‘There’s no winning’ in Slay the Princess but Black Tabby Games taught me their favorite ways to play

We sat down with Slay the Princess developers Abby Howard and Tony Howard-Arias ahead of the game's definitive edition release

Slay the Princess / Black Tabby Games

2023 was one of the best-ever years for gaming, with ground-breaking titles like Baldur’s Gate 3 and Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. Yet among these triple-A goliaths was a black-and-white hand-drawn visual novel that was the most highly-rated game of the year. Slay the Princess is one of those games that’s better the less you know about it, as each playthrough is personal to you. Every decision you make, everything you say to the princess, changes how she acts towards you, with an overarching narrative as you meet her again and again.

We sat down with Slay the Princess developers Abby Howard, Tony Howard-Arias, and assistant Spoons the Cat, to discuss all things Slay the Princess ahead of the definitive edition release, The Pristine Cut. Of course, I had to ask the question on everyone’s lips: what is the secret sauce to their success despite releasing next to so many gaming juggernauts? After a long, thoughtful pause Tony tells me, “I'll let a little bit of hubris seep in and say it's a good game.”

Both were extremely open about their labor of love over their hour-long chat with me, revealing both why they thought their game would struggle, and why it was a huge success. “We get cursed comments and reviews on Slay the Princess,” Howard-Arias says. “Like ‘I thought I hated all visual novels but it turns out that one is maybe good actually.’” 

Slay the Princess / Black Tabby Games

“We’re not like other girls,” Howard adds. The pair believe that there are two main challenges when creating a game like Slay the Princess are that many people don’t take visual novels seriously, and in a world where thousands of games are released on Steam every month, you need to capture your audience's imagination in a sentence and a screenshot.

“The reactivity to people's choices is a huge part of [Slay the Princess’ success],” Howard-Arias says. “Of feeling like you're constantly getting feedback from the game. It's saying ‘Yes, I'm listening to you.’ In fact, we sacrifice everything else to prioritize making that feel special.” Compared to other games with dialogue choices, Slay the Princess stands out by giving players dozens of options at every juncture to express exactly how they feel. While it was developed as a smaller project than their first game, Scarlet Hollow, and filled with self-imposed limitations, the team never wanted to remove any aspect of player choice.

“I feel putting limitations on art tends to really stretch your creativity in interesting ways,” Howard-Arias says. “One of the main limitations with Slay the Princess, because I had more time than Abby had, I took a lot of the lead on this project, so we don’t slow down Scarlet Hollow too much. So we thought, how do we alleviate a lot of the art burden? Let's have it so there's one character on the screen at most, and that gave birth both to the princess and then the manifestation of the voices who can exist as characters without Abby needing to draw them.”

Scarlet Hollow / Black Tabby Games

However, it wasn’t just the characters and locations which put limitations on the game. “When we started to work on Scarlet Hollow a very conscious decision we made was ‘No minigames’,” Howard-Arias says. “Any development time that was spent on bowling or something was instead more dialogue options, or more branches to the story. People are playing a visual novel to read a book, so we're just giving them a really interesting book where they feel like they're really in it.” Over the years big-budget games have restricted dialogue options to the point where you’re never sure what your character says will be as you intended. Slay the Princess puts this decision-making at the forefront.

Naturally, I had to ask what their favorite routes through the game are. “There's a lot that's going to be in the Pristine Cut that people should see,” Howard says. “I think that's all of our favorite stuff right now. Initially, I think my favorites were the Tower and the Wraith and now it's the Fury, the Wraith, and then Tower close behind, because The Fury’s expanded roots for the Pristine Cut are so much fun. It was so much fun for me to make.” 

Howard-Arias had a completely different answer. “I often hope that someone gets like one of the Stranger or the Wild, and that moment of clarity in their playthrough just because each of those shine like an extra light on the overarching meta-narrative,” he says. “I'm a huge fan of getting the Stranger as your first route as a peek behind the curtains. It makes no sense, but it will make sense later”

Slay the Princess / Black Tabby Games

The Pristine Cut features extra chapters and routes. In the original game, routes consist of two or three chapters, and this new cut extends many routes and versions of the princess past chapter two. “There are a few princesses that didn't have their own distinct chapter three,” Howard says. “There were further versions of themselves and we couldn't come up with something before the release that felt right. Then after we had some time to understand what the game was and to breathe, it just suddenly fell into place.” 

“[The original] didn't feel like it was unsatisfying,” Howard-Arias adds. “It just felt like we rushed to finish it.”

Going into Pristine Cut, Black Tabby Games wants us to take a different approach to how we play. “There's this habit with gamers,” Howard-Arias tells me. “I'm guilty of this habit and Abby is guilty of this habit, and we really want to break people of it. Especially in a choice-driven thing, there’s that urge, that instinct to maximize everything. We've all played Dragon Age and gotten to a dialogue tree and then opened the Dragon Age Wiki in another tab and been like, ‘OK, how does this resolve and what's the optimal thing?’ What's the right choice? There has to be one.” Except in Slay the Princess, there isn’t. Every decision you make is the right one for you.

Slay the Princess / Black Tabby Games

“There are two ways to play games like this,” he explains. “You either make choices with your head or your heart. Ultimately, I feel like the choices of the heart lead to more interesting stories. That's something that we see a lot of people arrive at over the course of Slay the Princess. They start trying to engage more logically. They start with the voice of the skeptic and kind of move into a different mode of playing by the end of it. The journey of Slay the Princess is figuring out that the game isn’t just throwing you back into it because you didn't do the right thing. It's putting you back in because this is what it is.”

However, Black Tabby Games’ final tip for playing the Pristine Cut was playing with neither your head nor your heart. “Usually when you see someone land on their fifth route, they're like, ‘Oh, this makes perfect sense.’,” Howard-Arias continues. “[They think] the game must have been set up to push me here intentionally and we kind of want it to feel like that for whatever you get for your final one. We found that players were putting more gameplay into it than there actually was. I think a lot of the interesting outcomes are when you make a decision that leads to chapter two and then you do something that goes against the grain of that decision instead of leaning into it. And usually by the fifth route, that is something that people just intuitively feel like they should be doing.”