Nightmare Fuel / Slay the Princess

Heart. Lungs. Liver. Nerves. Heart. Lungs. Liver. Nerves.

Remember, this is a horror game.

This page contains unmarked spoilers for the full release of the game! Beware!

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In General

• The nightmares start on the title screen. If you take too long to start the game, the Princess goes from sitting sadly against the wall of her cell to staring directly into the camera, shattered into two pieces—one half is quietly horrified, while the other is gleeful.
  • This shot is used in the first trailer for the game, and the Princess' warning when it happens drives in that slaying her is going to be far from easy.
    Princess: (Nervous smile) You're not actually going to try and slay me or anything, right?
    (Static obscures the screen for a second but clears to show the Princess giving an unnerving stare)
    Princess: Because I wouldn't if I were you...
    (The image cracks, showing the two princesses described above)
    Princess: If you try...I'll kill you.
    (The image breaks again, sowing more forms of the princess, with eyes and feathers peeking through the gaps in the image)
    Princess: As many times as it takes.
• In Chapter One, venturing into the basement with the blade results in a coolly aloof Princess who doesn't hesitate to threaten you if you don't immediately disarm. Going in without a blade and you meet a friendlier, more hesitant Princess with pleading eyes - but if you consider leaving to fetch the knife or lock her away, she switches modes immediately. Either can then become the proto-Beast or the proto-Nightmare.
• To say the forms the Princess can take depending on the paths you choose range from creepy to downright Body Horror would be an understatement. It's to the point that she can very much become a downright Eldritch Abomination in the most extreme circumstances. And even if you somehow manage to get the upper hand in a direct encounter, her body always seems to adapt to exactly how it's treated, and not even her death can truly save you in the wrong circumstances. And to top it all off, you make her that way through your choices.
• The many ways the Player can die or are injured are terrifying.
  • Being stabbed to death or his neck snapped by a knee, are some of the more tame deaths the Player can suffer.
  • He can at one point be turned inside out in lovely detail!
• Cutting off the Princess' hand, whether you do it yourself or she chews it off, is rather graphic for an otherwise (up to that point) non-gory game. She doesn't even react to it. Eugh.
• Every time you reach the end of a route, the Princess always gets taken away by the cluster of the Shifting Mound's arms. Seeing it for the first time can be an unsettling experience, especially when the chapter ended with you and the Princess leaving on peaceful terms. And it is always heralded with the shadows beginning to loom all over the background, erasing the surroundings, as the Princess herself begins to feel cold before the arms take her away.
  The Damsel: I'm cold. Is being happy supposed to be cold?
• Each variation of the Princess has a twisted form of love or attraction towards the Player and this can manifest in horrifying ways depending on route.
  • The Beast/Den wanting to eat him alive.
  • The Adversary/Eye of the Needle wanting to fight him in a masochistic death match.
  • The Razor despite liking him wants to kill the Player repeatedly.
  • The Nightmare enjoys seeing the Player struggling to survive near her, and the Moment of Clarity essentially torments him into being a docile husk that can no longer resist her advances.
  • The Tower/Apotheosis wants the Player to submit to her as a slave.
  • The Witch believes that she and the Player are caught in an endless game of betrayal and underhanded tactics. Believing you feel the same way; she wants to be the one to win.
  • The Fury wants to torture the player indefinitely so that he feels her pain.
• When you finally get to see the Player's reflection in the mirror, you find him to be an avian-like monster with beady white eyes. What's worse is that each time you get to the Long Quiet you can see his reflection go through its own life cycle. Growing bloated after the first encounter, the next withering into rotting flesh, then decaying outright into a skeletal form, until you're finally nothing at all.
• Much of the dark and outright extremely violent sexual overtones many of the routes can contain are a mockery of normal intimate relations.

