This page contains spoilers for Slay the Princess. If you don’t want them, leave now. I’m not even going to make this a post, or give it meta data tags, because I don’t want anyone to see this unless they’ve opted into it as so much as possible.
Anyway, lets talk about Slay the Princess, and the story to the extent it can be discussed.
An Attempt To Summarize The Plot
Slay the Princess is a love story between eldritch beings, and unfathomable old gods. The names they’re given in the story are the The Long Quiet (the player) and The Shifting Mound (The Princess). For the purposes of this writeup, I’ll just be referring to them as Death and Oblivion. There’s one other important character to quickly discuss, and that’s the Narrator, or more accurately, the Echo.
At some point before the story started, the Echo split apart the Shifting Mound and The Long Quiet, and locked them into a sort of world spanning cage. In splitting them, he also reduced them from what they were into the Princess, and the Player character. This cage was designed to do once thing: To make Oblivion kill Death, and thereby, end death forever.
This is a bad idea. In game this is primarily illustrated via the fact that if you do in fact choose to do what the Echo had planned, he then seals you off from the existence of the universe, and sends you into what amounts to a static, mindless eternity of nothing.
I think this is because while the Shifting Mound is death, she is also entropy, change, chaos, and she is all of these things at once.
Regardless, what actually happens is that while the Echo tried to lock up The Princess, what he actually ended up doing was more akin to splitting her into multiple copies across parallel universes. But the Long Quiet and Shifting Mound exist outside of those universes, and as such, end up piecing each other back together somewhat as they loop and interact through the trap the Echo has them in.
There are multiple endings and choices here. Some of them are consistent, and some of them are parallels. All of which is to say that some endings loop the cycle of the trap, and some imply the cycle ends. It’s also entirely possible that not all of them are internally consistent, on purpose.
So now lets talk about that.
If this sounds weird and a bit abstract, that’s because it is, and it’s clearly deliberately like that. Again, this is ultimately a love story between metaphysical concepts. What they are, what their definition of love is, what their definition of existence is, all of these things are somewhat beyond human comprehension, and is intended to be so.
It also leads to some very weird narrative moments. After all, the player isn’t a blank vessel, or hentai-haired self insert. They’re what I can best describe as fundamental force force of nature or old god.
There’s a part of the game where I found myself trying to convince the Shifting Mound, IE Death itself, that maybe Entropy as a concept isn’t a good idea. And that’s a difficult nut to crack in some ways.
I’m a human being. I will die. It doesn’t come up in this blog, because it’s rarely relevant, but I’m not spiritual, and the fact there is a point in time where I will cease to exist is absolutely terrifying to me. I have not made peace with that in any sense, and I don’t think I ever will.
And so if I ever did come face to face with death, I think I would beg, plead, argue, and threaten, and do whatever it took to try to avoid it. To probably misquote, in that sort of situation I would pull a “do not go gentle into that good night”.
Yet the character I’m being asked to embody isn’t me, and isn’t human. This is made more clear through some of the text selections available to the Long Quiet, calling the echo’s actions extreme hubris.
And in a narrative sense… it is! This individual tried to end entropy, change, and yes, death, forever. In the position I’m given in the game as one of those forces, this is overreach to an unfathomable degree.
But as someone who is equally scared of the end, I completely get it.
Meta-Narrative Looping
There’s one other really interesting thing about Slay the Princess that I want to talk about quickly, and that’s the fact that various endings in the game itself are implied to be part of a greater loop, resetting things back to the start of the story.
As such, after a got a “good” ending, I didn’t really want to play more. Much like Undertale, the story has finished. I don’t really feel a need to go back and do everything, and see everything. Part of being pulled into the story to the extent that I was meant that I also wanted to respect it by letting it end.
In Conclusion
This ended up a bit longer and weird then I was thinking, but the short version is this: Slay The Princess starts with an unusual premise, and delivers on it in interesting and uncomfortable ways. I generally liked it, even if I feel like I want to review it more as a book then a game.