Visual Novel / Slay the Princess

"Do you believe that? Do you believe I'm some kind of... monster?"

Whatever horrors you may find in these dark spaces, have heart and see them through.
There are no premature endings. There are no wrong decisions.
There are only fresh perspectives and new beginnings.
This is a love story.

Slay the Princess is a Ren'Py-based Psychological Horror Visual Novel/Dating Sim/Adventure Game developed by Black Tabby Games, the creators of Scarlet Hollow.

The premise is simple, as the Narrator (played by Jonathan Sims) explains: You're a hero on a quest, walking through the woods. At the end of the path lies a cabin. In the basement of that cabin lies a Princess (played by Nichole Goodnight). Your job is to slay the princess, otherwise the world will end. The Narrator makes sure to emphatically warn you that the Princess is a quite cunning creature indeed and should not be trusted; she will do anything to find a weakness she can exploit in order to dissuade you from your task. She will lie, cheat, offer bargains and bribes, and mix lies with the truth if it means getting an angle on you.

Of course, not everything is as it seems. The choices you make will wildly change the premise. And throughout, you will realize that while the Narrator may not have your best interests at heart, you can't fully trust the titular Princess herself.

Because if you do decide to slay her, or try to keep her locked away, she WILL make you regret it.

Oh, and whatever you do, don't fall in love with her.

A demo was released on Steam on August 1st, 2022, and a longer one released in March 2023. The game was released in full on October 23rd, 2023. A free expansion called "The Pristine Cut" was announced on December 16th, 2023, expected to release in 2024. The expansion will include entirely new chapters and extensions to some existing chapters.

WARNING: Because of the reveal-heavy nature of this story, some tropes will tell you about what happens simply by their existence on this page. Proceed with caution.

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You're on a path in the woods. And at the end of that path is a trope list.

Demo Only Tropes

• Benevolent Abomination: In "The Stranger". The Princess is a misshapen Humanoid Abomination, but she claims she just wants to be friends with the protagonist. Also, this version of the Princess (aside from the one in "The Damsel") is also the only one that isn't suspicious and/or hostile to you in Chapter 2, because this is your first time meeting her in this route.
• Boss Subtitles: Every route in the demo ends in a close-up shot of whatever new form the Princess has now taken, along with her new title.
• Multiple Endings: There are ten endings to find in the extended demo. Most of them are cliffhangers, ending in the beginning of Chapter II after telling you what new voice in your head and form of the princess you get in the next loop. The endings are:
  • Good Ending: Slay the Princess as soon as you're able to, without talking to her. Then don't investigate her corpse afterwards. Finally, accept the Narrator's reward without protests or questions. You get to stay in the cabin forever in a state of mindless bliss. You get a very badly-drawn card congratulating you and the game ends.
  • The Adversary: Slay the Princess, but in a way that results in a Mutual Kill where you both die. You get the Voice of the Stubborn, who wants nothing more than a rematch with the Princess, who is now a demonic Amazonian Beauty that is itching for a good fight. The basement is much less polished than it was before.
  • The Beast: Befriend the Princess, and then betray her by trying to kill her. You'll get the Voice of the Hunted, who's scared of the Princess hunting them down. The basement is changed into a dense jungle. The Princess now seems to have claws and fangs, hides almost completely in the basement's shadows, and hates your guts.
  • The Damsel: Don't pick up the pristine blade, and side with the Princess no matter what. You get the voice of the Smitten, who is completely in love with the Princess, who appears far more feminine and delicate and acts like a Princess Classic and a Damsel in Distress. The cabin changes to one of immaculate royal beauty with fine candelabras, a royal carpet, and an atmosphere that is almost pleasant despite being a prison.
  • The Nightmare: Leave the basement while keeping the Princess locked away, or run away upstairs during the fight with the Princess. You get the Voice of the Paranoid, who is utterly terrified of the Princess. Seeing as she is now a squirming Humanoid Abomination with an eerily human mask who flickers in and out of tangibility, can stop your heart at will, and resents you for trying to kill her or keep her imprisoned in the previous loop, it's not without reason. The basement is now an Eldritch Location of floating platforms and broken walls, where the Princess is hunting you down.
  • The Prisoner: Pick up the pristine blade, and side with the Princess no matter what. You get the Voice of the Skeptic, who openly opposes the Narrator. You will find the very sullen Princess chained to the wall by neck and both her arms, with the cabin looking more like a prison cell.
  • The Razor: Hesitate before slaying the Princess, giving her the time to reveal a pristine blade of her own. Alternatively, examine the Princess's body after killing her, at which point she revives and stabs you. In Chapter 2, you have the Voice of the Flinching, who's paranoid that she has a weapon. The cabin has seemingly been ripped apart and stuck back together again, and the Princess now has blades beneath the skin of her forearms that come out Wolverine-style.
  • The Spectre: Slay the Princess without hesitation, then escape the cabin by killing yourself. You'll get the Voice of the Cold, emotionless and unimpressed even with the Princess being a (very snarky) ghost now. The cabin is a dust-covered haunted house.
  • The Stranger: Walk away from the cabin or attempt to go on an invalid route, for example by loading in a save with choices leading up to a defunct route from pre-Directors Cut demo. You'll get the Voice of the Contrarian, who cares only about spiting the Narrator. The Princess is a lumpen Humanoid Abomination with a lilting voice and something writhing beneath her skin, who refers to herself as a "we".
  • The Tower: Pick up the pristine blade. After freeing the Princess, attempt to kill her when the Narrator takes control of your body, but then stop fighting the Princess. You get the Voice of the Broken, who believes fighting the Princess is a fool's errand, and is utterly terrified of her. The basement requires a journey down a long flight of stairs, and the basement itself appears to be a shrine to the Princess instead of a prison. The Princess is a towering goddess who floats in midair and has a Compelling Voice, whom your character is completely helpless to resist as she orders you to drop the pristine blade and kneel before her.
  • The Witch: Don't pick up the pristine blade. After freeing the Princess, attempt to kill her when the Narrator takes control of your body. Alternately, go back to retrieve the pristine blade after you meet the Princess. You'll get the Voice of the Opportunist, who seeks something to gain after the reset. The Princess is now a Little Bit Beastly sassy witch, with the cabin changing to a forest-like cave.
• Shout-Out: Mostly found in the achievements.
  • Getting the Witch ending gives you an achievement called "The VVitch"
  • "I tried so hard, and got so far..." references the Linkin Park song, "In The End". The icon depicts a character from Dragon Ball.
  • There are several shout-outs to Dark Souls. "The Real Slay the Princess Starts Here" features a picture of the memetic "You Died" game over screen. "Princess Souls" is a parody of the name and the icon depicts the Player's arms up towards the sun in the infamous "praise the sun" pose.
  • There's the "I didn't hear no bell" achievement, referencing a line from Rocky V and South Park.
• Voice of the Legion: The Princess' voice is creepy in The Stranger ending.

Tropes A to L

• Adapted Out: The Voice of the Obsessed, which you'd get in the Beast route in the original demo. In the 2023 demo, that role has been replaced by the Voice of the Hunted.
• Ambiguously Human: The Princess herself is not all she appears to be, for better or for worse. For such a slender young woman, she certainly takes a lot of punishment if you're trying to slay her. And she's a lot stronger than a woman who has been locked in an isolated cabin for who knows how long should be. This includes the fact that in several routes, she can lose one of her hands, and she's still a massive physical threat capable of rupturing your organs with just a few hits. In other routes, she is very clearly an Eldritch Abomination, with the basement itself as some kind of Eldritch Location. In the full release of the game, it's eventually revealed that each Princess you meet is a small part of The Shifting Mound, the entity who resides in the Long Quiet. Getting to the real ending requires going through five routes, i.e encountering five versions of the Princess that The Shifting Mound eventually absorbs.
• Amazonian Beauty: If you attack the Princess, it results in a Mutual Kill where you land a few hits but she still gets the upper hand. You get the Voice of the Stubborn, who wants nothing more than a rematch with the Princess. When you reach her, she's now a demonic-looking Blood Knight who shares your excitement in wanting to fight again. She's also much taller and more muscular than she was before, and the ending card has her with her fist in her palm with a Slasher Smile as she looks forward to your rematch.
• Ambiguous Situation: The whole premise runs on this. How and why was the Princess was locked away? Why does her death prevent The End of the World as We Know It? Why does the Narrator have so much power over you? If the Narrator can change things around based on what you do, why is he having you slay the Princess? Should you trust the Princess, the Narrator, or neither of them? Talking with them doesn't provide any real answers, due to the Princess being unable or unwilling to give the answers, and the Narrator stubbornly telling you to remain focused on the task at hand.
• An Arm and a Leg: If you free the Princess, you either cut her arm off or she chews through it to be free from her shackles. Either way, the Princess doesn't react at all. When the player asks about alternatives to amputation:
  Princess: (in a bored tone) That will be fine, I can lose an arm.
• And I Must Scream: The Princess is the personification of change, trapped in a single unchanging loop. She's in agony, and the one constant among all her forms — even the otherwise passive Damsel and hopeless Prisoner — is that she's desperate to escape. In the Nightmare route, you get a glimpse of her stiuation from her persepctive, and it's one of the most horrifying moments of the whole game

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.