The Shifting Mound

• Meeting her for the first time can be an unsettling experience. She is wearing the body of the last vessel you encountered and possessing a multitude of hands (her empathy will make the experience go more smoothly).
• Her final awakened form (after 5 vessels have been collected) is much more unsettling. She has at least 3 main faces, and a multitude of her smaller bodies and projections sprawled at her feet. Most of the latter are naked, which can be quite confronting in a game that up to this point has been devoid of nudity.
• If you instead repeatedly refuse to bring her a vessel, she'll get increasingly upset. At one point, she'll repeatedly tell you she hates you before her many disembodied hands forcibly drag you into the next world. If you persist with this, you'll both eventually be trapped in the void and fade from existence.
  • The Shifting Mound is eerie and inhuman seen this way, communicating through her many disembodied hands (which in the narration are called feelers, not hands) grasping at the Long Quiet's consciousness. The first time that the Long Quiet refuses, she takes it as a mistake. The second time is the only point in which she's ever angry with him. After that, she makes desperate pleas for him to change his mind, and the next time asks "Why?", but there are no options to respond. Past the point of no return, the feelers pull his shape into something formless and ensnared, and the two gods linger, the two final statements repeating endlessly, until they fade away.
  'You have made a decision. It is the wrong one. I love you.'
  You are bliss. Joy and understanding everywhere at once. Your soul threatens to fade away. 'I love you.'
  You are agony. A numbing arm. A parched throat. An open wound. Your soul forced back into existence. 'I love you.'
  You are bliss. Joy and understanding everywhere at once. Your soul threatens to fade away. 'I love you.'
  • Across a broken mirror, the Narrator can tell the Long Quiet about what the world will be like if the Shifting Mound is dead and the Long Quiet himself remains alive and trapped as the Narrator wants - stasis will reign, there will be no fear or loss, people will live forever with their loved ones, gently forgetting things over time and joyfully rediscovering them, which he sees as a good existence. But if both gods die... well, no one breaches the possibility, but Fridge Horror kicks in.

Adversary Route

• This route has some of the most graphic illustrations of physical violence in the entire game. This includes the Adversary twisting the Player's arm to the point she appears to be tearing it off and the Player straight-up cutting her face off with the Pristine Blade.
  • You'll also see the Player disembowel her and the Adversary stomp on his face for good measure.
• The worst part is that since neither the Player nor the Adversary can die, the Shifting Mound could have left them fighting for days, weeks, months, or even years before she finally interrupted their battle to claim her vessel.
• If the Player decides to fight the Adversary unarmed, she'll be utterly horrified that the Player continues to get back up despite receiving wounds that should leave you a corpse.
  • Want an example? How about your brain matter splattering across the wall from the busted up hole in your skull, which leaves you missing a rather large portion of your face.
• There is such a heavy aura of Interplay of Sex and Violence that the whole fight comes across as one big Freudian allusion to a very violently charged, machoistic, sadomasochistic, multi-round sexual encounter between the two combatants. The sheer single-minded eagerness from both the Adversary and the Voice of the Stubborn can make it genuinely unnerving to see play out.
  • To say nothing of which reaches its climax in the highly graphic illustration collage.
  • What makes the above so disturbing is how genuinely satisfied the Adversary looks during said illustration collage.

Beast Route

• While several of the Princess’ more monstrous forms retain her human form and can be considered Creepy Cute, that is absolutely not the case for the Beast Princess. Here, she’s been reincarnated as a literal animal, and unlike the Cat Girl the Witch becomes, the Beast is a monstrous cat-like creature driven by an animalistic instinct to eat you alive, barely visible behind the shadows and vegetation of the basement. She gets even more monstrous in the following Den Route, where she not only becomes more of an Animalistic Abomination, but loses her ability to speak as well!
• That awful shrieking noise the Princess makes when she attacks you is spine-chilling. It can count as a Jump Scare too, for the unsuspecting.
• Any time you can see this Princess' face, it'll usually be a Nightmare Face, especially when she unhinges her jaw to eat you. Made worse in that otherwise she's otherwise almost invisible, with only flashes of movement or vague shapes in the darkness to say where she is.
• You can get Swallowed Whole by the Princess and the process of digestion is described in graphic detail. You are slowly suffocating and dissolving in her stomach acid, your body melting down in layers. You even get a view of her stomach lining.
• Choosing to fight the Princess results in you getting Gutted Like a Fish with your spine snapped. You bleed out in a pool of your own viscera, with your entrails hanging out of the Princess' mouth like noodles.

