We're usually used to saving princesses, right? And then it will be automatic to have a wave of impatience when the narrator reveals our mission to us, naked and raw: "kill the princess". And don't ask questions, if possible. Except there are many questions: but why? What did the princess do? What is the nature of the threat that, apparently, could destroy our world? What then, in What world are we in? And why shouldn't I first have a nice chat with the mysterious girl I'm supposed to kill?
Kill the princess hits the mark from the title, which turns out to be an irresistible attraction for the curiosity of those who are used to seeing things in a completely different way, not only in the world of video games. Black Tabby Games' writing manages to create a delicious meta atmosphere, as seen in The Stanley Parable, and is able to drag the player into a spiral of gameplay that is difficult to escape from. Although user options are limited to selecting lines of dialogue from a short list of available options, the labyrinthine and enigmatic nature of Slay the Princess's plot makes it truly difficult to tear yourself away from the screen, even when the horror graphic designer begins. a A hard blow, with disembowelments, teeth falling from our princess's face and liters of blood staining the hand-drawn backgrounds.
Let's find out more about this groundbreaking visual horror story in our own. Review of Kill the Princess.
No questions
Exterior, night. We find ourselves in a forest and we hear a narrating voice. “Go up the hill, enter the cabin and kill the princess,” she says. There are many options at our disposal: we can choose to follow the instructions, take a dagger and kill the princess without much problem. Time to finish the game: approximately four minutes. Or we could enter an infinite spiral of questions and evasive answers from the narrator, questioning practically everything, demonstrating that we are expert debaters and that we are not, first we want to see the matter clearly, then we will talk about what to do. Time to finish the game: almost three hours.
More than "games", we should talk about "chapters": this is the name chosen by Black Tabby Games, which shows that each cycle of our adventure is, in fact, connected to those that precede it and those that follow it. Like a garland. Or maybe a chain? Entering a world masterfully designed in black and white by the team - with abundant splashes (and sprinkles) of blood, because we are still in a horror context - means accepting falling into a spiral of questions, mysteries, and then other questions and other mysteries, all so intriguing that they make the task of returning to real life complex, of raising our hands from the mouse that allows us to exercise our greatest power: that of choosing.
The deep rabbit hole
Video games like Slay the Princess can perfectly illustrate the The power of dialogue options. It leaves those who skeptically doubt the real recreational value of visual stories to the player. One hears that there is very little gameplay, while the incisiveness of the element that characterizes and distinguishes video games from other forms of art and entertainment, that is, interactivity, is often overlooked and not adequately taken into account. .
Well, the next time you find yourself in a conversation about this topic, you can introduce Slay the Princess as a shining example of visual history. While its outline is certainly traditional (dialogue, list of answers, selection of our favorite), everything is decidedly More disturbing than the sum of its parts.. Starting from this traditional genre, rooted in the dawn of video game history, Black Tabby Games masterfully unravels the warp of a plot that we will not reveal, not even in a small part, in this review. Because doing so would mean altering the player's experience, much more than what would happen on other occasions.
Even the slightest variations in the decisions made can lead to unexpected and sensational twists. The princess is at the center of everything: being enigmatic and changing, even her words are special, and are represented with a completely different source than the one that informs what the other characters say. Get ready for anything, because everything will happen in this seemingly pointless, disturbing and mysterious chimera. And then who are we? And why does the narrator want to prevent us from looking in a mirror at all costs?
White, black and red
The artistic direction of Slay the Princess focuses, on a visual level, on a style that is as simple as it is effective: backgrounds and characters seem taken from a pencil-drawn fairy tale book. Except every once in a while the designer goes crazy and dumps a bucket of blood on the drawing. Intrusions of red indicate the horror that destroys the fairy tale, because we are here to kill the princess, not to save her. In any case, the settings and characters are portrayed in a convincing and recognizable way, with a sometimes rough style and with marked personality.
It's a shame that, from a sound and dubbing point of view, Black Tabby Games hasn't always managed to live up to the rest of the parts of Slay the Princess. The quality of the dubbing varies significantly depending on the performer, and some problems in the audio mix can distance the player from the charm of this horror fiction. Slay the Princess does not have, at the moment, a translation of the texts into Spanish: we play it in English, and since the game is based entirely on reading texts and choosing dialogue options, we recommend it only to those who have a good knowledge of the language.
Conclusions
Tested version PC with Windows digital delivery Steam Price 17.49 € Holygamerz.com 9.0 Readers (24) 7.2 your voteKill the princess. Or ask a lot of questions. Or shut up. Or looking in the mirror whose existence the narrator categorically denies. Slay the Princess is close to The Stanley Parable in its ability to break the fourth wall and trigger powerful reflexes in the player, introducing them into a spiral of play from which it is very difficult to escape. And, when you do, you will surely have changed a lot. Free of traditional scares, but decidedly abundant in terms of graphic horror, Slay the Princess does not hesitate to deploy all the tools of a good writer's trade: captivating, brutal, fascinating and sometimes repulsive, but always capable of rescuing us from trouble. Black Tabby Games' writing is one of the best we have seen in the world of video games in 2023.
PRO
- A plot that drags you away with it and never lets go
- Simple but very successful graphic style.
- Always inspiring and compelling writing.
- Constant surprises
AGAINST
- Dubbing and audio mixing are not always up to par