• Animation Bump:
  • While most of the game uses heavily Limited Animation, the reworked ending added in the End of Everything update features fully animated cuts of each of the vessels you brought to the Shifting Mound emerging from her Body of Bodies.
  • The Beast route also has its own unique animated cuts, with one of the Beast pouncing as the player narrowly dodges her and another of her swallowing the player whole.
• Anti-Frustration Features:
  • The game features different levels of scrolling for various elements on the screen to give the illusion of 3-D movement — things closer to you will move more as you move your mouse around the screen, while things that are farther away will move less. However, if you find this distracting or it causes motion sickness, you can turn it off. The game also tells you this when you boot it up, so anyone who would have trouble with those effects can turn it off before it causes them any trouble.
  • The "End of Everything" update changes the arguments you make against the Shifting Mound and her vessels. Namely, clarifying what specifically you are arguing, such as asserting your independence, appealing to your shared humanity, or rejecting her authority.
• Apocalypse How: In the full game, should you accept the offer from the Princess, something like this occurs. She as the Shifting Mound, and you as the Long Quiet ascend to godhood and explore the multiverse together. Downplayed in that the Shifting Mound, a personification of transformation, death and rebirth, doesn't explicitly end the world so much as she enables it to one day end. Or even possibly just end what it was to become something new.
• Apocalypse Maiden: The Narrator certainly insists that the Princess is this, and implies that she'll end the world regardless of whether or not she intends to or even knows how, but refuses to elaborate as to how or provide any proof that she can. The Spectre route brings up the possibility that she may instead be a Barrier Maiden, as you can note that the world outside the cabin seemed to vanish after you killed her. The truth ends up being a little more complicated. After going through five routes, (and meeting five different Princesses) the Narrator reveals that the real Princess (the entity absorbing the others at the end of each route) is "the Shifting Mound", the personification of, among other things, transformation, death and rebirth. She was imprisoned in the construct by His Creator to keep all that she represents locked out of the rest of existence.
• Apologetic Attacker: Leaving the knife behind and attempting to free the princess in Chapter I will cause the Narrator to drop the knife into the basement anyway and force you to try and kill her with it. Holding back for long enough allows the princess to recognize you're being controlled, take the knife out of your hand, and kill you to relieve you of your brainwashing. She sobs and apologizes over and over as she stabs you, especially since her lack of experience with knives causes your death to be more drawn-out and painful than necessary.
• Arc Words
  • In all routes: "Everything goes dark, and you die."
  • In 'The Nightmare' Route: "Heart. Lungs. Liver. Nerves."
  • After a vessel is claimed by the Shifting Mound, and the latter tells you more about her: "Do not mourn her"
  • Many of the things the Narrator says before you enter the basement he will go out of his way to say in almost every chapter. In particular, describing the blade as "Your implement" and noting that "It would be difficult to slay the princess and save the world without a weapon."
    • When entering the basement in many routes, the narrator describes the entrance to the basement and ends saying "If the Princess really lives here, slaying her is probably doing her a favor", even in routes like 'The Damsel' or 'The Tower', in which the basement is not as bad as in other routes.
• Art Shift: In The Damsel route the princess starts out drawn similar to her original style, just more radiant and conventionally beautiful. However, if after rescuing her you ask her about what she wants to do with herself and keep pressing the matter as she insists over and over that all she wants is to make you happy, her art will continually become more and more simplistic until she resembles a crude mockery of herself, emphasizing how she's become shaped into an extremely basic character with no traits beyond the bare minimum necessary for the player's wish fulfillment.
• Attack on the Heart: Every successful murder of the Princess is one.
• Author Avatar: Literally the in-universe case for the Narrator. In the ending, he explains that he's a construct based on the Creator, a man who created the story the protagonist and the Princess lives in.
• Back from the Dead: In all routes except the very brief "Good Ending", Chapter I ends with the Hero's death, only for Chapter II to begin with them in the forest again, no worse for wear and wondering how they're still alive. And if the Princess also dies in Chapter I, she comes back for Chapter II as well, eager to reference how you'd killed her the previous time. She does remain dead in the Spectre route, but she still is able to fulfill her usual role, as a ghost.
• The Bad Guy Wins: Whoever you consider to be the Bad Guy. There are endings where the Narrator successfully traps you in the Cabin and sets the multiverse into eternal stasis, and where the Princess escapes and does indeed bring about the destruction of all reality.
• Beast Man: In some of the routes where you attack the Princess, she suddenly sprouts claws and fangs to engage you. She becomes even more beastlike and feral in some other routes.
• Be Careful What You Wish For: If the princess does turn out the an actively malicious or dangerous force, the Narrator can get spitefully smug. Most directly on the Wraith route, if you ask him to help as an Undead Abomination of a princess breaks your legs and tries to possess your body, he gloating mentions how he thought everyone wanted to free the princess.
• Benevolent Abomination: It's eventually revealed that every version of the Princess is just one part of the Shifting Mound, the entity of change that was split into pieces by someone trying to bring an end to death itself. Despite her bizarre true form and the fact that she can indeed end the universe, she is genuinely in love with the protagonist and believes that the change she embodies is a good thing, or at least a necessary one; She is birth and growth as much as she is death and ruin, and believes that a finite existence is needed to give existence meaning.
• Biological Mashup: Judging from how she refers to herself in the plural, the Princess in the "The Stranger" route is a fusion of all the Princesses from the additional cabins the Narrator spawned.
• Big Bad: The titular Princess, according to the Narrator, will destroy the world if she is allowed to escape the cabin. In truth, the Narrator himself is equally antagonistic as a fragment of both's creator; he created the Princess in the first place, making him as much responsible for endangering the world, and trapped you and the Princess inside his world, so that you could slay her (the embodiment of change and death), uncaring that this would doom the world and yourself to an eternal stasis. The ending gives you the choice to side with either of them or reject both and come up with another solution.
• The Big Damn Kiss: It is possible to pull this off with the Thorn version of the Princess once she is freed, provided the player chose to flirt with the Witch in the previous chapter, and therefore have the Voice of the Smitten with them. The Narrator is absolutely indignant about it and makes no secret of it, but realizes that even he has to follow narrative convention when it comes to these things and so breaks out the Purple Prose, even if at first he does so with clenched teeth and lays on the sarcasm as thick as possible. The Voices pick up on this and gang up to call him out on it, telling him not to ruin the moment and give its due description, and he begrudgingly acquiesces.
• Bigger on the Inside: On certain routes the interior of cabin doesn't conform to its outside dimensions. Its entrance room turns into a tall cathedral during The Tower and The Fury, while its basement where the Princess is becomes a dark endless void during The Nightmare and The Stranger. The cabin for The Wraith becomes a corridor, both longer and narrower than the building outside.
• Bird People: The Player character appears to be an avian-human hybrid, based on what can be seen of him. In every route, you get to see your scaly arm and taloned hand as you try to attack the Princess, and your upper arm also looks like it's sprouting feathers around the shoulder area. In some routes, the Princess refers to you with avian terminology, and the Voice of the Smitten worries about having "a feather out of place" if you try to check the mirror.
• Blatant Lies: There are some on the Steam page's Features list.
  No, the Princess isn't a cosmic horror. She's just an ordinary human Princess, and you can definitely slay her as long as you put your mind to it.
  No time loops. Don't be ridiculous. Time is a strictly linear concept and it certainly doesn't "loop," whatever that's supposed to mean.
• Blue-and-Orange Morality: Both the main antagonists. The Narrator is disgusted by the very concept of change and death, to the point his "reward" for you slaying the Princess is to trap you for all eternity in a small unchanging cabin. He seems honestly shocked that you might not be grateful for this. The Princess goes to other extreme, seeking only change without consideration for whether they're changes for better or worse. Unlike the Narrator, though, you can convince her to accept a more human moral code and become an unambiguously benevolent force.
• Body Motifs: Hands. Regardless of which route you take, hands play a part in lots of the more striking images of the game. The player is typically seen just by his hands. The princess can cut off one of her hands to try and break free from her bonds. When interacting with a mirror, the player does so by reaching their hand out to touch the mirror. The Shifting Mound typically shows up as hundreds and hundreds of arms, with hands grasping whichever princess the Mound has control of as an Empty Shell. Whenever the Hero and the Princess show genuine affection for one another, the two of them are more than likely holding hands. Finally, one of the endings has both the Shifting Mound and the Long Quiet embracing their hands together as they enter into eternity.
• Body of Bodies: The Shifting Mound. When you first meet her, you see multiple arms grabbing onto whatever vessel of the princess you took on that route. Her true form, met at the end of the story, is a beautiful yet grotesque amalgamation of female human forms, including hair that is made up of princesses, and hundreds more grasping upwards towards the shifting mound. From what you can see, the Shifting Mound also has five heads and six arms.
• Bookends:
  • The story begins with you outside in the safety of the wilderness and stepping into a cabin, your future scary and unknown. Choose to leave with the princess, and the story ends with you and her in the safety of the cabin and stepping into the wilderness, your future scary and unknown... but with reason to hope.
  • In the endgame, if you argue with the Shifting Mound over whether to end the world, she will summon the five vessels of the Princess you collected in reverse order, meaning the first vessel you completed will be the last one you argue with.
