SLAY THE PRINCESS

If PAX East had a trophy for the most compelling narrative, Slay the Princess would take the cake. As a visual novel with full voice acting, a Narrator describes your every move, along with the fellow voice(s) of reason in your head. Oh, yes, and the princess too. This game wastes no time in giving you the objective- you are in the woods, there’s a cabin up the trail. In the cabin, there is a princess, and you must slay her to prevent the end of the world. This game is set up replayability with all its twists, turns, and different paths the player can take. Slay the Princess is a choice-driven psychological horror visual novel and dating simulator made with unique hand-drawn art.

The gameplay is that of a choice based game (similar to The Stanley Parable that our writers loved), featuring light RPG elements and expansive options. The choices in this game are near endless. Actions as simple as picking up an item can alter how the world interacts with you, conversations can change the story’s whole course of action, and we are sure there will be even more unexpected plot twists in the full version. We highly recommend this game to anyone that likes choice based, psychological horror with a great narrative and dialogue. 

Slay the princess is being developed and published by Black Tabby Games. The release date is slated to be in Q2/Q3 2023 on PC (Steam), Mac, and Linux. A playable demo is available on Steam and has been recently updated.

Sam: So I just played the demo for Slay the Princess. Tell me a little bit about the background of the game. 

Abby: Yeah, so it started as an experiment in how do we make a game that is less labor intensive than our other game, Scarlet Hollow. So it was like kind of a game jam style game where we have one location, one character, and like, it's more about kind of the choices you make than it is about the environments you explore. So it's a very choice-driven game that varies wildly on each playthrough.

Tony: Yes. Yeah, and like the initial idea was kind of what if you're an investigator, and you were put in a room and told to kill someone with very little information. And the reason you're given very little information is because the person in the room changes based on what other people believe them to be. We have an unreliable narrator situation. And there's a princess who is definitely just a princess but as you talk to her more and as thoughts come in and out of your head, how she is changes.

Abby: Yes, it comes down to say, if you take the knife or you don't take the knife on your first meeting with her, she is wildly different. We use entirely different voice lines and entirely different script. Just because if you bring a knife down, the relationship between the two of you is different. It's already on edge. So it's again, very much about how relationships can be changed by just a few interactions.

Sam: As I was playing the demo, I did bring the knife. She was hostile towards me when I had the knife. (laughs)

Abby: (laughs) Yeah, you can get a very nice princess if you just don't bring the knife. And then she's like, “I'm just a sweet lady, and we could be friends.”

Tony: And then she still gnaws her arm off, which is very unsettling.

Abby: (laughs) She can still make her own choices after all.

Sam: (laughs) That’s how she got out? Okay…(laughs)

Abby: (laughs) Yeah, that's how she got out; she bites her arm off. You can see that we have sprites of her gnawing through her arm. Oh, yeah. And I love the end that you got, nightmare is a really fun one.

Sam:  I like the multiverses of it — where it's not just oh, like I said, I'm just walking in, I'm gonna have my dialogue tree. Alright, and when I lose, I go home. This is more complicated than that. The hero doesn't want to do it. The narrator, like you said, is just not trustworthy, honestly. 

Tony: Right.

Sam: The princess is also not really that trustworthy, honestly. Where you're just, you don't have all the information, especially for the first time playing. 

Tony: Exactly.

Sam: And then to have (I guess, spoiler alert) the reset happen where you're like, “how did I get back here?” Is the narrator telling it true that I'm special or is that just a convenient thought or convenient talking to someone about it? Oh, man. All right, and I do have a few more questions here: how long has this game been in development so far? 

Abby: Let's see. Last year, it took us maybe about a month to do it all. 

Tony: The first demo.

Abby: Yeah, the first demo that we released last Summer. It took me about a week to do all of the art for it. (laughs)

Tony: Yeah. We started it in early July and released the first demo to our like patrons at the end of July and then released it to everyone else on the first of August.

Abby: Yup, and then we did work on our other video game while kind of tooling around with what else we could do with Slay the Princess before we were done with episode Four of Scarlet Hollow which was released earlier this year. And then we got back to work on this and released the demo too, which is what this is, And it's like just kind of more expanded. Based on how people play. 

Tony: It’s the non-game jam version of the first. Yeah.

Abby: It's a little bit more polished.

Tony: Yeah, there's more princesses that have changes on the second playthrough each time. 

Abby: Now it leads more into what's gonna happen after the demo. So and that is gonna take us probably until the end of the Summer, or early Fall to finish the full game, and that's it. And then it’s out.

Sam: You guys mentioned, like, on demo one and demo two, if you guys could go back to do something different, would there be anything? 

Abby: No. It was so successful. (laughs)

Tony: Demo two. (laughs)

Abby: (laughs) Oh yeah, okay.

Tony: Just have that right out of the gate. 

Abby: And that was such a good reception the first time. I'm like, I don't want to mess with it.

Tony: Yeah, No. I mean, like, we got 25,000 wishlists in the first two weeks. So yeah, it's hard to have any regrets about how that went. And now like, this is what you just played is the version of the demo that like is most in line with the vision we have for the full game but, you know, releasing that now we got a whole new beat. Where are we have to take the new demo to PAX, and we're going to share that with everyone. So we're very happy about how all of it has gone.

Abby: Yeah.

Sam: And you said, by the end of this year, I guess? 

Tony: Yeah, later this year.

Abby: Yup.

Sam: Okay. All right, thank you so much.

Abby: Yeah!

Tony: Thank you so much for playing!