Slay the Princess

Slay the Princess is a narrative experience like no other. The game sharply reacts to your actions, questions, and even thoughts. It will draw you in for hours as you read dialogues and attempt to piece together who lies and who tells the truth. You will find it quite difficult to put the game down once you've started. Everything in Slay the Princess is tied to how YOU see the game, and everyone will understand it in their own way.

Slay the Princess is my first visual novel in my roughly thirty-five years as a gamer and I enjoyed every minute of it. With so many dialogue options to choose from, no two runs of the story are the same, and even when you get to the story’s finale there are still a few different ways it can ultimately end. The voice acting and soundtrack ties everything together beautifully and for someone who never got into visual novels, I can’t recommend this one enough. If you’re looking for a psychological horror story with quite a bit of comedic dialogue thrown in, then definitely prepare to Slay the Princess…that kind of came out weird.

Mostly lives up to the promises and hype built around the game. An all at once engaging, intriguing, funny, satisfying, and deep experience.

It was one of the best games of 2023, and the new update has made it even better. It’s a game that everyone needs to play for themselves as each journey is unique, even though you will likely want to dive in for another unique journey straight afterwards.

Canadian indie studio Black Tabby Games has already proven with Scarlet Hollow that it can tell very sophisticated, gripping horror stories with memorable characters. With Slay the Princess, Black Tabby Games has now surpassed itself: With every decision you make, the game draws you deeper into its plot loops and narrative levels.

Slay the Princess is an entertainingly dark and subversive visual novel with hidden depths that makes for a great few hours. For developer Black Tabby Games’ second title, it’s a very encouraging success indeed, and proves that its horror-telling chops in Scarlet Hollow wasn’t just a fluke. I will be keenly looking forward to its next title.

Slay the Princess is a straightforward choice-driven visual novel that slowly breaks at the seams revealing a rabbit hole of possibilities that prey on player anxieties and paranoia.

This game is the best example I can give of "art comforts the distubed and disturbs the comfortable". I was in the latter category. The more I played this game, the more it filled my heart with sadness. A beautiful kind of sadness. It's very rare for a piece of media to impact me in such a way, but this game achieves that and more. One of the most impactful experiences I've ever had. Whatever you think this game is by looking at the trailers, it's definetly not that. I can't tell you what it actually is, because a part of what makes this game such a great experience is peeling back the layers and trying to make sense of what the identity of this game is as you're playing it.

Funny thing! Nothing really deep there, no hidden message, but funny dialogues and scary princessess

[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]

I don't 'get it'. I've played for 100 mins, and it just feels like moving through treacle. I understand what it's doing, I just don't gel with it. I find it really boring and, frankly, disappointing in terms of cost vs. return. I wish I understood what everyone else sees in it (genuinely), but despite trying and despite loving story-driven decision-making games, I find it tedious. Play Dispatch. I'm only leaving this review just in case it helps someone like me think it over and dig a little deeper before purchase.

Yeah, I didn't find the game that intriguing. It was overly convoluted and really unclear on the direction. Another aspect was that it wasn't what I was expecting, both in terms of quality, given the very positive reviews its gotten on Metacritic, but also in terms of composition. There wasn't a clear narrative thread that I enjoy in choice based games, and the stakes didn't seem understandable. It's even a bit difficult to write a review because the game was intentionally confusing, but as simply put, I think that STP would have benefitted greatly from some exposition.