Damsel Route

• Even the Damsel route, which is arguably the most lighthearted route in the game, has its own moments of creepiness. She seemingly has minimal agency of her own, besides her desire to please you.
  • This gets to the point where she'll seek to tell you what she thinks you want to hear, no matter how insane it might sound. If you tell her that you hope that everyone suffered slowly in the previous world as they died, she'll claim that she made sure of that on ending the world.
  • After you rescue the Damsel and she asks you what do you want to do now, you can ask her what she wants. When she responds that she doesn't know, since nobody asked her that question before, you're given an option to press her further regarding what does she want. However, after that, with each response, she only answers with "I just want to make you happy" or a variation thereof as her art style begins to degrade to a more exaggeratedly simplistic one, the music becomes eerily distorted, and the background itself becomes more and more enveloped in shadows. The degradation continues further and further until the Damsel herself becomes nothing more than a crude drawing version of herself, devoid of all personality and sense of self except for a simple-minded desire to make you happy, and it is in that state when she gets taken away by the Shifting Mound. It can easily be seen as funny just as it can also be seen as creepy. Or both.
  • The lack of agency, gets creepier when you ask the Shifting Mound about her:
  The Shifting Mound: ...Do not mourn her, she has served her purpose.
• If for some reason, you decide to murder The Damsel:
  • She won't fight back, just tearily smile at you asking what she did wrong, as she dies. Even as she's smiling, the Narrator notes the abject terror in her eyes.
  • The Voice of the Smitten will be so distraught that he'll hijack control of your body and kill you with the same knife.
  • Horrifying retribution awaits you in the Burning Grey route.

Fury Route

• If you kill the Tower or leave the Adversary unsatisfied without escaping, it will lead to a third chapter: "The Fury". The path to the cabin and the cabin itself are full of grotesque fleshy growths. The Princess herself is malformed, heart clearly visible in her chest and what appears to be the puffed fabric sleeves of her dress are actually bunched up rolls of her skin.
• When she sees you, the Fury gruesomely degloves her entire forearm to escape.
• To punish you for your actions in the previous route, the Fury turns you inside-out, with your blood, torn feathers, and organs visible on screen. And she would have done this to you forever had the Shifting Mound not interfered.

Grey Routes

• This route is two-pronged: either fire or water.
  • Murder the Damsel, and you'll find yourself in a dry, twisting desert landscape that leads you to a cabin in which there dwells a shade in a white wedding dress. As soon as you're in the basement, she locks the door behind you both and tosses down a torch, setting the cabin alight. You get to watch the flesh slough from your own bones however you try to escape. As for the Princess, she never stops smiling, even as her face burns away, her muscles and fat are exposed and her eyes melt down her face like tears.
  • Murder the Prisoner/Leave the prisoner's head behind, and you'll encounter a very similar landscape. Except it's raining. Constantly. In this route you'll find a rotted, waterlogged cabin in which there dwells a shade in a black mourning dress. When she locks you both down in the basement, a wave of water rushes in, threatening to drown you. You kick and struggle to keep your head above water, but you soon realize it's futile; because the Princess' drowned, swollen, still-enchained body wraps a hand around your ankle and drags you down with her.