  • The heart of the Shifting Mound will have the personality of the very first Princess you met in Chapter I, including the Stranger if you never went into the cabin. You are also given the same options: slay the Princess (creating a world without death or change), save the Princess (leave the cabin together as mortals), or die (which, in the purest of Book Ends, takes you back to Chapter I to restart the cycle all over again).
• Brought Down to Normal: In the And? What happens next? ending, you and the Princess leave the cabin and the Construct, but forgo ascension to godhood.
• But Thou Must!:
  • The Narrator attempts this in Chapter I should you try to leave the forest instead of going to the cabin. He'll make the path you take lead to the cabin anyway. If you head yet another direction, he'll do the same thing again, and so on, until he starts spawning infinite cabins. But he can't force you to enter, and if you keep being defiant he'll eventually just say that you die after walking for long enough, sending you to Chapter II as usual after your death. Once you get there, you'll see the Narrator has given up on being subtle and erected walls to prevent you from going anywhere besides the cabin.
  • If you've played through at least one route, meaning you've met the Shifting Mound, it is impossible to accept the "Good Ending" which occurs after a straightforward murder of the princess in Chapter I. Attempting to do so will nudge the Mound into reminding you that you have a job to perform for her, and from there you must kill yourself to proceed to the Spectre route.
  • There are several moments where you are forced into making a decision, or where your decision making doesn't actually matter:
    • During "The Tower" route, the Princess is a towering goddess with a Compelling Voice. When you approach her, she'll tell you to drop your pristine blade (if you brought it) and prostrate yourself before her. While you have options to resist, these are fruitless, as you'll be forced to do what she wants no matter what you pick. Several other defiant dialogue options in this route are also greyed out to further illustrate the strength of her commands.
    • If you keep trying to run from the Nightmare, eventually the route collapses into a 'Moment of Clarity', after many off-screen attempts at continuing to resist her, and you have no choice but to take her hand and let her be free.
    • In "The Razor" route, your last choice that matters is at the begining of chapter II, which is taking the blade or not taking it (leading to The Shifting Mound reclaiming The Razor's full body or The Razor's heart, respectively), after that point, every choice leads to The Razor killing you many times until you reach chapter IV, when she completely transforms her body into blades.
  • The game does not allow you to take a route that would lead to a Chapter II that you've already seen, as the options are either greyed out or simply not present in the list of choices.
• Clap Your Hands If You Believe: The Princess's appearance and personality are determined by how the protagonist sees her. Even the very first decision of whether to take the knife changes the way she'll call out to you before she can see you.
• Colour-Coded for Your Convenience: Anything the princess says will be in color, while everyone else's speech is in black-and-white. If she's happy with you, the princess will speak with a fuschia-outlined thin text. If she's mad at you, her text will be bold-italiced red.
• The Conscience: The Voice of the Hero in every route. He's the one who clashes with the Narrator and questions why you're killing the Princess instead of saving her, and advises you to at least hear her out before making a decision.
• The Constant:
  • Though other Voices come and go (or have even been Adapted Out from earlier iterations of the game) the Voice of the Hero has been with you since the first demo, is with you on every route, and will be at your side even at the very end of it all.
  • The only thing that never changes in each of the loops is the pristine blade in the cabin. It's always in the same place, and it's always in the same shape. It remains pristine even in the route where you kill the Princess without dying, still gleaming long after her body has turned to bones and dust.
  • In the March 2023 demo, a mirror gets added to the room where the pristine blade is. If it's pointed out, the Narrator is adamant that there's no mirror. And if you try to clean the mirror, it vanishes.
  • There is a broken chain on the wall behind the Princess in every version of the basement. The Voice of the Skeptic even points it out in "The Prisoner" route, where it is conspicuously still broken.
• Cosmic Horror Reveal: The full game contains one of these. After the first encounter with the Princess, the Shifting Mound will grab the Princess out of nowhere, pulling her into the Long Quiet and taking you with her. It's only once you meet the Shifting Mound that she claims that she needs more vessels for you to bring to her.
• Cradling Your Kill: The Princess does this to you in the route where you help her and don't take the pristine blade. She sobs as she stabs you over and over again, and holds your hand as you die.
• Create Your Own Villain: Shown in several endings where you decide to kill the Princess after befriending her, or decide to leave her in the basement. She embraces her monstrous nature and exacts bloody revenge on you. She even tells you this, claiming that she's perfectly capable of being harmless and friendly... until you left her behind. She can become even worse, depending on the outcomes of your choices.
  Princess: I can be innocent and harmless... if I want to be. Teasing me with fresh air and a chance to finally live freely doesn't inspire me to play nice.
  The Wraith: I've become something much worse now, and it's all thanks to you!
• Creator Thumbprint: Abby Howard, co-creator for Slay The Princess, drew a short comic called "The Birdwatcher", in which a human woman goes on a date with a great dark corvid mass with shining eyes that extends a scaly, clawed hand to her.
• Curb-Stomp Battle:
  • In Chapter I, if you take the knife and never drop it but stall as long as possible before trying to slay the princess, she will knock you down in one blow, kick you a whole bunch, then crush your windpipe. (This puts you on The Tower route.)
  • The Razor route has you challenge the princess over and over again, trying a different strategy from a different voice each time, and always getting skewered within seconds.
• Cute Monster Girl: Several of the Princess's more monstrous forms are still drawn with her beautiful face intact, or at least try to make her a Little Bit Beastly. However, in some other routes, she's a full-on Eldritch Abomination.
• Deadpan Snarker: The Narrator is prone to making snarky remarks, particularly directed at the Voice of the Hero. The Voices of the Skeptic and Cold also engage in this, the latter being considerably more "deadpan".
• Decomposite Character: In an update from the original demo to the 2023 demo, some characters have been split between new voices and endings.
  • In the original demo, "The Fury" ending depicts the Princess as a demonic Amazonian Beauty with a clear dominating attitude. She is paired with the Voice of the Broken, who believes fighting her is pointless and you should just submit to her. In the 2023 demo the Fury's design has been given to the Adversary, who is more of a Blood Knight, while her dominant personality and being paired with the Voice of the Broken has been given to the Tower. In full game The Fury is now a separate form of the Princess, that you can unlock either by slaying the Tower or disappointing the Adversary.
  • You could unlock "The Beast" ending by doing anything perceived as a betrayal by the Princess. In the 2023 demo depending on your exact approach to said betrayal, you can get two endings and two forms of the Princess. The Witch shares the Little Bit Beastly aspect of the original Beast, while the name has been given to a much more animalistic and monstrous form of the Princess.
  • "The Damsel" ending made the Voice of the Hero fall in love with the Princess, with the Voice of the Doubting taking his role in second-guessing the situation. In the 2023 version of "The Damsel" the Voice of the Hero is the skeptical one, but is paired with the Voice of the Smitten, who is head over heels for the Princess. The Voice of the Doubting, now the Voice of the Skeptic, can be found in "The Prisoner" ending.
• Deliberately Monochrome: The entire game is done in a black-and-white pencil drawing art style. There are occasional splashes of other colors, mostly red to indicate blood.
• Defeat Means Respect: On the more combat focussed routes, namely The Razor, and The Adversary, The Princess will compliment you on putting up a good fight, describing it as fun, even while dying from a Mutual Kill.
• Developer's Foresight:
  • If you load into a save where the game is in an invalid or defunct state, such as with choices leading up to a route that's been Adapted Out from a previous version, the game puts you on the route to The Stranger, which you ordinarily get by refusing to go to the cabin where the Princess is.
  • Speaking of the Stranger: it's possible, either knowingly or not, for her to be the first version of the Princess you meet. If you venture into the Shifting Mound's heart in the endgame, which takes the form and personality of the first Princess you met, it will be the Stranger in a more stable form. All of her scenes will have different art to accommodate, unlike the other endings on this route which have the Princess looking normal and thus don't need the redraw, and the on screen text will refer to the princess with collective pronouns.
  • If you ask the Damsel what she wants or what makes her happy, her art style will devolve each time, until it is little more than a pencil sketch of an exaggerated Animesque caricature, after which the Damsel will be claimed by the Shifting Mound. If you choose a different option, she'll return to normal, but if you opt to slay her instead, you will get a version of her death scene with that deteriorated Damsel. If you let the Shifting Mound claim the deteriorated Damsel, she will still be deteriorated when the Shifting Mound recalls the vessel in her final debate of ideologies with you.
  • There are several options for players who don't want to commit to slaying or freeing the princess (particularly early players, wary of the surface moral implications of each), with notable routes like The Stranger and The Nightmare. Both of these encourage undecided players to take more risks in the future.
  • If you choose to "Wait forever" with the Shifting Mound, the game will close itself. Start it back up and you'll receive a comment based on how much time you've spent "waiting." The game has a different comment for different thresholds of time, even accounting for very unlikely circumstances of leaving it untouched for years, decades, or even millennia.
  • The default mouse cursor is a pointing right hand. If you have the pristine blade, the cursor will have its own blade. If you choose to hold the blade in a Reverse Grip, the cursor will change to reflect that. If you lose your right hand, the cursor will become a pointing left hand.
• Earn Your Bad Ending: The two arguably bleakest endings are also the hardest to find without a guide. Unsurprisingly, the game's achievement page on Steam (here) indicates that they're also the two endings with the lowest completion rates.
