Slay the Princess is a weird horror game that gets better the more questions you ask

polygon.com:

Slay the Princess begins with a simple scenario: There is a princess chained to a wall in the basement of an isolated cabin. You need to murder her (hence the name of the game) or the world will end.

You probably have a lot of questions. Why is the princess linked to the end of the world? Is murdering her really necessary? Why is she even in a cabin? Slay the Princess is happy to indulge the player in every line of inquiry, and it leads down a fascinating rabbit hole. It’s a fantastic, weird little visual novel, and it’s a perfect Halloween treat to savor.

Slay the Princess doesn’t extend beyond the traditional visual novel structure of dialogue, responses, and selecting a choice. Its story invokes both fairy tales and eldritch horror, and the scenes are depicted by wonderful hand-drawn portrayals of the Princess and her surroundings.

The protagonist is also accompanied by a narrator — one who fills the archetype of a standard, stuffy, sharply accented intellectual. The player can (and should) question the narrator’s actions, as the narrator is the one pushing them toward the cabin to slay the princess. You can technically beat the game in about three minutes by following the narrator’s directions to a T, but things get really interesting when you decide to blaze your own trail.

A particularly rebellious playthrough of Slay the Princess takes about three or four hours, but after my first non-joke playthrough, I only earned about 20% of the Steam achievements. Do you bring a knife into the basement with you to meet the princess? Do you try to lower her guard by convincing her you’re there on innocent business? Do you try to save her, or delay her execution? When her corpse is at your feet, do you check her pulse?

Variat