Slay the Princess – The Pristine Cut is a visual novel in the style of something called The Stanley Parable. I have not played The Stanley Parable, but I have it downloading since it is on sale as of the writing. The point is to make choices, usually a binary a or b, but sometimes more. There are no wrong choices, as no what matter you do, you are led towards a foregone conclusion. You are a hero, and your job is a slay a princess chained up in a cabin basement. If you try to slay the princess, like I did, you will fail, and then die. Then Chapter II will start and the cabin will be completely different. You will end up dying again and end up at the beginning of chapter I to repeat. But things will be different this time around…
Slay the Princess is straight Cosmic Horror, there’s even a trigger warning at the start. HP Lovecraft is a direct influence here. The game gets weirder and weirder as time goes on as you repeat trying to slay the princess. Even the narrator become unreliable. The Stanley Parable was a game made for critics to slobber over. Time will tell if I slobber over that game, but I’m not slobbering here. I love cosmic horror, but I was left with a giant sense of “meh” at the end. No emotional reaction whatsoever. Maybe I’m too jaded. Maybe I’m too hard to scare. It could be that Slay the Princess revealed too much at the end, or relied too much on metaphysical mumbo-jumbo at times to be scary.
I won’t knock Slay the Princess too hard. The voice work is great. The art is well done. I just couldn’t muster up any reason to care. The only reason I sat through it is because its not that long. Two to three hours. Although the game is replayable because you can make completely different choices and see you how things play out differently. So how to score it? The verdict will be a Your Mileage May Vary, but the back end score will be an eight. Slay the Princess is a decent game, it just doesn’t bring the scary enough for me to truly recommend it.
Overall: Slay the Princess The Pristine Cut is an interesting cosmic horror visual novel. Unfortunately, I just did not find it scary at all.
Verdict: YMMV
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P.S. What to recommend here? Terminal 81? I hated it but I’m being attacked by fanboys so maybe I’ll revisit it.
Game received for free from the publisher!