  • A new and unending dawn, and everyone hates you: Identical to the ordinary version of this ending, except you lose not only the Princess but the voices are all mad with you (beside the Hero and Contrarian). You can get this ending by taunting the Voices about impending demise upon encounter the mirror in the Long Quiet (at least twice), who will start bickering with you.
  • Just as you once were nothing: In each version of Chapter 2, refuse to enter the cabin, causing the Shifting Mound to grow frustrated and upset with your refusal to provide her with more vessels. This must be done five times to reach the ending. While this isn't difficult, it's tedious to play through Chapter One and then click through the same choices to turn away from the cabin five times. On the fourth, the Shifting Mound says that the two of you are near the end. Once more sees you both permanently trapped inside the construct with no hope for escape. The Shifting Mound tells you you made the wrong choices but says she loves you. From there, you can prolong your existence indefinitely, but the only way to roll credits is to give up, causing you and the Shifting Mound to cease to exist.
• Eaten Alive: Play your cards wrong, and The Beast can catch you, grab you, and swallow you into her stomach. The Narrator promptly describes you being digested as well.
• Eldritch Abomination: Both the protagonist and the Princess are eventually revealed to be one each. The Princess as "The Shifting Mound", the personification of death and change, while the protagonist is "The Long Quiet", an undying god of stasis created to be the princess' counter-balance.
• Eldritch Location:
  • The forest itself, if you disobey the Narrator outright and try to leave. He'll just generate an infinite number of paths and an infinite number of cabins until you do that he says.
  • The cabin and the basement where you find the Princess keep changing in the second chapter. In some of them, it's an ordinary cabin in the woods. In others, it's a swampy jungle or a castle tower. In others still, it's a full-on other dimension where the Princess is its dark master.
  • The Long Quiet, where the Entity absorbing each Princess resides. To make things even more confusing, the Long Quiet is revealed to be you.
• Empathic Environment: Chapter II of every route has the cabin's entire architecture change depending on what you and the princess did to each other in Chapter I. And if the route contains a Chapter III, the forest and path to the cabin are affected as well. The Narrator remarks that it's a sign of the Princess' influence spreading.
• invokedEsoteric Happy Ending: Invoked, as it's clearly not intended as a proper good ending aside from In-Universe. If you slay the Princess without a second thought, you get an eternity in the cabin, the world outside having seemingly vanished along with the princess, and accepting this fate results in the "Good Ending" where the Narrator gives you a poorly-drawn card congratulating you for saving the world.
• Evil Is Bigger: The more antagonistic forms of the Princess tend to be larger than the hero. The Adversary and the Beast both dwarf the hero, and the Tower is tall enough that the hero doesn't even come up to her waist. In Chapter III of the Tower route, the Tower becomes even bigger, to the point that she's bigger than the entire landscape with the entire surrounding area swirling around her. Notably, after this Princess is taken by the Shifting Mound, the hands that grasp her can only partly cover her face, head and neck, as opposed to covering every other princess completely.
• Evil Is Deathly Cold: No matter her present circumstances, when the princess finally leaves the cabin she'll remark that it's cold right before she's grabbed by the Shifting Mound. Subverted, in that the Mound isn't evil so much as reassembling her avatars and mind.
• Fairy Tale Motifs: The overarching premise is one big subversion of the usual fairy tale fare. While the goal you're meant to reach does take the form of a princess — as is the case in many such stories — it is so you may ostensibly slay her. Not save her.
  • Before anything else happens, you find yourself on a path in the woods, which only gets stranger and stranger as the game progresses.
  • The Adversary and Eye of the Needle routes have the princess acquire draconic traits that bring to mind the classic "knight slaying a dragon to save the princess" story, only here the dragon to be slain is the princess.
  • Similarly, the routes where you betray the Princess result in either a slavering Beast that must be outfought, outmaneuvered or outwitted (a challenge often doled out in fairy tales by big bad wolves) or a Witch who is, in a sense, guarding the path to another princess.
  • The romance between the very "human'' looking Princess and the Player character brings to mind the story of Beauty and the Beast.
  • The Damsel route is this trope played straight or deconstructed, depending on whether or not you ask the Damsel what would make her happy too many times.
  • The Thorn, as the name would suggest, is found entangled in an extensive briar patch. She can even be given True Love's Kiss if you choose the right options when you speak with the Witch in the previous chapter.
• Fighting from the Inside: You can do this when you refuse the slay the princess, but the narrator tries to force you to anyway. You'll have multiple choices to "Slay the princess" in the menu, and only one to resist or otherwise try to defy the Narrator. In the Prisoner route, the Princess recognizes that you're resisting attacking her, and slits your throat. In the Damsel setting, she stabs you repeatedly, but tearfully says she's sorry to you over and over again.
• First Girl Wins: If you go to the heart of the Shifting Mound, the Princess inside will be based on whatever choice you made in your first run of the game. If you took the knife, she'll be somewhat cynical, if you didn't, she'll be kindly. If you refused to go the cabin at all and met The Stranger, she'll be there, but in a happier and more stable state, and she'll lightly encourage you to accept godhood.
• Five-Second Foreshadowing: Assuming you're familiar with what happens to the world after the Princess's death, one particular outcome of the Prisoner route has this. If it weren't clear that the Princess's severed head is still alive, the fact that you can see the still-there forest through the cabin windows should confirm it just before you go through the door and find out properly.
• Five Stages of Grief: The Shifting Mound goes through all five if you insist on turning back away from the cabin at the start of Chapter II, which ends the route without proving her a vessel, closing all opportunities for her to be made whole and for the both of you to ever be freed from the construct. The achievements you get each time you end a route this way are a direct reference to this trope.
• Foregone Victory: Unless you refuse to go to the Cabin (which is another ending), anything you do brings you closer to the objective as every Princess is eventually reclaimed by Shifting Mound even if she doesn't leave the Cabin and choices mostly affect the dialogue before the Last-Second Ending Choice.
• Foreshadowing: In the Spectre route, after the Princess possesses your body, the Narrator states that [your] body wasn't made to hold you and the Princess. He says "made", as if you were created and not born, which is the case: both you and the Princess are Artificial Gods made to represent stasis and change respectively. When the Narrator says that you weren't made to hold both of you, he means that the explicit purpose of the Player's creation is to keep those concepts separate, which is also why he is trying to push you into slaying the Princess.
• The Fourth Wall Will Not Protect You: An In-Universe Example. Should the player chose to have the Hero submit to to the Tower version of the Princess, she looks into him and notices that there is another presence inside him, describing it as a faint "echo". It is evident that she is talking about the Narrator, who first reacts with incredulity, because, the way he understands the rules, the Princess isn't supposed to able to see him, much less interact with him. When it becomes increasingly clear that, yes, the Princess is not only talking about him but is even about to use her Compelling Voice on him, the Narrator screams in horror, as the Princess assumes control over him.
• Friendly Enemy: Even versions of the princess who become hostile to and/or kill you, will still have some form of attachment to the point that they'll ask the Shifting Mound to let you remember them.
• Gag Echo: When walking up the stairs with the Witch, you can either let her walk behind you or insist she walks ahead of you. If you let her walk behind you, she claws you in the back, and Voice of the Opportunist laments that if only she had gone first he could've told you to stab her in the back and you would've said something like, "Wow, that's an amazing idea that I never saw coming, thanks for looking out for us!" If you insist she walks ahead of you, Voice of the Opportunist tells you to attack her, and one of your possible responses is "Wow, that's an amazing idea that I totally never saw coming, thanks for looking out for us!"
  Voice of the Opportunist: Wow! You said exactly the thing I imagined you would say as soon as you heard my brilliant plan. This whole day is a dream come true, really.
• Gaslighting: There's no mirror in the second loop's cabin! Go ahead, put your hand on the wall where this mirror supposedly is. Who cares if you can see it, there's no mirror there. See? There wasn't a mirror there after all, despite you reaching out try and touch it. You're just seeing things. If you get into loops beyond the second, this is subverted. The Narrator genuinely cannot see the mirror, and at first thinks you're just fibbing him into order to stall for time. He reacts with surprise and confusion if you and the Voices repeatedly point it out. Probably because this mirror is not actually a part of the Construct, but is tied into your nature as The Long Quiet.
• Genre Mashup: The Steam page tags it as both a psychological horror game and a dating sim. How you choose to deal with the Princess makes all the difference.
• A God Am I: The Tower considers herself greater than any other creature. She's not entirely wrong, considering her Compelling Voice makes you do whatever she tells you to do. Should you suggest that she's going to end the world, the Tower takes this as a great idea, since everyone deserves to be beneath her and/or be destroyed by her. She can even reach into your subconscious and see the Narrator, taking him over too and even identifying him as the Echo.
• Grand Theft Me:
  • If you decide to save the Princess, the Narrator takes control of your body to try and force you to kill her. You can make an attempt at Fighting from the Inside, though. The Princess will recognize what you're doing, and try to give you a Mercy Kill.
  • In The Wraith chapter, the Princess does this to you. Her ghost 'tears the membranes' of your soul and hijacks your body in an attempt to leave the cabin.
  • In the full game, the Shifting Mound does this to every single princess you encounter. The Princess is grabbed by multiple arms, pulled into another dimension, and used as a vessel for the Shifting Mound to communicate with you. Should you ask how any princess is doing, the Shifting Mound will say that the Princess is nothing but an empty shell now for the Mound's reawakening.
