"a 1-Star Review of Slay the Princess, a Terrible Game"
hello! i've been on a kick of playing games that are not very good. if they're bad in an uninteresting way, i leave them be. if they're bad in an interesting way—now that's the stuff, baby. so after PIXEL PUZZLE MAKEOUT LEAGUE and IN STARS AND TIME i played SLAY THE PRINCESS and had... such an interestingly bad time i felt moved to write one of the only critical rejections the game's ever gotten. we spend about 9 minutes getting through some preliminaries for tropeyness/lampshading, oel visual novels, and metafiction; we do an acknowledgement of good things about the game (art, voice acting, skeletal narrative design, prose styling) and then take down the huge problems in the game's overall writing and approach. i've been getting a fair bit of pushback for it, which is fair i guess. a number of people have tut-tutted me for saying "this is bad" instead of "i don't like this." that's bothered me a lot, because it's a complete misapprehension about what criticism is. of course whenever i say something sucks it's my opinion—i am unable to have beliefs that aren't my opinions. the difference between "it's not for me" and "this is ontologically evil" is ultimately a matter of politeness and nothing more.
anyway, you can find the video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0NSsQfxEsNU. i would much appreciate your watch, wherever you fall on this game.