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Slay the Princess
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Scary Moments (Nightmare Fuel) in 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 be brutally injured are varying degrees of terrifying. It says something when being stabbed to death or choked out under the Princess' knee are some of the kinder ways she goes about murdering you.
  • 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. And if she chews her hand off, the CG showing her biting into her wrist places a disturbing amount of emphasis on her teeth, making it look less like she's doing it to escape and more like she's engaging in autocannibalism.
  • 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 sadomasochistic 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, and believes you feel the same way.
    • The Fury wants to torture the player indefinitely so that he feels her pain.
    • The Damsel lacks any agency of her own and mindlessly goes along with anything he says.
    • The Burned Grey wishes to be with him forever, and is happy to burn him alive to keep him from leaving, whilst the Drowned Grey wants to drown him.
    • The Cage wants to make him give up escaping due to being The Fatalist.
    • The Wild wants to stay fused with him forever.
    • The Wraith wants to force possess him.
    • The Princess And The Dragon (particularly the harsh variant) wants to keep him in her head.
  • 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 fact that the Narrator is so terrified of death that he somehow forcibly separated a divine being, turning them into the Long Quiet and the Shifting Mound, and then tries to get the Long Quiet to kill the Princess. And he’s so determined to have the Princess killed that if you free her and try to leave the cabin with her, the Narrator will hijack your body and try to force you to do it! It’s terrifying just how far he’s willing to go to get what he wants. And there's no way to kick him out, either; all you can do is either surrender control entirely or alert the Princess, whereupon she gives you a Mercy Kill.

    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.'
  • While the Unfinished Mound is generally a Benevolent Abomination, her personality does change based on the vessels you give her, and if you give enough angry vessels it quickly starts changing for the worse. While the Satisfied Mound is universally compassionate and forgiving, the Unsatisfied Mound focuses entirely on her awakening with no consideration of yours, turns cold and uncaring to your suffering, dismisses people as too small and temporary for her to care about and can even directly threaten your life. Given she's on the cusp of Godhood, the implications aren't great for the fate of the world. You're building the Princess as you go, and if you're not careful, you might not like the Princess you end up with...
    After bringing three vessels and threatening her: If that remains your choice when all is said and done, then you may try. I will regret destroying you, if that is what it comes to.
    After bringing four vessels and threatening her: Conflict is my nature. There is nothing I want more than to finally perceive the shape of myself from every angle, and to turn that shape on you.

    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, 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, made even worse by how genuinely satisfied the Adversary looks during it all.

    Apotheosis Route 
  • The updated chapter continues after the Apotheosis emerges, and one of the outcomes is that (whether or not you want to) the Apotheosis takes you as she breaks the construct to freedom. Since you are the Long Quiet, this causes you immense suffering, accompanied with a unique and horrifying sound effect as you are unraveled. You can choose to make the Princess suffer with you, in which she will scream in agony in a way she never has before. She will either be restrained by the tendrils of you or be unraveled herself, both of which are daunting to witness.
  • Another of the outcomes is throwing the Pristine Blade at her eye, and to the surprise of the voices, it actually hurts her, and she screams in even more agony than in above. In a fit of rage, the Princess responds by completely incinerating you in a light, burning up all your voices and even the Narrator in the process.

    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 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.

    Cage Route 
  • The environment the Cage is in (and the Cage herself) is quite a horrifying sight, as chains make up the floor of the cabin when you reach it. Step forward and you fall into the 'basement' wherein the Cage resides. After a brief time of free falling, you're hooked up in chains, the form of the Princess coming into view. She now wears a dress completely covered in chains and her decapitated head is now in a cage. As the Cage steps forward, the chains become increasingly taut as she makes her way towards you, all whilst being completely apathetic. The whole thing looks positively like a Hellraiser scene.
  • The scene where your and the Cage's bodies fight has such a heavy aura of Interplay of Sex and Violence that it's unbearable!
  • Assuming you've the Paranoid with you, even if you insist on tossing the blade, he'll overtake you and clamp the blade to you, as if implicitly agreeing with the Cage's fatalistic outlook.

    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, and then you're taken to the Burned Grey route...
    • As sad as you have to watch the Damsel die, if you slay the Deconstructed version, the Voice of the Smitten will get upset as she lies dying (with blood coming from the stab wound in her paper cleavage with the blade protruding from it) and wail aloud that he should be sorry and not her. The distorted music that plays in the background simply doesn't help... which, combined with the Smitten's wailing, can come across as Narm.