• Gratuitous Princess: The Princess is mostly just for the narrative irony of a hero's quest being to slay a princess rather than save one. What exactly she's the princess of isn't elaborated on, nor is anything else about her past, and she seems to have been chained up alone in a remote cabin for as long as she or anybody else can remember. This is latter subverted on the revelation that, that she is a deity of change, with the ability to draw power and shape from the perceptions of others. She takes the form of a princess because it's something you can fathom and relate to.
• "Groundhog Day" Loop:
  • Regardless of what you do in Chapter 1, Chapter 2 loops back to the beginning and puts you back in the woods. You and the Princess still remember your previous encounter and she's evolved in reaction, but the Narrator either doesn't remember or pretends not to. Ends up horribly averted, as the Narrator explains that both the protagonist and Princess keep inadvertently jumping into alternate worlds at the end of each route, devastating the previous world in the process. If the Narrator is to be believed, anyway. At the final encounter with the narrator, he implies that all the worlds you go through/destroy are pocket worlds created by him (and to an extent reshaped by the Princess) to funnel you towards their objectives.
  The Narrator: The construct you're in exists in every world at once. Any time you failed, any time you thought yourself dead, it would restart and shunt both you and her to a new world.
  • There's a nightmarish version of this in the Razor route, where the player is repeatedly stabbed and reset while fighting her.
    The Princess (Razor): Come on show me something new!
    Narrator: She skewers you.
    The Princess: You're cute!
    Narrator: She skewers you
    The Princess: Impressive!
    Narrator: She skewers you.
  • The Moment of Clarity route implies that this happens off-screen, with you not only having every collectible Voice at once, but those Voices are thoroughly exhausted and traumatized. The loop ends when the Player finally relents and lets the Princess leave the cabin.
• Handicapped Badass: Even when missing a hand, the Princess can still defeat you if you try to kill her after freeing her.
• Hand Wave: You can ask what the Princess ate and drank while she was locked in the basement upon meeting her, since she logically has to have eaten to survive. However, the Narrator and the Princess will both mention that such a thing really isn't important to answer, and move on without explaining it. This could have something to do with the fact that she's a fragment of a shattered goddess.
• Hitman with a Heart: You become one if you choose the Damsel ending, where you don't pick up the pristine blade and side with the princess no matter what. The princess becomes a Princess Classic Damsel in Distress, and you gain the Voice of the Smitten, who is helplessly in love with her.
• Horrifying the Horror: In the "Adversary" route, you can outright come Back from the Dead off of sheer determination and confront the now-demonic Princess again, who goes from Blood Knight to outright traumatized at seeing your mangled wreck of a corpse get back up to fight her once more. She even expresses that your pulped brains are still on the walls around you two, and that "corpses aren't supposed to look like that!"
• Hostile Show Takeover: Several variations.
  • In the Tower version of Chapter II, it is possible for the Princess to notice the Narrator's existence, much to the Narrator's confusion and dawning horror. She then proceeds to use her god-like power to take control over the Narrator as he screams in terror, and then makes him repeat whatever she says.
  • The Wild version of Chapter III, starts with the (unseen) Princess doing her own version of the Opening Narration, much to the confoundment of the Narrator, who complains that she shouldn't be able to do that. When the Princess continues her narration, commenting on the state of the world and the Hero and the nature of the Narrator, he gets increasingly frustrated and tries repeatedly to wrest back control over the story, even ordering her to shut up, but to no avail. He is first able to reassert his control again if the player allows the Hero to separate from the Wild.
  • The Wraith: When she possesses the player's body she overrides the narrator, saying that she refuses to be described into submission, before narrating the sequence of actions herself
  • One chapter also showcases a variant where the takeover is performed by your ally. After dying the first time to the Razor, the Voice of the Cheated declares that he has no intention of going through the usual "You're on a path in the woods..." narration, and instead declares that you're gonna start in the cabin. Cue the cabin's interior with the Narrator describing the scene as normal, as if you just pressed the "Skip" button and proceeded through the game normally.
• Humans Through Alien Eyes: Considering that the only characters besides the Princess (the Player and Narrator), along with the creator of the Universe are Crow-like entities, it could be possible that The Princess is sort of like a reverse monster-girl.
• I Am Who?: The protagonist is eventually revealed to be 'The Long Quiet,' a nascent undying god that personifies Stability that was created to act as a counter-balance to the real Princess, the avatar of Death and Change.
• I Die Free: The only way to escape the "Good Ending" the Narrator crafts for you, is to kill yourself. The story ends with you plunging the pristine blade into your throat.
• Insistent Terminology:
  • The dagger in the cabin is always referred to as "the pristine blade" by the Narrator.
  • He also insists that the task is "slaying" the Princess, and not "killing" or "murdering" her.
• Interplay of Sex and Violence: The Razor and the Adversary routes really play this up. The Razor route is one of the few routes where you can explicitly flirt with the Princess, and to top it off, she reciprocates... before skewering you. Her final fight is also blisteringly intimate, as the Player makes a point of kicking every voice out of his head (including the Hero and the Narrator) before dueling her. Meanwhile the Adversary declares your Mutual Kill in the previous chapter to be "the best three minutes of [her] life." and describes your potential battling in a way that comes off as... exceedingly passionate and evocative of other acts. The Stubborn is not far behind her in terms of eagerness to start and continue fighting.
• I Reject Your Reality: In the full game's Damsel route, Chapter II will have the Hero and the Smitten insist that they're a Knight in Shining Armor here to save their beloved Damsel in Distress princess, and everything is going to go perfectly. The thing is, they're right. The shackle that binds the princess to the wall is too big to hold her, and the locked door inexplicably unlocks when the Hero says it does, with even the Narrator confused as to how this is happening.
• Ironic Echo: If you first approach the Princess unarmed but ultimately decide to slay her anyway, you can try to justify yourself by telling her that with the potential fate of the world on the line, trusting her simply isn't worth the risk. Should the Princess manage to escape the basement on her own and lock you inside after this, she'll taunt you by saying that you of all people should understand that opening the door wouldn't be "worth the risk".
• Ironic Hell: After the reveal of the true nature of the Princess and the Player, the whole game is revealed to be a form of this. The Princess is The Shifting Mound, a being that represents change, forced to play a role and with little capacity to meaningfully make choices while the Player is the Long Quiet, a being that represents stability and stagnation, forced to constantly chose and deal with rapidly changing circumstances.
• I'm Cold... So Cold...: You know the Shifting Mound is about to collect a vessel when whatever version of the Princess you're talking to suddenly begins to feel cold. So cold.
• Infernal Paradise: The Narrator's goal is to trap the entire multiverse in a single, unchanging moment of "eternal forgetting and remembering" — you get to see it if you slay the princess, where your reward is to remain in the mostly empty cabin for all eternity. He seems unable to comprehend why anyone wouldn't want this.
• Interface Screw: Tell the Shifting Mound that you would rather wait than forget and be sent to a different route, and she will close the game. Restart it and it'll take you right where you left off.
• Jigsaw Puzzle Plot: A variation. Pretty much every route have the potential to offer the player a little piece of insight into the characters, the nature of the world, and the backstory, if they pay attention, but getting the full picture will probably take multiple playthroughs, due to the mutual exclusivity of some routes. For instance, the purpose of the other shackle, i.e. the mysteriously empty one that appears next to the Princess on every route, is first fully disclosed on the Prisoner route (because it has grown to a size where it is hard to ignore), and only if the player chooses to interact with it.
• Jump Scare: Averted. While a few of the more "horrific" forms of the Princess are definitely scary, nothing just randomly pops out at you and screams from nowhere. The terror comes from how to deal with the princess, the situation you find yourself in after the Wham Episode, and what this could mean if you choose to see things to their logical conclusion.
• Kneel Before Zod: The Princess does this in "The Tower" ending. With a Compelling Voice, she commands you to kneel. Should you refuse, she yells at you to kneel even louder, at which point you have to obey her and kneel.
• Leitmotif: Each variant of the Princess has a theme that shares their name in the OST list. The Shifting Mound's own leitmotif has five different variations, each one more complex than the last to show her slowly growing with each vessel you deliver to her.
• Laser-Guided Karma: Can happen to you and The Princess across different routes, depending on your actions. For example, if you try to abandon her after allying with her in The Prisoner route, the doors immediately lock behind you, trapping you in the same room.
  The Princess: I told you that you'd regret saying that. But I didn't think you'd regret it so fast. And with so little effort on my part.
• Lemony Narrator: The Narrator is very talkative and is the one who directs you on your quest. He displays varying levels of irritation and enthusiasm depending on how much you obey him. When you start openly defying him, the consequences of your actions have him narrate your death in a manner that suggests the Narrator thinks you have it coming.
• Life-or-Limb Decision: Some routes have the princess escape her shackles by cutting off her hand or asking you to do it. Downplayed in that she does not show any pain or indication that she'll miss her appendage.
• Loophole Abuse: The Princess cannot leave the cabin without your help or if you die. When the Princess becomes less trustful of you, she tries to find ways to get around this. The Beast, for example, eats you alive and walks out of the cabin with you in her digestive tract.
• Lovecraft Lite: The Cosmic Horror Reveal turns the story into this. The Princess is the nascent form of the Shifting Mound, an alien goddess of change, and thus death - and her (and the Mound's) potential affections for you are entirely genuine, and as it turns out, you are her can; you're the Long Quiet, deity of stability and order. Thus it becomes a love story where the main characters happen to be Eldritch Abominations.

