Slay the Princess Trivia

Acting for Two: Inevitable with the game only having two voice actors.
- Jonathan Sims plays all of the voices in your mind as well as the Narrator.
- Nichole Goodnight plays every variation of the Princess and the Shifting Mound.
Ascended Fanon: Depicting the story from the perspective of the Princess (including giving her her own "Voices in Her Head") or having the Hero in the Princess' position are some of the most common premises for fan fiction for the game. The Pristine Cut flirts with these ideas in some of the new routes. In the Princess and the Dragon, you get to play out a chapter from the perspective of the Princess and watch as you argue with yourself and try to slay her. In Happily Ever After, the Princess gains a Voice of her own, namely the Voice of the Smitten, who contrives a romantic fantasy scenario and instructs her on what to say, much like how he and the other Voices do when they're in your head.
Author's Saving Throw: The Pristine Cut is an Updated Re-release of the game which added a few new routes and made changes to existing ones based on player feedback and a feeling of dissatisfaction with several others.
- A common complaint about the Fury and Apotheosis' chapters in the base game was that they both felt like huge anticlimaxes, having the Princess become a vengeful demon intent on making you suffer, and an all-powerful enormous goddess respectively, but abruptly ending before anything interesting came of their routes. There was a lot of build-up to the Princess in each route, talk about how clearly powerful she is, and potentially giving it a try anyways... And then the routes just kind of end before the battle actually starts. This was a sentiment echoed by Black Tabby Games, as one of the explicit goals of The Pristine Cut was to flesh these out into more substantial chapters, complete with new dialogue and new endings that feel more substantial.
- Many players complained that it was possible to trigger the Drowned Grey route in a way that felt like Karmic Overkill with the Prisoner. Specifically, failing to figure out that the player should take the Prisoner’s head with them when they walked out of the cabin. The Drowned Grey and the Voices treat this basically the same as if you were responsible for betraying her trust and murdering her outright, even if the Prisoner decapitated herself. It's perfectly reasonable to assume that someone who got their head cut off has died, and this appears to be the case right up until you take the Prisoner's head outside. Plus, the Prisoner never even told you to do this in the first place, so you were being blamed for not executing a plan that you weren't told about. This ends up diluting the feeling of karmic retribution that the Drowned Grey is clearly going for, and instead feeling like you're being blamed for something you had no control over. The Pristine Cut added a new route called the Cage in response to this criticism, accessed the same way as this alternate Drowned Grey route but where the change that happens to the Princess feels like a more natural consequence of the player's actions. It was also changed so that you can only access the Drowned Grey route explicitly by slaying the Prisoner yourself, which makes the Drowned Grey's hatred of you feel much more logical.
- The Den is an Animalistic Abomination and a Feral Villain, but she's also The Speechless. As such, many players didn't find the Den particularly interesting simply because there was nothing to do but fight her, and there was no way to communicate or persuade the Den to do anything but kill you. The results of the official survey over the fandom's favorite princess saw the Den get the second-lowest score, just above the Drowned Grey. The Pristine Cut added a few more possible outcomes for the Den based on what you do in her lair, including a possible way to communicate with her and potentially cause the Den to help you.
- Post-production, the developers felt that using the Voice of the Paranoid in the "Happily Ever After" route made no sense, as it looked like the Player was actually frightened by the Damsel deconstructing herself, rather than being skeptical about her changing into a deformity, before asking her to stay with him in the cabin; this also contrasted her deconstructed vessel being summoned at the End of Everything to tell the player, "Love melted into skepticism, and you pulled back layer after layer after layer, until all you were left with was the knowledge that you did not know me." As a result, they went to all the trouble of replacing Paranoid with the Voice of the Skeptic, even getting Sims back to re-record the latter's new lines, in order to fit in better with the ending part as well as with the deduction of the identity of the shadow on the wall as the Rogue Voice of the Smitten and blowing out the torches in order to expose the truth behind the scenes of the route, both of which the Paranoid would have done in the HEA route. This change, released for PC/Mac on March 2, 2025, and for PlayStation 4/5 and Xbox Series on July 29, and for Switch two days later, turned out to be rather pleasing for many fans playing the game.