    Den Route 
  • In the Pristine Cut, the fight between the Den and Player becomes something out of John Carpenter's The Thing (1982).
    • The Voice of the Hero notes that perhaps eating the Den like she's eating the Player might heal their wounds and make them stronger. If you chose to give in to the primal instincts, the Voice of the Hunted loudly proclaims they've become predator and the fight becomes a Cannibalism Super Power-fueled brawl as he transforms the Player into an Animalistic Abomination complete with Horror Hunger. By the end, the Voice of the Hunted has become almost as bestial as the Den herself, while the Voice of The Hero weakly states his regret for ever saying anything and the Voice of The Stubborn gives him a verbal beatdown for inadvertently getting them into this mess.
  • The fight itself contains some of the most graphic and downright horrid displays in the entire game. The Narrator describes how the Player bites off the Den's arm and devours it in order to heal himself, and as the two feral Animalistic Abominations trade bolts and blows, the fight devolves even further into Body Horror.
  • The Player and the Den have become so hyper focused by their Horror Hunger that they don't realise they've started to merge, becoming a bleeding, misshapen avian-feline Animalistic Abomination that's still trying to eat itself, showing how both parties have been reduced to little more than savage animals operating on primal instincts.
  • If you try to leave the tunnel without the Den, a stray thought causes the tunnel to collapse in on itself, pinning you both in place with no option but to slowly starve to death. And the Narrator, annoyed by you shifting blame around and/or the Skeptic's self-defeating comments, makes sure to go into excruciating detail about how much you and the Princess suffer. When the rubble clears as the world fades, you catch a glimpse of her emaciated body.

    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. In the original release, it is impled she would have done this to you forever had the Shifting Mound not interfered. In the Pristine Cut, you see the results play out.
    • Reaching her from the Adversary after trying to fight her barehanded, the Fury is less sadistic but no less brutal, quickly stripping you of flesh, muscle, organs and bone to see what part of it is "you". The only thing more horrifying is that it's possible, with the aid of the Contrarian and the Stubborn, to keep going, moving forward to reach her and stab her in the heart even when you're nothing at all.
    • Reaching her by defeating the Tower or actively ruining the fight for the Adversary makes the process horrifically drawn out. Removing you atom by atom, piece by piece, twisting your body horrifically for who knows how long until it breaks not even the Voice of the Stubborn, but herself. Her taunts to see if what's left is still defiant take on a more desperate tone as you're horrifically twisted and mangled again and again.
      Are you still there? Are you still you?
    • If, after defeating the Tower, you try to fight her again, the Fury, not wanting to give you another chance, completely destroys what remains of your body and splatters it all over the walls of the basement, ensuring you won't even do anything to slay her. You are laid bare, forever stuck in agony as you can do nothing but perceive the horrific state you're in. It would have been an And I Must Scream ending had the Voice of the Stubborn not intervened.

    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. In her subsequent appearances she'll still be a charred corpse.
    • Murder the Prisonernote , 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. And it's apparent you would have died by drowning had the Shifting Mound not intervened to stop the water from filling your lungs and take the Drowned Grey with her.
  • The Drowned Grey route is made even more nightmarish by the fact that this incarnation of the Princess is the most inscrutable. She speaks exactly once, in a way that reveals almost nothing of her motivations or state of mind, and doesn't react to anything the Player does or says before or after. She's just there - staring.

    Happily Ever After Route 
  • Happily Ever After is very, very reminiscent of an abusive relationship. The Voice Of The Smitten silently looms over the Princess, a massive and monstrous shadow that's talked around if acknowledged at all, but whose presence is terrifying and inescapable. He whispers sweet nothings into the Princess' ears while having total control over everything in the room and physically preventing her from leaving. Meanwhile, the Princess is terrified, constantly monitoring everything she says and does to avoid accidentally angering him, contriving frantic excuses for what's happening and having a full-on panic attack when you refuse to go along with it. For all the magic and bird gods it's disturbingly realistic, and all the worst for the player because this silent abuser is The Smitten. It's chilling to see the love-drunk poet devolve into this...unless, even worse, is this what he was always really like under the Purple Prose?
  • The buildup towards it is a sudden and disturbing twist in the otherwise lighthearted Damsel route. You tell the Damsel that you want to stay in the cabin, and she desperately tries to say no but can't bring herself to do something that makes you unhappy. Still, she's clearly distressed with the whole idea, and when the Smitten realizes that she'd rather leave the cabin than stay with him forever, he panics, ranting about how the cabin and the narrator are poisoning her mind and that she'd never willing choose anything over him in a very dark side to his previous Thinks Like a Romance Novel personality. But there is a single point that can be set as where Smitten loses his mind. When he suggests showing the princess the contents of your heart, the sudden switch to a chillingly lucid tone is a red flag that this will not end well. Then he rips the Player's chest open by using the Player's bare hands, literally showing her your heart in the hope this will convince the Damsel to stay with him. Jesus.
  • What really throws everything into focus is that this route is the one where the Narrator ceases to fight you. Everything has gone so wrong that even this incarnation of the thanatophobic Greater-Scope Villain decides death isn't such a bad thing after all compared to this.
    • Even worse than that, it's implied that the Happily Ever After version of the Construct is the closest approximation to what the Narrator (and by extension the Creator) wants reality to be: an endless plateau of life where nothing dies or ends, sure, but nothing is allowed to change or grow. The Narrator is seeing his perfect realm play out before his eyes, and he hates it. And because each route's Narrator is a distinct entity with no shared memories, he can do absolutely nothing with this realization. That's pretty damn terrifying from an existential standpoint.

