Black Tabby Games’ Slay the Princess flips the damsel in distress narrative on its head from the very start, then spends the rest of its roughly four-hour runtime subverting its own subversion in increasingly elaborate ways.
...While it’s difficult to talk about Slay the Princess’ mind-bending story without giving too much away, its other virtues are safer to discuss. Above all else, visual novels need good writing and art to really succeed, and Slay the Princess excels at both. There’s a powerful voice running under all of its writing, whether it’s the narrator chiding you for refusing to follow his orders or the high-minded philosophizing that seeps in toward the end of the game.
Slay the Princess’ art may look relatively simple in screenshots, but in motion, it’s breathtaking. Made up of pencil sketches, its backgrounds and characters have a constant writhing animation to them, as if they’re being drawn and redrawn with each passing second. As your perspective on the world shifts, the art takes on a very different tone as well. When the game shows more of its horror roots, the visuals grow more disturbing with heavy doses of body horror. Other times, the art takes on the style of fairy tale illustrations or children’s drawings, all emphasizing different aspects of its ever-shifting story.
As a self-described scaredy cat, I avoid horror at all costs, with notable exceptions for games like the 2022 masterpiece Signalis. But despite knowing it would ruin my sleep that night, I couldn’t stop playing Slay the Princess once I picked it up. What started as an interesting experiment in player choice quickly revealed itself as something much more thought-provoking and surprisingly sweet. Sure, the princess may claw you to pieces a few times along the way, but that’s a small price to pay for romance. READ FULL STORY FROM INVERSE
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