Trust - Slay the Princess Episode 4
Channel: Zac the Fist Cake
Date: 24/01/2024

"The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them." ~ Ernest Hemingway
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Slay the Princess - https://store.steampowered.com/app/1989270/Slay_the_Princess/
Princess VA - https://twitter.com/NRGoodnight
Narrator VA - https://jonathan-sims.com/
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Slay the Princess is a 2023 horror adventure game developed and published by Black Tabby Games for Microsoft Windows, Linux, and macOS systems. It was released on October 23, 2023. The game is conceptually a twist on the damsel-in-distress archetype; rather than saving the princess, the objective is to kill her.
Slay the Princess received critical acclaim for its narrative, art, music, and voice performances.
Slay the Princess is a visual novel, wherein the player advances through hand-drawn scenes from the player character's perspective. The player's primary interaction with the game is selecting dialogue or action options. How the story unfolds depends on the player's choices and dialogue responses. It features a branching and looping narrative structure. Each loop is generally centered on the player's choice to save or slay the titular princess, and the actions they take towards that goal.
The initial loop, or chapter, of each narrative branch is always the same, and the choices made by the player affect the narrative and visual design of the next loop and the princess's appearance and character, generally along the lines of eldritch or body horror. The player can once again attempt to slay or save the princess in the successive loops. Narrative branches may have two or more loops before they conclude. A narrator and other unseen, named voices comment on and attempt to influence the player's choices. The initial loop features only the narrator and the Voice of the Hero, with different voices added in subsequent loops depending on the narrative branch. Five branches can be completed in a single playthrough, with the game resetting to the initial loop in between them, but the player is restricted from repeating a narrative branch within a single playthrough.
Slay the Princess was developed by Black Tabby Games, a Canadian indie studio consisting of husband and wife Tony Howard-Arias and Abby Howard. The studio's only previous game was Scarlet Hollow, an episodic horror game released in early access beginning in 2020. Development of Slay the Princess began in May 2022. At the time, they felt that Scarlet Hollow was not financially successful enough to support the studio on its own through a projected five-year development timeline, and wanted to pursue a second game with fewer assets and shorter development timeline. The pair were first inspired by a game jam entry, Claim Your FREE BitBuddy™ Today!, which impressed Howard-Arias with how much "emotional storytelling" was put into a small game. The pair began discussing a concept of a horror story confined to a few locations and a single character on screen at a time.
A major inspiration for the concept of Slay the Princess was a scene from episode three of Scarlet Hollow with nine different characters having a complex interaction, which led to the idea of one character being multiple different characters at different times. The initial concept was of the player character being ordered to kill a seemingly innocent person who is allegedly dangerous to leave alive and changes shape to be whatever the viewer expects them to be. Howard then suggested "Save the Princess" as a name, and upon finding that "Slay the Princess" was unused as a title the name was taken as a central concept.
The couple rapidly iterated on the concept, with the game announced along with an initial demo in July 2022. In the two weeks following the announcement, the title garnered 25,000 wishlists on its Steam page. All of the artwork for the demo was made in a week. The pair worked on the game during gaps in the production of episodes of Scarlet Hollow over the next fifteen months, with full-time work beginning in February 2023. They estimate that Howard worked the equivalent of three months on the game over the time period, while Howard-Arias worked seven to nine months.
Howard's pencil drawing art style was initially chosen to save time over the more elaborate artwork of Scarlet Hollow, but was kept as they felt it fit the "dreamy, ever-shifting aesthetic" of the game. Voice acting is provided by Jonathan Sims and Nichole Goodnight. The developers wanted to add voice acting to all of the dialogue in the game as the size of the script in Scarlet Hollow had been prohibitive. Goodnight was chosen for the Princess based on a charity stream she had done in which she played Scarlet Hollow, where she voiced all the characters' lines, while Sims was chosen for the Narrator and internal voices as they were fans of his work in The Magnus Archives.
Slay the Princess was included on lists of the best games of 2023 compiled by Kotaku, Inverse, The Gamer, GameSpot, and Destructoid.