Nightmare Route

• You begin on this route by choosing to leave the Princess imprisoned in the basement, which enrages her. The Hero barricades the door, only for the Princess to eventually break free, moving in unnatural ways while sporting a Nightmare Face and glitching in and out of existence. There's little wonder why the Hero dies of sheer fright.
  • One alternative way to leave her in the basement is to do it while a failed attempt at assassinating you has you match each other blow-for-blow. As you try to run away with your injuries, you turn back to see the Princess so enraged by your audacity to just walk away that she breaks the chains through sheer strength, and the Narrator implies that she was this close to catching you while you ran up stairs.
  • As The Princess reaches the door, she promises to slowly "pick you apart piece by piece" when she reaches you. The only thing that stops her from doing that, is that she finds you already dying, and numbed from the paralysis aura of her new form.
• Appropriately, the Nightmare Princess is very unsettling. Incarnated as something like a vengeful spirit, her face has been replaced by a cracked mask resembling a doll's and her voice gains an ominous reverb. Just being around her causes organ failure and she continuously taunts you about how she could kill you at any time but chooses to revel in your dread. She talks about tearing the world apart piece by piece, much like how she killed you the first time, and even says it would be a favor, since that would make the good times seem better by comparison.
• Trying to run from the Princess or deciding to stay with her in the basement leads to her taking off her mask (as seen in the page's image), revealing a literal Nightmare Face. The subsequent Mind Rape (which could also double as a Tear Jerker, as the sequence is implied to be from the Princess' point of view) causes the Narrator to Go Mad from the Revelation and abandon the player.
  "Like creeping mold, the complete reality of your existence threads its way through your mind. Birth, death, birth again. Decay and bloom. A million stitches from a million microscopic wounds you've inflicted on everyone you've ever met with every muscle you've moved and every word you've ever spoken.
  "Your existence hurts them.
  "A lonely soul in a room by itself weeping. It lives for eighty years and then it's gone. And then it's there again.
  "A reprieve. A good life. Love, children, a steady career. Recognition from your peers. Here one moment and gone the next. The worms have found their orifices.
  "Diagnosis. It forgets everything it is. Anger. Rage. Distance. Poverty. The lonely soul is lonely again. Love turns to mockery. It dies. It is reborn. Worse. Lonelier.
  "This is all too much. I... can't keep going."
  • The whole sequence is illustrated. During the "reprieve", when the Princess is surrounded by others for once, she's smiling in a way that gets more exaggerated, desperate, and painful-looking with each statement, highlighting that even this good life can't be properly enjoyed as the knowledge of what had been and what's to come loom.
• If you choose not to kill yourself while falling through the infinite abyss, your biology "collapses in on itself" as you die slowly of starvation and thirst.

The Moment Of Clarity

• The introduction to this Chapter spells out just how horrifically bad things have gotten. It starts off with "Chapter III" popping in without a subtitle. Then Chapter IV, then V, then VI, then so many it's impossible to tell how much time has passed. The black screen is overwritten by an illegible mess of chapter titles. And then we get the name of the chapter, silently and abruptly cutting through in black letters.
• The story has been completely broken. Linearity has ceased to exist and all the Voices from all the routes are present. The cabin both exists and doesn't. When the Princess crawls out of a hole in the hill where the cabin should be, she looks like the Nightmare Princess but with a more damaged mask and three floating arms. There is no option to refuse her, with the text filling you in on how futile your actions are.
• Unlike you, who only remembers the previous two chapters, and the Narrator (who always only remembers the current one) the Voices have experienced countless deaths between then and now. Even the Hero and the Stubborn are more than a little traumatized.
  Voice of the Stubborn: Shut up. You were here.
  Voice of the Broken: Every single time.
  Voice of the Opportunist: You did your best, really. There’s just a pecking order.
  Voice of the Smitten: And our cruel and beautiful goddess sits atop it, right where she belonged.
  Voice of the Hero: You’re lucky. What I would give to be able to forget.
  • The exact ways in which the Voices are dealing with their trauma is also rather disturbing. the Hero is downtrodden and wants to forget everything, the Paranoid is scattered and confused, the Hunted is hyper vigilant and fearful, the Cheated is deeply frustrated that nothing seems to work, the Smitten's dialogue almost sounds like a victim justifying a harmful partner, the Stubborn is trying to find some means to defeat the Princess but clearly has run out of options, the Broken has given up even more than he usually does, and the Opportunist seems content just trying to appeal to the Princess and do what she says because he has no other choices. The Contrarian seems the least affected, but it seems his jovial attitude has become a crutch to survive the situation. The Skeptic endlessly philosophises in a vain attempt to find meaning to everyone's suffering and even the Cold seems more fed up with the situation than he normally is, being much more verbally insistent to the Player that he listen only to him because the other's have failed.
  Voice of the Cold: How many times do I have to tell you to snuff out your heart?
• It's heavily implied that whatever transpired during the loops broke the Player so badly that he blocked out the memories in order to remain sane and he used the Cold's Personality Power to do so.
• All this horror was created due to the Player breaking the Moment of Clarity's heart, with her lashing out in the most terrifying way possible.
• When approaching the mirror at the end of the route, the Voices are all so traumatized by what they've experienced that they each welcome the death that comes with it. It's a bit sobering that even the sillier Voices, such as the Smitten, Opportunist, Cheated, and Contrarian, are all just as eager to approach the mirror as the more serious ones. Even the Voice of the Hero, who in every other route is deeply reluctant to approach the mirror, is completely ready to embrace it after the ordeal.

