Slay the Princess: The Pristine Cut

About Slay the Princess: The Pristine Cut

Slay the Princess is a choice-driven psychological horror visual novel by Black Tabby Games, the studio behind Scarlet Hollow. It came out on PC in October 2023. The Pristine Cut is its expanded edition, published with Serenity Forge on October 24, 2024 and it is sold on PlayStation, Xbox and Nintendo Switch as well as PC. It adds three new chapters, longer versions of The Den, The Apotheosis and The Fury, a gallery, more than 1,200 new hand-penciled frames, more than 2,500 new voiced lines and a new ending.

The opening is simple. You are on a path in the woods. At the end of it is a cabin, and in its basement is a princess. A narrator tells you she must die, or the world will end, and that she will charm, lie and promise you the world to stop you. There is a knife for the job. What you do next, and what you believe about her, decides where the story goes.

The horror comes from not knowing who to trust and from watching your own beliefs come true. If you go down expecting a monster, you may meet one. You die, she dies, or something else happens, and the story starts again with the cabin and the princess changed by what came before. Some versions of her are calm and sad, others bloodied and cruel, and the places around her grow stranger and more grotesque.

Every background and sprite is drawn in pencil on paper by graphic novelist Abby Howard, mostly in black and white, which makes the red of blood and the moments of transformation hit harder. Every line is voiced in English, by Jonathan Sims and Nichole Goodnight, with subtitles in ten other languages.

A first ending takes about three and a half hours by HowLongToBeat's count, and seeing every route is closer to eighteen. It suits players who like horror built on dialogue, dread and choice rather than jump scares or combat. There is a lot of reading and listening, and the payoff comes from replaying to see where other beliefs lead.

How to play Slay the Princess: The Pristine Cut

1. Start a new game and listen to the narrator as you walk the path to the cabin.
2. Read each scene and choose a line of dialogue or an action from the list.
3. Decide whether to take the knife, go down to the basement and what to do with the princess.
4. When the story loops, choose differently to reach new versions of the princess and new chapters.
5. Use the gallery in The Pristine Cut to see which routes and endings you have found.

Tips

• There is no wrong way to play; dying is part of how the story moves forward.
• Answer the way you actually feel at first, then replay to test other attitudes.
• Play with sound on: the voices in your head are half the story.
• The maker warns of suicide themes and occasional flashing images; check its content warnings first if either matters to you.
• It has full controller support, you can save at any time and nothing is timed, so you can take each choice at your own pace.

Questions