Slay the Princess

There can be no happiness without change, and there can be no change without death...so death is something to celebrate? I think? Whatever point Slay The Princess was going for with its recursive time loop formula and lofty themes of paranoid existential horror, if it coalesced into anything at the end, it went over my head because I'm always pretty bad at nailing existential themes. Though the jump from the perspective of mortality to a perspective of godhood, also coloured by some meta-textual parallels enforced by having to play the game over and over, also dilutes the impact of the story some. I want to appreciate how this game unfolds from a fairy tale gone wrong into a Lovecraftian nightmare and then possibly into a theistic thought experiment. It's certainly a memorable climax, and overall makes for a decent visual novel where it feels like all your choices added to something. But I dunno, it's missing something to push it over the edge. When I think of truly great endings to add a last minute existential slant, I think of Disco Elysium's Insulindian Phasmid. That felt more definitive, and Slay The Princess feels a lot more circular and...even a bit "fortune cookie"-like.

But just about everything else checks out. The monochromatic drawing style catches the eye and still gives way to many stylish flourishes over the course of the story, the monologuing narrators can get a bit grating, but otherwise there's a lot of chemistry between the cast, even as there are essentially only two characters. The voice actors have to play a lot of roles regardless, and their ranges are more than good enough to carry the script, especially the Narrator's biting delivery. The text dumps can get repetitive, as time loop stories tend to do, but I was intrigued to see what permutations would spawn from my actions and puzzling out how to achieve the ending I (thought I) wanted was a fun challenge. I can see this hitting other players deep in the gut, but I have always been distant from stories with "Ouroboros" imagery in their themes and characterisation, and Slay The Princess is no exception.