Tropes M to Z

• Made of Iron: The Princess in every route that has you attack her when she's not completely defenseless. The narration describes her as barely flinching when you stab her the first time, then tanking several hits from you that also barely slow her down. Oh, and even with all those wounds and with one arm missing, she still beats the crap out of you and manages to kill you in many of the routes. It's only by sheer dumb luck that you manage to stab her in the heart if you get into a fight with her.
• Major Injury Underreaction:
  • In several of the routes, the Princess will lose her right hand. She'll either get it cut off by you, or she'll chew through her own flesh to escape. Regardless of how she loses her hand, the Princess never reacts to what should be agonizing pain. And if you get into an ending in which you manage to stab the Princess or get into combat with her, she never reacts to the wounds. It's another sign that the Princess may not be all that she appears to be.
    Princess: [in a bored tone] That will be fine, I can lose an arm.
  • In the full game's Prisoner route, the Princess can cut her own head off with the pristine blade. And even then, she still doesn't react, and will thank the player for taking their head out of the cabin.
• Male Gaze: Given an odd if cheeky justification. The Princess' figure and look are molded by how the player interacts with her. In routes where she is little more than a wish-fulfilling fantasy, like the Damsel, her cleavage is larger and more accentuated by the camera. The more standoffish she becomes the less sexualized the angles, to the point she isn't human-looking to begin with.
• The Many Deaths of You: In general, there are many ways to die, and nearly every route involves your death at once point or another. In particular, the Razor and the Nightmare routes have you die so many times off-screen that you manage to collect every Voice, who are all collectively sick of dying.
• Mercy Kill: The Princess does this to you when you resist the Narrator's attempts to take over your body and force the story to go his way. She recognizes you're not in control of yourself, and apologizes before promising to "make it quick".
• Minimalist Cast: There is only the Player, the Voices (who may or may not be the same entity as the Player), the Princess, and the Narrator.
• Moral Myopia: The princess displays some of this trait during certain routes, to justify the cruelty of her actions. For example, in the Wraith route, she will tell you that "it's also rude to murder", leaving out the part where she gleefully killed you at least twice.
• Morton's Fork: Save for the true endings, every route ends with an objectively bad outcome for the Player and Princess.
  • For the Player, leaving the princess behind or fighting her usually leads to your death, even if you 'win' the fight. Other scenarios such as befriending her, or releasing her cause the world to end. Even killing her and not dying still causes the world to end.
  • For the Princess, she occasionally dies in her battles with the Players, and gets essentially reduced to nothingness in every other outcome.
• Multi-Armed and Dangerous: The Shifting Mound. Not only does it grab various princess avatars with multiple arms, but it covers each vessel with multiple arms and hands. There are so many arms behind the Shifting Mound that it looks like a jaunt of flame.
• Multiple Endings:
  • First, there's the "Good Ending" which occurs should you grab the knife, immediately slay the Princess, and leave. You accept your reward, which turns out to be an eternity spent in nothing, and the Narrator gives you a badly-made "Congratulations" card celebrating your victory. This ending is possible only on your first route; if you've already met the Shifting Mound, she'll cut things off at the card and remind you to get back to putting her together.
  • Another unique ending is Just as you were once nothing: For each route, play through Chapter I as usual but don't go to the cabin in Chapter II. (This means never doing The Stranger.) Each time this happens, the Shifting Mound is denied a potential vessel, and as more and more timelines are cut off she becomes increasingly desperate for you to change course until she finally says that if you lose one more part of her it's over for both of you. Turn away from the cabin again, and both you and she no longer have a way out of the Long Quiet, now doomed to remain there until your consciousnesses stop existing.
  • The final encounter with the Shifting Mound splits off into four endings. The final three have additional variations depending on whether the Princess you met first was the harsh Princess (knife on you), the soft Princess (no knife on you), or The Stranger (ignored the cabin altogether).
    • There are no endings: Accept The Shifting Mound's offer to become gods together by telling her you're ready to move on and awaken. You'll both crack through the confines of the construct and step into the beyond together, ending the old universe and starting cycle of life and death anew, but the two of you appear to be happy together.
    • A new and unending dawn: Refuse The Shifting Mound, and try to slay the princess. The Voice of the Hero takes you to her heart, inside the cabin. Take the pristine blade and choose to slay her one last time. How sad this is can depend on which variant of the princess you met first and how much you talk things out before ending things, She'll tell you that she loves you before she's Killed Off for Real. You'll awaken to your godhood and the new world made by it with just you and all of the Voices, who are all happy it's finally over (except Smitten). Now you have to figure out what to do with yourselves. A variation of this ending, called A new and unending dawn, and everybody hates you occurs if you mocked the Voices' concern when you approached the mirror at the end of two routes. Instead of looking forward to a new eternity, the Voices remember your callousness and promise to torment you for it.
    • And? What happens next?: Don't pick up the pristine blade when the Voice of the Hero takes you to the Shifting Mound's heart. Sit with the Princess and talk to her instead. Your only option after talking will be to leave the cabin together, but forgoing your ascension to godhood. In this route, the princess is drawn with slightly more realistic proportions and speaks with a much more natural tone, suggesting that this is what she's really like. You both intend to face whatever is out there together. You can even give the Princess an Anguished Declaration of Love before you go, which she reciprocates.
    • You're on a path in the woods: Pick up the pristine blade when the Voice of the Hero takes you to the Shifting Mound's heart. Accept the Princess's plan to avoid choosing between killing her and leaving with her as gods, resetting both of your memories and starting the loop all over again.
• Mutual Kill: In several endings, you succeed in killing the Princess but at the cost of your own life. In the Adversary ending, the Voice of the Stubborn is eager for a rematch. So much so that he wills you and her back to life multiple times to allow the two of you to kill each other over and over.
• My God, What Have I Done?:
  • In the Witch route, you can optionally give the blade to the Princess as a gesture of trust. She gleefully kills you with it in revenge for betraying her in Chapter 1, only for her joy to turn to remorse as she realizes you were being genuine this time.
    The Witch: Why? Why did you let me do this?!
  • If you do slay the Princess, the Hero grimly notes that he feels like he's done something terrible, and dismisses the Narrator's attempts to reassure him.
• Nameless Narrative: The Narrator and the Voices aren't referred to with any name, only receiving epithets through the subtitles, the Princess is referred to as such by the Voices and Narrator with her subtitles having no name for her, and the Player is neither given a title in his text nor referred to by one. Justified in the case of the voices who aren't really people to begin with, and later the Princess and player character, who are Artificial Gods (titled the Shifting Mound and the Long Quiet respectively) who never had "real" names to begin with.
• No-Holds-Barred Beatdown: The Princess gives several of these to you in the routes where you don't immediately kill her. Whether you give as good as you got depends on several factors, but it always ends with your death.
• Nonstandard Game Over: No route can be retread on the same save. You can close off your options by picking any route that isn't The Stranger, then turning away from the cabin. There won't be a vessel for the Shifting Mound to claim that way. If you destroy enough routes like this, it will become impossible to finish Her.
• Never Going Back to Prison: The Princess will do anything to leave the cabin. She can forgive you for trying to kill her, but any attempt to leave her behind will incur her wrath. Leaving her in the basement transforms her into the Nightmare, who will engulf you in visions of her torment to convince you to let her leave, with her repeatedly yelling "let me out!". Killing the Nightmare or leaving the Spectre behind transforms the Princess into the Wraith, who will forcibly hijack your body to leave, showing absolutely no remorse for doing so.
  Player: Look, we're even now. You killed me and then I killed you, water under the bridge right?
  Princess: I think you forgot something.. like the part that all this started when you left me a pit to languish all by myself!
• Not Quite Dead: If you kill the Princess without dying yourself, you check her pulse and discover that her heart is still beating. She uses the opportunity to stab you in the neck, and smirks at you as you both bleed out.
• Omega Ending: After going through enough routes, you gain the ability to unlock some of the 'true' endings via interacting with the Shifting Mound. All of them provide a reasonable 'end' to the game, with four of them breaking the loop, and the fifth one's ending itself being continuing the loop, but from the very start, even wiping the Princess's memories this time.
• Ominous Visual Glitch: During the finale, the Shifting Mound glitches and distorts when presenting the more traditionally horrifying Vessels (the Nightmare, Moment of Clarity, Spectre, Wraith, both Greys and the Deconstructed Damsel). Before then, the Nightmare does this regularly, even from chapter one where she's still nominally a normal princess. In the Moment of Clarity route, the entire constuct basically looks like a malfunctioning video game.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business: In "The Nightmare" ending, you get to the cabin only to find the door is already open and the Princess has transformed into an Eldritch Abomination with no discernible human features aside from a seriously messed-up face. The normally unflappable Narrator panics and asks "What did you do?! She's supposed to be an ordinary Princess!". It's also one route where The Narrator uses "kill" instead of "slay", which the Hero comments on.
• Painting the Medium:
  • The subtitles for what the Princess is saying change depending on her attitude towards you. If she likes you, her subtitles are white with soft red outlines in a thin font. If she's hostile to you, her subtitles are red with a dark red outline in a bold font.
  • At the culmination of The Stranger route your options on what to do with her are in fact one decision, but formatted and phrased as if they were separate. Hovering over "either" of them highlights all "three" at once, turning it into one paradoxical act. It is simultaneously slaying the princess, freeing her and leaving her behind.
  • During The Tower route, you can end up being forced to kill yourself as the princess commands you. If you look at your other options they are greyed out, and if you read them you will realize they aren't options at all, but a series of statements that form a monologue. The princess is talking to you through what normally would be your action options, driving home further how she is completely in control of you.
  • In "The Moment of Clarity" route, you appear with every unlockable voice, who remember dying and restarting many more times than you, and when you find the Princess, the only clickable options are the ones to let her free, while every other choice is greyed out, telling you, among other things that there are no other choices and that you've already tried everything else.
• Pay Evil unto Evil: What the Princess does to you if you befriend her and then try to kill her, or befriend her and then try to leave the cabin.
• Perpetual Smiler: The Damsel in Chapter II of the full game is nearly always depicted with a big warm smile on her face. This is true even if you choose to slay her at some point, where she'll still be smiling even as she dies with tears streaming down her face.
• Power Floats:
  • In The Tower route. The Princess, now a towering goddess, floats above the ground instead of resting on it. Along with her Compelling Voice and the fact she is also apparently glowing, it's a sign that trying to defy someone this openly powerful will not end well.
  • In The Nightmare route, where the Princess becomes nightmarish and ghostlike. To the point where she can even potentially cause organ failure via mere proximity.
• The Power of Love: So powerful in fact, that the Voice of the Smitten ignores the Narrator's words and wills an ending where he and his beloved princess leave the cabin! Until she's taken by the Entity.
• Power of Trust: The Narrator and Princess will insist that's what the current situation is, when trying to persuade you to trust them over the other while concealing key information from you. The narrator claims the princess becomes more powerful and destructive, the more you know about her. This theme is particularly resonant in the Thorn and Wild routes. In the Wild route, she merges her consciousness with yours. If you question it twice or ask to separate, it falls apart leaving her wounded. If you instead fully trust her, she'll work with you and the other voices to break through the ceiling of the narrator's worldlet.
  Princess: At the end of the day whatever the two of us have going on down here, it's about trust, blind trust.
  Narrator (when asked for evidence) You just have to trust me!
• Pre Ass Kicking One Liner: If you (literally) stab the Princess in the back.
  Princess: You bastard! If I have to kill you to leave this place, I'll do it.
  Princess [if warned but still betrayed]: I'll go ahead, and put you out of your misery.