Prisoner Route

• The Princess is bound to the wall by two wrist shackles and a thick collar. In order to escape, one of the options is to allow the Princess to decapitate herself in detail.
• If you inspect the empty shackle besides her you can be trapped besides her. Unlike with the Nightmare, you're The Needless here and just sit there until time makes the basement deteriorate.

Razor Route

• One way to reach this route, is attempting to either check for a pulse or retrieve the blade after killing her in Chapter 1. She will immediately spring back to life, giving you a slasher smile with teeth replaced by pointed metal. She will then grab you, pin you down and stab you:
  The Princess: I guess I won't be dying alone, after all!
• The cabin and woods become increasingly hostile Alien Geometry, the contours of everything becoming increasingly jagged due to the Razor's influence.
• The Princess is made of razorblades. When she unveils the blade, her arms slice open and fall like torn cloth. When the chain limits her movements, she nonchalantly hacks off her chained arm and makes a mad dash for you.
• In the chapter that follows she will joyfully skewer the player, over and over again (made worse if you didn't bring the knife with you in the 2nd chapter, as you won't have a means of defending yourself in the next when the Contrarian throws it out the window on a whim).

Stranger Route

• When you try to just leave and avoid going to the cabin altogether, the path loops back around, depositing you right in front of it. And the Narrator makes it pretty clear by his tone that this is entirely his doing. Keep doing this and not only does the path continue to loop, you'll start seeing cabins literally everywhere. To the point where the screen is full of them, and there's nowhere you can go that doesn't lead right to it.
• It's possible to find this scary, funny, or both, but when you're officially on the Stranger's route, the entire area has been walled off, so that there's no possible way for you to try to leave again.
• Attempting to go down the infinite, overlapping stairs to the basement basically results in temporary Death of Personality. The Voices are unsettled by the experience.
  "You slowly lose sense of yourself the further you go. Time disappears, and you can feel yourself begin to untether.
  "Physical sensations dull and then vanish, until the only things experienced are the endlessly repeating patterns and emotions of the journey. A continuous march forwards to a destination long forgotten.
  "Consumption and betrayal. Skepticism and blind devotion. Rivalry and submission. Terror and longing. Pain and unfamiliarity. And at the heart of it all, an emotion that can only be described as-"
• At the basement, you find the Princess again... and then a different Princess abruptly appears and then three more. None of them are aware of each other as reality begins falling apart. You're given the option to take multiple options at once and the narration describes many conflicting experiences clashing and melding into each other. Even the Voice of the Contrarian is taken aback, and begins to sincerely regret his actions causing the princesses to end up fused together.
  • While the demo's versions of the Stranger were creepy, that was due to their monstrousness. The full release's version is still very much human, but it comes with the Body Horror that results from the merging of all five versions of the same Princess - including versions of herself that died - and all of them are conscious and self-cognizant of it. The amalgamed princess is then dragged off by The Shifting Mound just as you were about to respond to their cries for help.

Spectre Route

• The Spectre is a Cute Ghost Girl, and is amicable enough. However, that does not mean she's let go of you killing her, or that she's harmless. For the moments she snaps at the player over what he's done, she pulls a brief but effective Nightmare Face, her face instantly rotting to show her teeth in a Slasher Smile. The contrast between her cute face and her rotting one highlights the horror of the latter.
• If you decide to leave the Spectre in the basement, or continue trying to kill her, the results are not pretty. She uses her incorporeal form to phase into your body and tear out your heart, showing it to you once she's done.