    Moment of Clarity Route 
  • 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 (or eight in the Pristine Cut) 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 philosophizes 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 others 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.
  • Much of the Moment of Clarity's dialogue strongly implies she went to very thorough methods to "mold" you into the broken husk she desires.
  • 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.
  • The Pristine Cut makes only one change to this route, but it's a pretty big one: instead of having a slightly more cracked mask than the Nightmare, the Moment of Clarity has a shattered mask that obviously reveals that she straight up doesn't have a face. At the end of the route, the mask is gone entirely, and the Moment of Clarity's "head" looks like a giant hole surrounded by hair.

    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 the 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. And when the narration mentions the worms, it's shown in the illustration. The Princess' corpse, lying in a grave as a horde of worms are either descending down towards her, or are already consuming her.
  • 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.

    Princess and the Dragon Route 
  • In this chapter, you get a rare chance to see the events of a chapter through the Princess' perspective. You are trapped in the basement, unable to move and, as a Voice in the Princess' head, unable to make any decisions for yourself. Suddenly, a large, winged bird-like creature with a knife walks down the stairs and stares at you. That's you. That's what you look like to the Princess.
    • The Voices in Your Head are now in charge of your body, and you begin to realize how scary it is to be approached by someone who will either stare blankly at you for what's implied to be minutes at a time or randomly switch between one of three drastically different personalities, two of which have no problem driving that knife into your heart and one that can be otherwise convinced into doing so.
    • When a Voice is in charge of the body, they show through different animations that display their body language and facial features. The Voice of the Hero looks very hesitant and guarded, as if he's constantly waiting to see if there's a way to settle this without fighting. The Voice of the Cold has dreary half-lidded eyes, but is always prepared to kill. But when the Voice of the Opportunist is in charge of the Player, he makes himself known with several different cocky smiles (mind you, the Player is otherwise never depicted with any facial features besides his eyes, which makes this especially creepy) and playfully dangling the knife in his hands, as if to say he's taking great pleasure in knowing that your life is in his hands and he can kill you whenever he sees fit.
    • The worst part about the Opportunist's smile is how it reveals how "you" look. You are indeed bird-like, oddly humanoid but still too avian. You have a long beak (sometimes), filled with eerily human/horse like teeth, but then it disappears when another Voice is in control. Your beak/mouth can curve to imitate smiles and frowns, but they look wrong. Almost like it's imitating the way that the Princess' smiles and frowns might look without the understanding of how those muscles work. It paints a strange picture of what, exactly, "you" are.
  • The Opportunist's exaggerated Chronic Backstabbing Disorder, played for laughs in every other route... isn't so funny here. Without you to rein him in and with only the Hero and the Cold to hold him back, he's taken de facto control of the Long Quiet's body, and he has no interest in letting the Player get back in the driving seat. He cruelly gloats about how he'll kill you and the Princess, dangling the knife with a warped Slasher Smile before driving it into your heart. True to form, he'll flip-flop once you get back in the body...but if you leave again, he'll waste no time making it permanent.
    Sorry, girlie, but we're seeing this through!
  • If you slay the Princess after returning to your body,note  you’re treated to an absolute Mind Screw of a sequence where you and the Princess end up merging into one being. The visuals are deranged, seeing you and the Princess spin around flickering between the regular art and stencil while a deranged cacophony screeches on. Eventually, once it all ends, you and the Princess are now Sharing a Body, looking at their hands and realising how pointless all of this violence really was.
    You are Power and you are Weakness. You are Hope and you are Despair. You are Acceptance and you are Rejection.
    You are the Canvas and the Painter.
    You are the Victim and you are the Victimizer. You are Life and you are Death. The Hero and the Princess.The Princess and the Dragon.
    You slam the door in your own face.