• Pretty Princess Powerhouse: The Princess is very slim and delicate-looking. But as you go through different routes, it's clear that she is freakishly strong, and will use that strength to literally rip you to pieces if she gets the drop on you. To the point where there's only one ending where you survive an encounter fighting against her, because you fatally stab her before she can react or free herself. Even losing one of her hands barely slows her down.
• Predator-Prey Friendship: Zig-zagged. The player character is shown to be some kind of bird person and the Princess has something of a feline motif, considering the Beast, the Den, and to a lesser extent, the Witch. It varies what the PC ultimately thinks of the Princess, but she's shown to love him no matter what.
• Poor Communication Kills: Many of the more violent routes are a result of you, the Princess, or the Narrator not properly communicating their intentions. For example, in the Prisoner route, if she gets a hold of your knife, she decapitates herself. She silently expects you to carry her head outside, to avoid the Narrator's suspicion, but it's possible to miss this, in which case, this act will actually kill her, and send you on the path to the Drowned Grey.
• Princess Classic: If you side with the Princess completely, but without picking up the pristine blade, Chapter 2 will give you the Damsel, where the princess is a sweet, innocent evolution of the Princess who the Voice of the Smitten is completely in love with.
• Reality Warping Is Not a Toy: A consequence of the princess being influenced by the Player's view of her.
  • Running at the princess without talking to her enables you to slay her easily. However, the more you let her act confident, the more she will brutalize you after being attacked.
  • Both the player and the princess warp reality based on their perceptions(player) and their experiences(princess). This turns out to be the reason the narrator is so keen to keep you in the dark, any extra details you get could complicate your perception and make the task harder.
  • Even an already-successful assassination can be foiled by this trope. If you write her off as dead and leave, she's dead. If you suspect that something's off or check for a pulse, she springs to life and kills you.
  • In the Adversary route, if you somehow manage to slay her after she baits you into attacking, the Voice of the Stubborn is eager for a rematch, so much so that he wills her back to life, so that you can keep fighting and killing each other multiple more times over.
  • In The Wraith, the Narrator tries to stall her escape and possession of you by making the hallway longer. Realizing that she can warp reality too, she takes over the narration, and warps to the door.
• Rocks Fall, Everyone Dies: If you continually avoid entering the cabin, the screen goes black as the Narrator comments that the world has ended and killed every living person, including you, because you didn't slay the princess.
• Romance Arc: Ultimately, Slay the Princess is a love story between two Eldritch Abominations.
• Rule of Cool: In Chapter I, freeing the Princess from her shackle means cutting off her arm. On a playthrough with the developers, Matt brings up the complaint he'd heard that it would make more sense to sever her hand at the wrist than to start above the shackle, where her arm is thicker. They chose the spot they went with because of how it looks.
• Sanity Slippage: With each loop you restart, you gradually lose more of your sanity. You also gain an additional voice in your head, depending on the previous ending you get.
• Save the Princess: The title is a play on this, with the goal being to slay and not save her. At least, that's what the Narrator wants you to do.
• Schmuck Bait: In the Prisoner route, there's an extra neck shackle beside the princess. Her dark smile, when she suggests that it will probably fit and the other voices warning you against approaching it; makes it clear that something bad will happen if you approach it. Sure enough, if you do it suddenly fastens around you and repels your blade through some mysterious magnetism. Ironically though this is the only way for both you and the princess to escape in one piece, uninjured in this chapter as time accelerates and the entire prison corrodes around you. In The Razor Route, the princess pretend she needs rescuing while making multiple references to stabbing you to death.
• Second-Person Narration: The Narrator describes everything as if it's happening to you. This is despite the fact that you're clearly not human, as your arm appears attached to some kind of bird creature, as evidenced by what little you can see of yourself.
• Seen It All: The Voice of the Cold sounds extremely bored, expressing no reaction whatsoever when the Princess shows up as a ghost.
• Shout-Out: Mostly found in the achievements.
  • "Strike me down..." is a reference to Return of the Jedi, which is the Trope Namer for Strike Me Down with All of Your Hatred!
  • "That which cannot die cannot die" features a rendition of the infamous "Epic Handshake" meme from Predator.
  • "Ahab" is a reference to Moby-Dick.
  • "Talking Heads" is a reference to Talking Heads.
    • One of the achievements are "Burning down the house", which is also the title one of their most well-known songs.
  • Two separate achievements are called "The Exorcist" and "The Exorcist III".
  • "The Scorpion" and "The Frog" reference the fable The Scorpion and The Frog.
• Sickening "Crunch!": How the narrator describes your bones and organs rupturing when you engage the Princess. Complete with appropriately revolting sound cues.
• Sickeningly Sweethearts:
  • In the Damsel route, taking the advice of the Voice of the Smitten and freeing the Princess has the two of you joyfully leaving the cabin together as the Narrator loudly voices his disgust.
  • The "Thorn" version of Chapter 3 marks the only place in the game where you can kiss the Princess. If the Voice of the Smitten is present and you use the blade to set the Princess free, you'll be given the opportunity to kiss her.^note You can get the Smitten by telling the Witch she's beautiful after giving her the blade. The Narrator is forced to describe it in melodramatic detail as the Voices egg him on, though he's clearly furious about it.
• Silk Hiding Steel: The Princess is this depending on what action and which route you take. She's a massive physical threat, and even the pristine blade might not save you if the Princess decides to fight you. The Narrator can potentially describe the Princess crushing your organs if you get into a fight with her.
• Sinister Silhouettes: In "The Beast" ending. Once you get down to the basement, the Princess stalks you from the shadows. All you ever see of her are glowing eyes, a clawed hand, and sharp fangs.
• Splash of Color: Due to the nature of the game's world, in the rare cases where a bit of color is present—either in an element of the environment or in a change to the Princess' design or appearance—it really stands out.
• Surprisingly Realistic Outcome: On the route to The Damsel ending, the Princess is a bit taken aback with a dose of reality hitting her square in the face. The Princess here is a Princess Classic Damsel in Distress who has never so much as held a weapon before. She tries to give you a quick Mercy Kill while you're Fighting from the Inside against the Narrator, but the fact that she's so inexperienced with a weapon means that your death isn't quick and painless; it's messy, painful, and slow. She has to stab you multiple times, all while repeatedly saying that she's sorry, before it eventually does you in.
• Survival Mantra: In The Nightmare, the Voice of the Paranoid recites "Heart. Lungs. Liver. Nerves." to stop the protagonist's body from shutting down out of fear. You can hear him still going in the background even after the usual arguments between you, the Narrator, and the Princess start.
• Tareme Eyes: In the loop immediately after you get killed for helping the Princess without grabbing the pristine blade from the table, the next version of her you encounter is arguably the most benign and human, with large wide eyes and a Princess Classic demeanour. Appropriately, the chapter is called "The Damsel".