Colbert Bump: By June 2024 the game was averaging a concurrent player count of 100-200. These number received a massive spike after Markiplier began streaming the game.
Creator's Favorite: According to comments made by Nichole Goodnight during streams of the game, the Tower is both her favorite version of the Princess and the one she had the most fun voicing. Other highlights for her included the Wild, the Witch, and the Thorn, though she's also noted in other streams that the answer changes every time you ask her.
Creator's Favourite Episode: Tony Howard-Arias has stated that Happily Ever After from The Pristine Cut is easily his favorite route in the game, and a potential Tough Act to Follow for anything he writes in the future.
Dear Negative Reader: In the one year anniversary livestream, Matt and Abby took pains to say that most fans have been great, but there have also been some who acted like any delay in updates to this or to Scarlet Hollow was a personal insult. In particular they mention an email where an entitled fan tried to make it into a moral issue that they'd planned and had a wedding, out of the belief that any time they spent having personal lives was time they should have spent on game development.
Dummied Out:
- Both the game's files and the "Supporter's Cut" artbook include a perspective image of the Beast having gored the Player in half, implying that such an outcome would have made the Beast a vessel. In the final game, that outcome always leads to "The Den", which have its own unique images, meaning it's impossible to get the Beast as a vessel this way. And even before the Pristine Cut there was an achievement called "You can't keep this up forever", which was gained when the Beast gored the Player in half and devoured his innards; said achievement has since been nixed out.
- The Pristine Cut replaces two endings to the routes in the original game, as they now lead to entirely new chapters. Dialogue and code for the original endings still exist in the game.
  - The ending (and its associated art) in "The Spectre" where you slay yourself while she possesses you instead leads to "The Princess and the Dragon".
  - One way to get to "The Grey" was to leave the Princess' head after she decapitates herself in "The Prisoner". After The Pristine Cut, that outcome leads to "The Cage".
Limited Special Collector's Ultimate Edition: Coinciding with the release of The Pristine Cut, the game has a Collector's Edition that comes with a physical copy of the game for consoles, a download code for the game's soundtrack, a sticker sheet, a Collector's Edition box, an acrylic standee, an optical illusion keychain, a reflective lenticular, a metal bookmark, an enamel pin, and finally a seven-inch statue of the Princess as the Shifting Mound. The "Premium Deluxe Edition" comes only with the first three items.
Method Acting: During the stream of the Pristine Cut, Nichole revealed that she was actually going through a divorce when she was recording the lines for the "Happily Ever After" chapter as well as the Shifting Mound's poems for Happily Ever After during your confrontation with Her.
Milestone Celebration: The Pristine Cut released exactly one year and one day after the game's original release date.
Promoted Fanboy: Nichole Goodnight livestreamed Black Tabby Games' previous game Scarlet Hollow and came up with voices for the characters. Black Tabby Games says that Nichole's voice acting was so close to the voices they imagined that it stuck with them, and they reached out to her to play the part of the Princess.
Recycled Script: In The Pristine Cut, the whole "die and respawn in the same place, lather, rinse repeat" plot in the Tower-Fury route kinda borrows some of the same elements from Chapters III and IV of The Razor. That includes the Narrator begging you not to die or "our world is doomed" the first time you start doing so; the whole montage of you dying and returning in the same room; the Smitten reacting to the Princess' nightmarish appearance with utter glee, right down to using the same audio clip of "She's gorgeous! Absolutely divine!"; the Cheated getting baffled that they aren't starting on a path in the woods; and the Narrator attempting to do the "Everything goes dark, and you die" line when the final attack has you running out of options, before he fades out at the Shifting Mound's intervention.
- The "Give her your implement" dialogue choice in the Cage route has the same elements as the "Just take her hand and set her free" dialogue choice in the Moment of Clarity route.