    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 endless 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: Of course we died. We couldn't land a single blow on her and she broke every bone in our body before she decided to 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 grayed 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.
    • Not even The Narrator is safe from her power. If you decide to do something in her favour (killing yourself at her orders or pledging yourself and trying to free her), she’ll eventually take notice of Him trying to resist from the inside. After giving him a small "The Reason You Suck" Speech, she takes control of The Narrator with her Compelling Voice, and he screams in a horrifying way that sounds like he got the life sucked out of him. When he talks again, it’s an unsettling, mindless drone with the Tower’s voice over it, signifying that he has now been controlled by her.
      • The lead-up to the Psychic-Assisted Suicide is pretty bad enough, when the Tower compels you to pick up the blade and stand up, but then she tells you: "Take that knife in your hand and slit your throat." *shudder* But then it all culminates in the suicide ritual itself where, after the hijacking, the protective barrier that the Narrator used to save you via his Author Powers is now gone, leaving you to start the ritual immediately. We'll let the now-possessed Narrator speak for himself:
        The Tower!Narrator: You bring the blade to your neck. You slice through soft flesh, severing veins and arteries, your blood flowing freely down your body. It's a painful lesson in obedience. But the pain won't last forever.
        [the blade drops down from your hand with a clang]
        Voice of the Hero: [in shock] No no no no no no no!
        The Tower: [seeing that the suicide ritual is complete] When I see you again, you'll free me from my chains, and deliver me to the destiny that lies beyond this place.
        Voice of the Broken: We will. I promise.
        The Tower: I know you will.
        [scene fades to black]
        The Tower!Narrator: Everything goes dark, and you die.
      • Sure, the suicide ritual is bad enough with the option of "Slay the Princess" still intact and being the lesser of the two evils, but to make a bad situation worse? If you already got to the Fury through the Adversary and dealt with her as you saw fit, the next time you approach the Tower with the blade and she orders you to slit your throat, you can still use the "Slay the Princess" option, and the Voice of the Hero can still stop the Voice of the Broken and save you; but when she offers you a final chance, the "Slay the Princess" option will be grayed out, denying you access to the Fury twice, so you're forced to either serve her for her vessel, or resist for the final time in order to get to the Apotheosis. In other words, you're screwed either way.
    • The scary aftermath follows when you free her, with the possessed Narrator still talking in the Voice of the Legion manner:
      The Tower!Narrator: Her/My chain shatters, and the cuff falls from her/my wrist. She is loose/I am free, and the end is upon us.
    • The unsettling music that plays in all of these frightening moments? "Supplication". Give it a listen, if you dare!
  • 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.
      Narrator, describing the Fury's "cabin": Now, there is a growth that has overtaken it. A viscous fluid seeps from cracks in the stone walls, and it congeals into chaotic streaks of writhing nerves and wet clumps of living meat.
      Voice of the Hero: That's horrible.
      Voice of the Broken: You did this.
    • Should you instead summon the Apotheosis, the Broken's speech becomes much more ominous, sounding like a one-person Apocalypse Cult.
      Voice of the Broken: Another witness to her Radiance. Her hour is soon upon us.
      Voice of the Broken: We've built a new god, and she is limitless.
      Voice of the Broken: The end of everything...the beginning of something new. The moment we open that door, she will be free.

    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.
      Voice of the Hunted: I feel safe. She isn’t dangerous anymore. We could leave her. We could both live.
      Voice of the Opportunist: Well, this should be easy! If you’re… sure about it. I mean, what's the point of being king of the hill if there's no one around to be better than? We'd just be sitting on a hill.
      Voice of the Broken: We’re just like her. And she’s just like us. We never should have left her.
      Voice of the Contrarian: I don’t think we should kill her. I-It would annoy him if we didn’t, right?
      Voice of the Stubborn: This doesn’t feel like a fight. This isn’t what I wanted! Where’s the victory in this?
      Voice of the Paranoid: I don’t like this. What he wants us to do, it’s just cruel! It feels like we’d be killing a part of ourselves.
      Voice of the Cheated: This hardly seems fair to anyone. It’s an easy win if we want it, but I’m not sure whose win it is.
      Voice of the Hero: Do we have to do this?
      The Narrator: You have to. You know you have to.
  • 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. And you can’t tell her that you’re being forced to attack her by the Narrator!
  • 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 (if you got the Nightmare) or having already died and then filled with rage (if you got the Spectre), 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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