Review: Slay the Princess – The Pristine Cut (Nintendo Switch)

The visual novel smash hit Slay the Princess packs an intense psychological horror journey into a game composed of simple but massively effective components. The Pristine Cut takes the much acclaimed game and adds a huge amount of new content. Many of the existing storylines have been expanded to offer new variations on your journey, alongside three entirely new plotlines to explore.

Hand-drawn, pencil-sketch style artwork establishes an ethereal, fantastical atmosphere reminiscent of fairytale illustrations from the very beginning. The voice of a disembodied narrator urges you forward on an adventure that rapidly ramps up into a philosophical cosmic puzzle.

You are introduced as a hero, tasked with killing the princess who is chained in the cabin. If you do not kill her, you are told, she will destroy the world. A conflicting voice challenges your missions. As a hero, it argues, is it not your job to save princesses, not kill them? You are then presented with a number of choices you can use to navigate assignment.

You can go right ahead, march into the cabin and murder the princess swiftly, wasting no time with moral conundra. Or, you can talk to the princess, get her side of the story, decide for yourself if killing her is the ethical thing to do. 

Whatever your decision is on your first attempt at killing the princess, you will have another chance. After you reach the end of the first chapter, the story loops around, and you find yourself back outside the cabin and faced once again with killing the princess. However, your character remembers your first attempt and demands to know what is actually happening, despite the narrator’s pleas of ignorance.

This gives Slay the Princess – The Pristine Cut an interesting meta-narrative that goes beyond the initial moral question into a more philosophical space, which builds on the classic folkloric imagery of the first chapter. With each reincarnation, your options shift. You can’t take the same steps twice. The visuals also change—everything looks different, almost as if you’re taking the journey in a different but uncannily similar reality to the one in which you first began.

Slay the Princess – The Pristine Cut has a total of nine possible endings and various paths you can take to end up at each one. The art style evokes an atmosphere through its simplicity, complemented by stunning original music that draws you into the claustrophobia of the cabin where the majority of the game takes place. The character design lends itself well to the subversion of fantasy tropes, with wonderful voice acting that brings not only each character but every voice inside your hero’s head to life. Despite the cartoon-like style, some of the visuals are expertly crafted to be enormously disturbing.

While Slay the Princess – The Pristine Cut is not a particularly long or complex game, it utilises everything in its arsenal incredibly well. It is packed with finely designed details which build into a wonderfully compelling game that makes excellent use of its tortuous pathways to make you feel as if your choices make a genuine impact.