Throw It In: In the December 2023 developer livestream, Tony Howard-Arias revealed that his original script only had the Narrator remark "If the Princess lives here, slaying her is probably doing her a favor" when entering the basement in Chapter I and a few of the Chapter II routes, but that Jonathan Sims found the Mood Whiplash it caused so hilarious that he started saying it in every other route as well.
What Could Have Been:
- In a Reddit AMA, Black Tabby Games talks about some scrapped ideas, including The Stranger route having more of a focus on trying to communicate with a truly inhuman Princess, and the Adversary and the Eye of the Needle having some draconic elements, the Eye particularly being much more of a dragon.
- The 2022 and 2023 demos have significant changes from the final version. Some variants of the Princess were changed or decomposed into two versions (for example, the demo's "the Fury" had the design and personality of who we now know as the Adversary, while the title of Fury in the final game is featured as a different form of the princess that can be created in the Adversary route) and have sprites or scenes that never make it to the final game. The Voice of the Flinching and the Voice of the Obsessed were made into the slightly different Voice of the Cheated and Voice of the Hunted respectively in the final game.
- Black Tabby Games released concept art after the release of the game, along with details on changes made in development.
  - This concept art◊ contains very early designs for the Spectre, Nightmare, Stranger, and Beast. A similar collage became the key visual for the game (as seen on the main page). The Princess on the right is not given a name, implying that her route was either combined with another (given her sly, worn expression, it's possible that her route would've tackled similar themes of deceit and betrayal as the Witch/Thorn) or scrapped entirely.
  - The Princess was meant to stay human-looking for several loops before becoming more monstrous, an idea that was scrapped as the planned story changed from a traditional structure to an overarching metanarrative and the amount of branching and variation required for the idea became too much to tackle.
  - Some Princess variations were considered too scary visually, and artist Abby Howard was told to tone them down to make them more romance-able - considering that the Fury, the Wraith and the Moment of Clarity all made it in, it's probably for the best that they asked to take it down a notch.
  - The Stranger was originally meant to be a bunch of sentient bugs in a "Princess skin", to play on the idea of trying to interact with someone unknowable to you, but this was scrapped and replaced with the final "partial fusion" idea due to the writers having difficulty finding a way to properly approach the Stranger's main theme without just making it a retread of Chapter I.
  - The Beast (who was initially named the Adversary) was originally planned to look like a Questing Beast who'd look different in each of the small glimpses you see of her.
  - The "end form" of the Shifting Mound was meant to be variable, but the developers instead chose a single true form for Her. One of these many forms was a divine, winged creature with many eyes and Princesses within. They gave the multiple wing motif to the Player, and the disembodied eyes motif made it as far as early promotional material and into the Nightmare route as a manifestation of the Voice of the Paranoid's, well, paranoia.
- If you delievered either the Apotheosis, Tower, Wraith, Spectre or Wild as a first vessel to the Shifting Mound, and asked Her if She knew the Narrator, one of Her lines that you can't get in-game would have been, "I know of Him through the memories of my vessel. But she had nothing like Him on her own."
- A route released in the Pristine Cut, The Princess and the Dragon, was originally going to have a different new Voice based on a choice in the previous chapter, the Spectre. One option would have brought the Contrarian while the other would have brought the Voice of the Opportunist. In the end they trimmed the branches and went with only the Opportunist. The Contrarian would have involved a fun call-back as he threw the Pristine Blade out of the window, but there wouldn't be any tension in that route as (between wanting to spite the Narrator and being actually decent) he would just free you and the Princess. Meanwhile, the Opportunist leads to a serious Oh, Crap! moment.
- At one time during the Tower!Fury route in the Pristine Cut the Voice of the Paranoid was going to spawn at one part of the Death Montage rather than the Voice of the Smitten, as described by an unused audio file before it was replaced with Smitten's Stock Audio Clip from the Razor.
  Voice of the Paranoid: Everything keeps changing. It's all going too fast!
Word of God: According to the developers, the Narrator, the Player, and the Voices in the Player's head are all birds who hail from England. This gave fans an imagined conversation about "who doesn't want [a] flock of British-sounding birds in their head telling them what to do".

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