one step I performed previously where I said 'nuh uh' to The Princess. Skipping this caused me to end up going down a different path entirely. Definitely don't fully understand the deeper narrative here, but that's reasonable since I haven't seen all the game has to offer. I would definitely want to go back to this in the future, I could see myself getting all the achievements.

7/10 nuh uh