Slay the Princess Review: The Visual Novel That Flips the Rescue

Slay the Princess review: the premise and the loop

Every year a handful of small games break out of the indie pile and take over the conversation. Cult of the Lamb did it in 2022 with its cheerful animal cult, It Takes Two did it for the 2021 awards season, and Sea of Stars arrived in August 2023 as the obvious breakout of its year. Slay the Princess belongs on that shelf, with one difference: it is the sort of project that grows out of a small team's love of the craft, and it shows in how little of it feels borrowed.

The setup fits in two lines. You stand in a dark forest in front of a lone cabin. A Narrator tells you to go inside and slay the princess locked in the basement, because if she lives, the world ends. Nearly every fairy-tale game sends the player to rescue the royal in the tower. Slay the Princess flips that and asks what happens when the rescue is the mistake, and when the person in the basement starts talking.

The princess talks a lot. She will say nearly anything to get out, and the game never settles whether she is a monster, a victim or something that changes depending on how you treat her. That uncertainty is the engine of the whole story. Fault keeps moving between you, the Narrator and the girl in the basement, and the player is rarely sure which of them is lying.

Black Tabby Games developed and released it, and the game came out for Windows, Linux and macOS on October 23, 2023, which means it also runs on Steam Deck. Tony Howard-Arias wrote and designed it. That detail matters for a review of a visual novel, because almost everything you do is read, heard or chosen from a short list of lines.

How the time loop works

Death resets the story, and the reset is the game's central idea. Each run takes you through the cabin, the woods and the basement, and each ending carries something into the next. What you did to the princess, what she said back and how you answered all stay in the game's memory, and both of you remember. Players who like to read about game design will recognize the shape from roguelikes, but there is no combat or stat tracking here. The progression is emotional and informational.

The structure keeps a familiar story fresh. The first scene may be the same twice, but the princess behaves differently, the cabin looks different and the Narrator reacts to your history. The more choices you make, the more voices pile up inside your own head, so the options on screen change as the game learns what kind of player you have been. Different dialogue, different paths and different endings all come from that single mechanism.

Choices, voices and the Narrator

The Narrator is a deliberately stuffy English voice, performed by Jonathan Sims, who is also known for the podcast The Magnus Archives. His delivery is dry and slightly smug, and it gives the game a spine. When the Narrator controls the story you feel it, and when he starts to lose control it is genuinely unsettling. Nichole Goodnight plays the Princess and handles the widest range in the cast, from pleading to sweet to cruel, sometimes inside a single scene.

Dialogue choices follow the choose-your-own-adventure model: you click, the story bends. The difference is that the game treats choices as character. Some of your options come from voices you created earlier, so a pacifist run and an aggressive run produce different inner monologues. The game also reacts to how you behave around it, including what happens when you leave the program and come back, and that is where the fourth-wall moments land. Anyone who played Doki Doki Literature Club will recognize the unease.

Fault, perspective and what comes after

The game is easy to describe as a series of kill-or-spare decisions, and that undersells it. The larger subject is the aftermath. Once you have killed the princess, spared her, fled or done something stranger, the question changes from what you did to what it made you. Themes of peace, rebirth, death and a twisted kind of love surface across the runs, and they surface because earlier choices built the voices that now comment on them.

The princess is not the only unreliable party. The Narrator frames the whole setup, and the longer the game goes the harder it is to trust his framing. You are also a character with a voice that shifts, so the player has three suspects for any lie and no clean way to tell which is speaking. Visual novels often stay on one track while pretending to branch. This one keeps asking whether you can trust the person telling you what you are doing, and then makes you live with the answer.

There is a metanarrative layer too, in which the game tracks how you play and plays back what it has learned. Lead writer Tony Howard-Arias has said that how players arrive at a situation changes the story as much as the situation itself, and the structure bears that out: the same basement scene lands very differently depending on the route that led there.

The hand-drawn art

Abby Howard, the graphic novelist behind The Crossroads at Midnight and The Last Halloween, drew everything in monochrome pencil-style illustration with short bursts of animation. The black-and-white look is cheap on paper and hard to do well. Here it sells body horror, murder noir, ghostly imagery and the occasional beheading without color to soften any of it. The art also changes with your path and chapter, so the same room can feel like a different place on a second visit.

The soundtrack, composed by Brandon Boone, sits under all of it without crowding the voices, which is the right call for a game that depends on the delivery of every line.

Slay the Princess at a glance

The basics, for readers deciding whether to buy.

• Developer: Black Tabby Games, with Tony Howard-Arias as writer and designer.
• Release: October 23, 2023 for Windows, Linux and macOS.
• Console release: The Pristine Cut, an expanded version published by Serenity Forge, arrived on October 24, 2024 for PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S and Nintendo Switch.
• Voice cast: Jonathan Sims as the Narrator, Nichole Goodnight as the Princess.
• Art: Abby Howard, hand-drawn in monochrome.
• Music: Brandon Boone.
• Genre: horror visual novel with branching paths and a looping structure.

Slay the Princess review verdict

Play it. For anyone who likes narrative games, Slay the Princess is the rare case where the strange premise is not a gimmick, because the writing has a reason for every twist. The best moments arrive when the game uses what it has already learned about you, and there is nothing quite like it among the visual novels and branching adventures that came out around it.

The depth of the scripting is the real achievement. Beyond the question of whether she will kill you or you will kill her, the story runs through finding peace, rebirth, death and even something close to infatuation. Few games can say that about a premise this blunt. It also explains the way the game stays with you after you close it: the choices that looked small keep returning in the next run.

Compared with the other indie hits of its moment, the achievement is quieter. Cult of the Lamb sold itself on the contrast between cute and gruesome, and Sea of Stars on a polished retro look. Slay the Princess sells itself on sentences, a voice cast and a single drawn palette, and none of those can be faked with a larger budget. That restraint is why it earns the comparison to the best visual novels of the past decade.

There are limits. This is a visual novel, so it asks you to read and listen for hours and does not offer action to break things up. Repeating similar openings can test patience before the branches begin to diverge, and the violence is graphic, so players who dislike body horror or gore should look elsewhere. For everyone else, it is a strange, memorable game that stays with you after the credits.

The Pristine Cut later added content for console players and arrived as a free update for existing owners on Steam, so PC players do not need to buy the game twice. Start on whichever platform you own, go in blind and keep your first ending to yourself.

Sources

• Slay the Princess, Wikipedia — developer and release details