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Como + Mortis' Slay The Princess Ramble(s)
#1
welcome to the first of many ramble threads to come. today us and como discuss the newly released horror visual novel, Slay The Princess. we've done one playthrough of it and plan on 100%ing it eventually, but for now, here's our (very disorganized and rambly) thoughts!

CWs for the game can be found on the official website here.

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[image description: roughly sketched concept art for the game "slay the princess". a bird man with a knife is approaching a princess, and the princess is shooting some kind of red laser goop out of her eyes at him. there's an arrow pointing to the princess labeled "nightmare".]
 


COMORANT: So
Stab the Prinzessin

MORTIS: we played slay the princess! and wanted to do a review about it

COMORANT: I feel like she stabbed us more we stabbed her

MORTIS: she definitely did and pretty much all of it was our fault to some extent

COMORANT: Like not even killed just stabbed in general
Okay I blame the voices

MORTIS: we will get to the voices, that's a big thing i want to talk about here
do we want to do spoiler free impressions first or just dive right in

COMORANT: Lets spoil shit at the end
So
Yeah this is absolutely a straightforward concept taken to a very surreal and existential extreme that toys with the nature of a lot of visual novels
The soundtrack is perfect for the story it wants to tell
the artwork is lovely, the sketchy look switches things up enough constantly to keep things fresh and intereesting despite what is effectively a game with three fucking rooms

MORTIS: the amount of voiced lines in this game is fucking insane, and they get a ton of mileage out of just having two (very good) voice actors

COMORANT: I was about to say, this whole game is really something that takes a small scope and pushes it as hard as humanly possible
gets right into the meat of things pretty quickly too

MORTIS: yeah, it didn't feel like it was wasting our time at all, even with our first run through being the simplest possible route (on purpose and our choice, more on that later)
we were still given TONS of interesting stuff to chew on
it was definitely an experience that made us go "whoa!" a lot. which i appreciate

COMORANT: Mmhmm. I think honestly it's a very good entry point to someone who might be interested in visual novels as well
Lots of accessibility settings, a simpler premise expanded to very interesting extremes, a strong touch of exploration of its own format, and the mix of horror and dark comedy that are inherit to its premise are used very well.
which like, it is a visual novel, like a actual one albeit designed to encourage a lot of exploration for those who are not familiar with them

MORTIS: i think that people who like a lot of meaty dialogue trees will get along well with this game, especially if they're cool with very VERY heavy gore and horror themes. there's a lot of stuff in this that is really brutal but i feel like there's a niche for like. really scary and brutal VNs, it's kind of a cornerstone of the genre
but honestly i feel like, while i haven't played too many of them myself and am mainly just familiar secondhand, this one is definitely trying to avoid being sort of...guro-esque? does that make sense
aside from the last scene we got that one was just kind of fucked up. we'll get to that

COMORANT: I think a big daunting thing for those who haven't played them is the nature of feeling like having this amount of complexity in branching path like
makes you intimidated by the possibility of making bad calls
and I think the game right away going "You will not see everything in one go, there are no wrong answers" and the nature of its story let you experiment at first comfortably until you are fed enough to want to be very careful and deliberate

MORTIS: oh yeah this game completely circumvents that by the nature of how it works and encourages you to do whatever the fuck because no matter what it's going to give you something interesting, scary, and potentially thought provoking
the character of the princess is a fascinating one and we're having a lot of thoughts on her. but no matter which angle you approach a run from, you're going to see some new stuff- especially made better by the fact that the game will just outright prevent you from retreading something that would be the exact same, which is AWESOME
that is honestly one of our biggest gripes with games with branching dialogue trees, having to retread to get to tiny slivers of new content. something that we noticed with our playthrough is they do give you the option to skip stuff youve already done, i think? or at the very least fast forward through it- but honestly we were so immersed in the voice acting and atmosphere that we never really felt a need to do it

COMORANT: You can just rapidly go through a lot of the repeated dialouge
there were a ton of options including to just skip to the dialogue cchoices
Shall we dip into mild spoilers before we go into the heavy stuff  or do we have anything we want to cover before talking story specifics

MORTIS: uhhh warning for suicide, gore and self harm for sure. those are the three biggest content warnings i have for the game as well as some very selective stuff that would mainly apply to plural people with rough internal experiences, which i will put in a spoiler here (it's story relevant and we WILL be talking about it in depth)

Show ContentSpoiler:

ok yeah im good

Show ContentSPOILERS AHEAD:
MORTIS: so...yeah. that's our initial impressions of slay the princess. super scattered, but it's...really good. it can definitely veer into shock territory though, so please watch out if your brain doesn't agree with seeing really scary shit without any fucking warning lmao
BUT
there is a CW list on the slay the princess website, which i will have linked earlier in the post with any luck

COMORANT: Absolutely recommend it if this catches your attention at all and you can take rougher content.
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Como + Mortis' Slay The Princess Ramble(s) - by skinstealer - 11-24-2023, 09:16 AM

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