Tower Route

• The first chapter leading to this involves being beaten to death by the princess with her bare hands, shoes and knees, which the Voice of the Broken describes as a much more painful experience than what's shown on screen:
  Voice of the Broken: She broke every bone in our body, only then did she let us die.
• If you told her that she's foretold to end the world in the first chapter before fighting her (having brought the knife) the princess wins without taking a single hit from you and uses the extra time to crush the life out of your body more slowly.
• The Tower, relishes the idea of the world ending and decides to make it her purpose crediting you with the idea. If you don't tell her, she will forcibly read your mind and comes to the same conclusion. Worse still, she plans to make you help her!
• The Tower, for all of her ethereal beauty, is incredibly intimidating. Besides the fact that her Compelling Voice makes you kneel before her, she can also order you to do things like repeatedly stab yourself until she tells you to stop, or even slit your own throat. And as a way of Painting the Medium, any option besides what she's ordered you to do is greyed out. It all makes for an incredibly unnerving opponent who has the power to make you kill or torture yourself by just telling you to do so.
• The Voice of the Broken is also quite unsettling. In basically every other route he's The Load, taking a backseat to every other Voice with his depressing input and general lack of desire for action. Here, he develops a supremely unhealthy and dependent obsession with the Tower, which is marked by his uncharacteristic enthusiasm when he hears her voice. When the Tower orders the Player to harm himself or follow orders, Broken forces the Player to do them even when he refuses out of a disturbing desire to please the Tower.
  • Even more disturbing is his attitude when we betray her. He becomes angry and despondent in his devotion, blaming the others for destroying their relationship and hoping she'll forgive him. It takes on the same obsessive undertones as the Voice of the Smitten, but with a much darker presentation. When you get to the Fury, he's arguably just as disgusted and angry with the Player as she is.

Wild Route

• There are two paths to this route, and both are equally horrific. Either the Beast swallows you whole and you die inside her, or you try to fight or abandon the Witch, causing her cabin to crush you both. The Wild route is a result of you two dying together, in a way that results in you two being joined together. Rather than starting a new chapter on a path in the woods leading to a cabin whose basement holds an imprisoned Princess, you are the path in the woods. The both of you. Together.
• The Wild Princess is one of the most eldritch forms. Now she's the forest itself. And you're a part of her too. The primary scene for the chapter is unnerving. A mass of white veins or roots in the outline of trees against a black void, the fusion of her and you. The Princess is forgiving if you stay fused together and if you accept this existence, your Voices are happy enough, forgiving her in turn. She can sense that the two of you are supposed to be one. But if you start to separate, recalling all the ways she hurt you, the white forest turns red as the Princess starts to rant in sorrow and fury at the wrongs she suffered as well.
• The Wounded Wild, which results if you forcefully separate yourself from the Princess, is fused to a tree with no limbs and her ribcage open to show her still beating heart. She looks miserable and utterly resigned in this state. When she's cut out of the tree, whether you do so yourself or when the Shifting Mound retrieves her, it shows that her arms have turned into branches inside the tree, still with blood flowing through them and yet completely unusable.
  • You are given the option to slay the Wounded Wild. Every single one of your Voices is at least hesitant to do so, if not outright against it.
• If you don't try to separate yourself and instead turn inward to find your freedom, the Narrator becomes increasingly hostile, desperate, and full of cold, disdainful fury. All the snark falls away and it's one of his most nakedly confrontational moments in the whole game.
  The Narrator: You won't find anything. If I have to starve you, if I have to sacrifice my world to keep the Princess at bay, I'll do it.

Witch Route

• In one version of chapter 1 leading to this, the narrator will hijack your body to try and kill the princess. If you freed her in an earlier chapter 1, you won't have the option to resist the possession (with the words "slay her" shown multiple times), and the enraged princess will claw/bite you to death.
• If you instead got here by mutually killing each other in chapter 1, she'll growl that it's not over and will make you pay in the next loop.
• If you choose to leave the basement and abandon the Princess, she'll make the branches and roots of the cabin close in until they eventually crush you. The claustrophobia and agony of the pressure is described in exquisite, loving detail...Until you "pop". Which is accompanied by appropriate first-person visuals before the screen goes black and you die.
  • Arguably it's even worse if you trigger this fate through a brawl with the Witch. Because not only do you suffer the same fate as described above, but you get to watch what it does to her before it kills you.
• Should the Witch pull you down the stairs, causing both of you to break your backs:
  The Witch: We're going to die together. Isn't that a lovely treat! I wonder how long it'll take. Maybe I'll get to watch the worms lick your bones clean.

Wraith Route

• Having been killed in the chapter prior, the Wraith Princess returns as a skeletal Vengeful Ghost with a Voice of the Legion even more discordant than the Nightmare Princess'. Her skull is stuck in a grinning rictus. Her huge Glowing Eyes of Doom seem to stare into your soul. And speaking of soul, she possesses you by ripping a hole into it that she can enter. She then forces you towards the door on an ankle that she broke, complete with awful crunching noises with every step.

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