• Talking Is a Free Action: Subverted. Some options are labeled "(Explore)", which indicates an option where you can safely get some exposition or ask questions that won't progress the plot. However, this only barely applies to options that have you talking with the Narrator or the other Voices. The Princess does not have to let you talk and may make a move even if you choose an "Explore" option. Even dialogue options you chose earlier in a conversation will impact future choices and options. For example, when you encounter the Beast, the Voice of the Hunted advises you to move immediately, because you're out in the open and vulnerable; if you choose to talk to the her, she will eat you alive immediately. Another example is that the Princess will refuse to hold a proper conversation with you if you bring the knife into the basement until you heed her order to drop it.
• Technician/Performer Team-Up: The Voices of the Hunted and Stubborn pull off one of these in two chapters: the Eye of the Needle and the Den. The Hunted, with his superior survival instincts, agility and strategic nature, is the Technician, while the Stubborn, being incredibly strong and driven only by his potentially death-defying desire for a good fight, is the Performer. Individually, they struggle against their respective versions of the Princess, as the Hunted's lack of initiative leads to the player usually only being able to escape from the Beast, while the Stubborn's lack of self-preservation means the player can at best score repeated Mutual Kills with the Adversary. But in this chapter, where they are made to work together, their combined skillsets allows them to overcome their respective weaknesses and successfully kill the Eye of the Needle and the Den, who are both even stronger than the above.
• Thought-Aversion Failure: In "The Adversary", if the protagonist and the Adversary have a Mutual Kill in a fight to the death that both revive from, the Narrator panics. He desperately tries to keep the player from following the line of thought that follows the Princess coming back from a lethal injury. Cue nearly every option being 'The Princess Can't Die', with the few variations being ineffectual attempts to avoid the idea, such as '(Lie) The Princess Can Die'.
• The Maker: An entity who created the Player, Narrator, Princess, and the "world" they inhabit, who was mortal yet had quite a bit of power. Little is known about them, however they are implied to be a Crow-like entity similar to the Player and Narrator.
• Title Drop: At many different points in the game, one of the options simply reads "[Slay the Princess]". Whether you're successful is determined by surrounding circumstances.
• Tomato in the Mirror: It doesn't take long for the player to realize that the Princess is a Humanoid Abomination at best and Eldritch Abomination at worst. That's not the twist — the real twist is that the player character himself is a being of the same cosmic scale.
• Transformation Horror: At the end of a couple different chapters, the Princess is aware that she's changing and seems horrified. The Specter who'll become the Wraith says she hadn't wanted to hurt anyone but thanks to you is becoming something so much worse. The Tower, forced to hurt you with her hands when her Compelling Voice fails and about to become the Fury, feels herself "twisting into something new. Something dull. Something defiled. What have you done to me?"
• Uncanny Valley: The Princess is beautiful, but slightly uncanny even when acting completely innocent and benign.
• Unreliable Narrator: The Narrator, natch. It's very clear he's not being completely honest with you about your mission, or the Princess' true nature.
• Unspoken Plan Guarantee: If the Voice of the Hunted joins you for the Eye of the Needle's chapter, then he'll lay out his plan to slay her: enter the basement, provoke her into chasing you, then lure her out to the surface where you have room to dodge her attacks. Following this plan goes exactly as intended, and even leads to one of the rare instances where the player can definitively win a fight against the Princess instead of just settling for a Mutual Kill.
• Video Game Caring Potential: At the end of each route, the player character has the option to reassure the voices in their head when they start panicking at the sight of the mirror which "ends" them.
• Video Game Cruelty Potential: At the end of each route when your various voices become distressed at the sight of the mirror, you can coldly tell them that it's their end, but you yourself will be fine. (Which is true from a certain point of view.) In one ending, your voices will call you out for this. If you've told them that it's their end on at least two occasions, one variant of a final ending will have most of the Voices prepare to torment you as payback, even replacing the achievement that you would have gotten for the ending with a mock version.
• Video Game Cruelty Punishment: While not totally consistent, some of your more brutal cases of suffering a Cruel and Unusual Death tend to be Laser-Guided Karma because of how poorly you chose to try to slay the princess. Usually immediate actions are met with fairly immediate responses, but doing things like waiting until she fully trusts you before sticking the Pristine Blade in her back tends to result in very bad circumstances.
• Voice of the Legion: The Princess' voice is creepy in The Nightmare route. Justified with The Stranger and the Shifting Mound as they both have multiple heads.
• Well-Intentioned Extremist: Possibly the Narrator. He is hellbent on making sure you fulfill your mission and kill the Princess, as he genuinely believes that she will end the world if she gets free. And if you defy him too much, he personally takes matters into his own hands.
• Wham Episode: In the full game, one of these always occurs on the end of your first choice. The Princess will get grabbed as a vessel by the Shifting Mound, and you'll be pulled into the Long Quiet to meet with her. The Shifting Mound will then explain that she needs more vessels, and she needs more bodies, which necessitates sending you down more routes. It's through this that the entire game shifts into a Cosmic Horror Story.
• Wham Line: The final time you look in the mirror, you don't see your reflection. You see... something else.
  The Player: Are you me?
  The Narrator: I think you know what I am.
• What the Hell, Hero?:
  • The Narrator will chastise the Player whenever he goes against his orders and guilt-trip him for choosing his own curiosity over the fate of the world.
  • If the Player asks her what she wants to do when she leaves (without entering the basement with the knife), she'll deflect by asking if he's using freedom as a bargaining chip for the "right answer".
  • If you decide to let the princess disarm and kill you, mid-fight in Chapter 1, or seemingly mindlessly follow her orders in The Tower the narrator/voices will react accordingly:
    The Narrator: Really?
    Voice of the Hero: All right. I'm done with this. I'm just going to sit in the corner. Let me know when we get our agency back.
• A Winner Is You: Parodied.
  • Successfully slaying the Princess in Chapter I and accepting the reward results in the Narrator presenting you with a crudely-drawn card saying "Good ending!! YOU DID IT!!! You saved EVERYONE!" and a cut to credits. Unless you've already met the Shifting Mound, in which case she'll snap you out of it and leave you with no option but to kill yourself to reset the loop.
  • Surprisingly, you can reach a similar scenario in a Chapter II, the Prisoner route. You can slay her without dying yourself, accept your reward, and receive the card. The only difference is that you have the Skeptic with you, who will always call bullshit and force you to kill yourself for another loop.
• Women Prefer Strong Men: Played with when you and the Princess manage to mutually kill each other. The Princess takes time in her dying moments to compliment your strength, even describing the fatal encounter as "fun". When you don't put up as much of a fight, she mocks your weakness as she crushes your windpipe. And in "The Tower", the Princess is a bit more receptive to you if you take the pristine blade with you.
• You're Insane!: You have the option to tell the Nightmare version of the Princess this:
  The Hero: You're a lunatic. You know that, right?
  The Nightmare: I am what I am. And right, now I'm in control.

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Finally made it out. Wait... why is it so cold...?

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