Slay the Princess

• Genre: Visual Novel
• Time Played: 3.6 Hours
• Too Short/Long: It's fine for what it is, I personally would have thought it would have been fine to make you go through/find all possible routes before completing the game.
• Pleased/Disappointed: Pleased enough, it was fun, and I had Alice play on the TV so I could watch her do a full playthrough too.
• Why I played: It just kept coming up in various peoples "end of the year" posts and such. I saw Slay the Princess from no less than 5 different sources in the past few days and I'm not sure if it was fomo or genuine interest, but it was enough to make me buy it. Plus I knew if I didn't like it, at least Alice would.
• Recommend to others: I would, if it seems like it's something that would interest you. Which is a pretty wishy-washy recommendation, but it's hard to recommend a visual novel as a must play. Especially one that's kinda weird, kinda violent, and just specifically what it is. It's not for everyone, but some people may really enjoy it.

I don't really have much to say about Slay the Princess that can't be summed up by a previous category. I guess to expand on the Too Short/Long, I could say, me personally, playing games the way I do - I wouldn't have minded an option to see more of the routes/options/dialog in a single playthrough. It does have multiple endings which provides incentive to play through multiple times, and from what I can see, you can do stuff differently enough to (almost, because some stuff you will see multiple times even in one playthough) not see the same situation twice. At least within two playthroughs, three might be pushing it. That said there is a good amount of content and variation for your choices.

Some visual novels border on "kinetic novels" which are really just digital comics, rather than a game, but this offers so many dialog choices and branching paths, it's definitely more of a choose your own adventure and makes it feel more like a "game" than many visual novels do. Which I do appreciate. I think some of the dialog and story was meant to be thought provoking in a way that makes it seem a little try hard, but if you can appreciate it on the surface level, I think that's fine, and maybe better.