PAX: Slay the Princess is a twisting, creepy, captivating moral dilemma

destructoid.com:

Throughout a show like PAX East 2023, you’ll usually hear some variation of the “seen anything good” small-talk around the show floor. It’s a casual fallback, and sometimes you hear about something you’ve missed. Yet there was one phrase, around one game, that really dominated this year: “Have you seen Slay the Princess yet?”

I went into the show already familiar with Black Tabby Games’ unique adventure game, as its trailer caught my eye a while back and its demo impressed in a recent Steam Next Fest. The premise is simple: you’re on a path, to a cabin in the woods, and inside there’s a princess. The Narrator, guiding your way, asserts that you must slay the princess. If you don’t, the world will come to an end.

What starts as an intriguing premise becomes a delicate dance of posturing and reasoning. Who is trustworthy, and who is truly dangerous? Though the Narrator may not be the most conscionable person, the princess is no damsel in distress either.

For PAX East 2023, Black Tabby Games prepared a new demo, promising new lines, scenes, and four new “Princesses” to discover. If you’re intrigued at all by this premise, I highly suggest you take a break, go play the Steam demo, and come back. It’s worth the surprise. But taking some time to talk with Tony Howard-Arias and Abby Howard, the duo behind Black Tabby, I was curious to see both how Slay the Princess has evolved, and how it began.

“So it was kind of a mechanical thing, actually, because we wanted to see if we could do a game that had much more limited assets than our other game, Scarlet Hollow, which is super labor intensive,” Abby said. “So this was a very minimal project.”

Scarlet Hollow, Black Tabby’s other title, is an episodic and long-in-development horror