With the recent release of its director’s cut, there’smore to explore inSlay the Princessthan ever before.Slay the Princess: The Pristine Cutadds new chapters, expands on existing chapters, and leads to new endings as various routes through the game get facelifts to bring the game more in line with what developers at Black Tabby had in mind.
Game Rant spoke with Black Tabby ahead of the release ofThe Pristine Cut, where co-creators Tony Howard-Arias and Abby Howard talked about the new cut of the game and what the core message ofSlay the Princessis.
“Please Slay the Princess”
Abby has commented in the past about how watching people playSlay the Princessis a very different experience than developing it. As developers, Black Tabby has a view of the game in its totality–players don’t. That makes each playthrough fascinating for Tony and Abby, as they watch gamers navigate the experience with imperfect information. That said, the imperfect information players approach the game with sometimes leads players to think of the game as something it isn’t.
This isn’t a bad thing, of course, as there isn’t really a wrong way to playSlay the Princess. Thegame is built as a mystery, and one a player can unravel no matter how they initially approach their adventure. The biggest way Abby says players come into the game with expectations that don’t quite match the game they’re playing is their treatment of the game’s central premise: thatthe narrator can be trustedand the player must slay the princess. While that can be a fulfilling approach, Abby is concerned that players approachingSlay the Princesswithout critically considering whether slaying the princess is a good idea miss a lot of what the game has to offer. As Abby explained,
Some people go in with expectations that the game is immediately trying to tell you to do that without question, whereas we do want it to be something where you see that and you’re like, “Well, I don’t want to slay a princess.” Like the title alone is something where you’re supposed to reject it immediately because it’s a ridiculous proposition of just murdering someone you’ve never met before. They approach it as a puzzle that they need to solve, and therefore, they jump to conclusions really quickly about what they’re interacting with and what their goal should be, versus wanting to explore it as just a player who’s emotionally invested in a story.
That said, Abby explained that it takes a few runs through the game’s routes to realize that it isn’t apuzzle that needs solving, but an experience that needs exploring. There is no perfect plan for the most desirable solution toSlay the Princess,so there is no plan that gets a player on that path. Instead, the game is about action and reaction. It’s a consequence, explained Tony, of the difference between the developer’s perfect information and the player’s imperfect information. But that’s also where a lot of the fun comes for the developers: seeing how the personalized slice of the game’s pie compares to the whole experience as they see it. Players, he explained, experience a fraction of a fraction of the total permutations of all the routes in the game.
This is an experience The Pristine Cut was designed to heighten, he said. One of the goals of the new version of the game is to lead players to some of the more metaphysical routesSlay the Princesshas to offer. The Pristine Cut intentionally guides players toward these at a particular pace; this is a means to try and combat the issues players have had trying to solve a puzzle that doesn’t exist, with Tony further adding,
I’m hoping The Pristine Cut is structured in such a way where you always get at least one of those on a playthrough, and ideally, you get one at the very end. Oftentimes you’ll see people who, by the end of it, understand the rules of the game and how it works, and they get it. And then for some people, just because there are so many possible permutations and there are so many ways to engage with it, it’s like a key piece of information is lost. They reach the climax not understanding that there is a logic and methodology to how everything connects and works.
Learning that there’s a logic to the game, but that its mystery isn’t a puzzle box is one of the things the developers want players to learn fromSlay the Princess. That isn’t the only thing that Black Tabby wants players to take away from the experience.
A Princess Contains Multitudes
Princesses,like ogres and onions, have layers. One of the more fascinating traits ofSlay the Princessis how responsive the titular princess is to player choice. For example, she reacts differently if approached with, or without, a knife. That’s a microcosm of the way the player and princess interact, and that was one of the core choices made for the game. It was one of the first things the developers at Black Tabby decided about the game when they took time away from their episodic storyScarlet Hollow:the princess’ story is about perspectives and how they unveil the differences in a person. That’s as true for real people as it is for finely crafted NPCs.
It isn’t uncommon forchoice and consequence gamesto explore the way player choice reflects the surrounding environment.Slay the Princesstakes that to a personal level–choice doesn’t just affect the world, it affects her. It also affects the players in their daily lives, Tony explained:
Not only do other people contain multitudes, not only is it that other people are constantly changing versus static beings, but that’s you, too. A thing that I like to talk about in the context ofSlay the Princessis the way that, if you haven’t seen people from high school in a long time and you see them again, you may often find yourself reverting back a little bit to who you were then. This is the identity that was given to you. I feel a key takeaway is you can do that if you want, but also, you know you don’t have to be stuck as this person in this context forever. You are able to shape yourself if you just have the will to do it.
Abby went on to explain those multitudes are something that can be hard to understand in others. In reality, there’s no way to explore how different approaches to a situation affect a person. People can be totally different to different audiences, and that is something the princess illustrates. More than the game’sexistentialism and metaphysical exploration, more than the narrative itself, Abby hopes players understand that incalculable tiny variables determine the version of someone a player encounters in the real world. That was core to the story even before the princess was a princess at all.
The original idea for the princess was a creature that you were sent to kill and are not told anything about, specifically because perception is something that changes what they are. A character where, if you’re told this character is this powerful thing, it’s so scary. You’d better not go in with expectations that they’re going to do anything to you, to stop you because then they will, because they’re based on what you think of them.
And that was how the game’s core message was forged, and what it means to Black Tabby when they ask players toSlay the Princess.
