I picked up Slay The Princess because I've seen almost exclusively high praise for it - and to be fair, it is really solid. At the risk of sounding pretentious, I do wonder if it's mostly by people who aren't big into VNs, since if you aren't familiar with them, I think you'll get a huge kick out of the meta and time loop elements
It's kinda hard to talk about the parts I liked without spoiling stuff and this is a game where you wanna go in blind so tldr - the art is really nice, it's always intriguing, it pulls off the meta gimmicks very well (im sucker for games that use steam achievements!!), the writing is good, the atmosphere really achieves what it sets out to do, etc
There are some aspects of STP I didn't vibe with but I can't really explain it, but I'm gonna try because I've not seen much critique at all and I think it's important
I think I just wanted it to take things further? The characters are quite intentionally "shallow" but I still ended up wanting more. Everything is also purposely somewhat vague which isn't a bad way to tell a story but personally takes me out of things
Maybe it's the overwhelming amount of dialogue options you're given at once, and that it's sometimes not clear what is flavour text and what progresses the story. For example, sometimes the game will give you like...8+ choices at once, and it'll be contained to half the screen, and require you to scroll down, instead of being given more space - and it just felt really claustraphobic at times lol
I also felt unsure if I should be making multiple save files while going down a route and exploring the sub options, or if I should just be committing to my first choice - and after hitting a few endings, I'm still not sure
The voice acting of the male hero character I think is really good and fine, but the princess has the same problem that I just kinda expect every indie/mid budget VN with voice acting to have, and that's her microphone makes her S sounds very sharp (which i have to cut off because i have sound sensitivity issues out the ass)
It's also not a super long game for the price but I do not regret picking up Slay The Princess and think it's worth playing. It's obvious that a ton of love and care has gone into crafting something unique and I'll take something like that, that has some flaws, over something bland any day
It's kinda hard to talk about the parts I liked without spoiling stuff and this is a game where you wanna go in blind so tldr - the art is really nice, it's always intriguing, it pulls off the meta gimmicks very well (im sucker for games that use steam achievements!!), the writing is good, the atmosphere really achieves what it sets out to do, etc
There are some aspects of STP I didn't vibe with but I can't really explain it, but I'm gonna try because I've not seen much critique at all and I think it's important
I think I just wanted it to take things further? The characters are quite intentionally "shallow" but I still ended up wanting more. Everything is also purposely somewhat vague which isn't a bad way to tell a story but personally takes me out of things
Maybe it's the overwhelming amount of dialogue options you're given at once, and that it's sometimes not clear what is flavour text and what progresses the story. For example, sometimes the game will give you like...8+ choices at once, and it'll be contained to half the screen, and require you to scroll down, instead of being given more space - and it just felt really claustraphobic at times lol
I also felt unsure if I should be making multiple save files while going down a route and exploring the sub options, or if I should just be committing to my first choice - and after hitting a few endings, I'm still not sure
The voice acting of the male hero character I think is really good and fine, but the princess has the same problem that I just kinda expect every indie/mid budget VN with voice acting to have, and that's her microphone makes her S sounds very sharp (which i have to cut off because i have sound sensitivity issues out the ass)
It's also not a super long game for the price but I do not regret picking up Slay The Princess and think it's worth playing. It's obvious that a ton of love and care has gone into crafting something unique and I'll take something like that, that has some flaws, over something bland any day