Slay The Princess is a horror visual novel, in the purest sense. It’s well produced, with excellent voice acting, and art that does a very good job of communicating what it wants to. For anyone turned off by the “horror” aspect, this game has maybe one “jumpscare”-esque moment. It also doesn’t rely on any breaking of the 4th wall, like messing with files with on your computer or those sorts of things.
As a result, it almost entirely relies on the strength of its writing, art, and voice acting to tell a story, and a really interesting one. This makes it incredibly difficult to talk about.
As such, I’m left with two choices. I could engage with the work itself, and try to access it. Or I could dance around it, and look at the space it exists in, without engaging with it directly.
This writeup will be the second one. At the end of this writeup, there is a link to a page full of spoilers, because there are some things I want to discuss, but simply cannot without spoiling the game. But that page isn’t here, so if you are afraid of spoilers, you can keep reading (just don’t click on the link. There won’t be anything here that couldn’t be seen by looking at the steam page, or booting up the game.
To some extent, game reviews and criticism aren’t particularly well suited for evaluating games that are almost entirely reliant on narrative. Literary criticism tends to do much better at that. Game reviews are better at evaluating mechanics.
The primary mechanic of Slay The Princess is reading text. As far as mechanics go, is it a fundamentally strong mechanic? Yes. We have an entire medium of work reliant on that mechanic that isn’t games. They’re called books. Slay The Princess also has images, which means we can compare it to comic books, which are also pretty popular. Or we can call them graphic novels if we’re being fancy.
I think it’s a very strong visual novel, and if you enjoy horror, or games focused around narrative discovery like Gone Home, I would recommend it.
That said. If you want spoilers and longer form discussion, here you go. I suggest you only read this if you have no interest in the game, as doing so will destroy parts of the experience.