Slay the Princess — The Pristine Cut News

Hey folks!

Some long work is finally coming to an end, and we're thrilled to share that the physical editions AND the art book for Slay the Princess will be releasing on August 15th.

It took longer than anticipated to finalize mould and painting for the statue, but it's finally at the point where it's entering mass production.

PS5 and Nintendo Switch cartridges will be fully up-to-date with fixes, including the skeptic-paranoid changes, performance improvements for the Switch, and functioning text to speech for visually-impaired console players.

Check it out!









And we've got some brand new previews of the artbook while you're here.







You can pre-order both the physical editions and art book through Serenity Forge's store: https://store.serenityforge.com/collections/slay-the-princess

Thank you all so much!
Tony

Hey folks!

We're extremely happy to share that Slay the Princess — The Pristine Cut is a finalist for this year's Nebula Awards (Best Game Writing.) It's a huge honor for our work to be acknowledged this way, and we wouldn't be here without each and every one of you supporting us all the way.

So thank you all so much. We have a lot more work to share with the world, and we can't wait to see you on the next steps of our journey, from the rest of Scarlet Hollow to what lies beyond the horizon.

All the best,
Tony and Abby

Fixed a translation error where a narrator line in happily ever after would display english rather than translated text.

Fixed a rare logic error in spectre where a player who triggered the "harsh" spectre variant would unintentionally be pushed to the "friendly" spectre menu.

Hey folks!

A small (and probably final) content update for Slay the Princess just went live — The Voice of the Skeptic now accompanies you on the Deconstructed side of Happily Ever After instead of Voice of the Paranoid.

I’m not sure why I originally settled on Paranoid for that branch of the story. Maybe it was because Skeptic already felt overrepresented in The Pristine Cut between his presence in the Den, and his major role in The Cage split across three routes. The Cage in particular was a very emotionally taxing chapter to work on, so maybe I was tired of writing him.

But post release, it’s felt like:

1. Paranoid’s in HEA was just kind of there. At least, none of the things he does in the chapter felt important for his character.
2. Every voice gets an opportunity to truly shine somewhere except Skeptic. In fact, to push players to the cage, we wound up taking away one of his weirdest moments to shine from the base game (pushing you to take The Prisoner’s head with you.)
Localizing the game means that redoing any dialogue is very burdensome, since I’d have to have it retranslated in all 12 of our supported languages, but upon looking more closely at the script for Happily Ever After, I realized that all but one or two lines felt more like they belonged to skeptic rather than the paranoid anyways.

And that when given to the skeptic, those lines don’t feel like he’s just kind of there the way it felt like Paranoid was just kind of there. The small wins Paranoid can get in that chapter — deducing the identity of the shadow; pushing you to blow out the torches — they’re big wins for the Skeptic, and the route seemed like it would be much more rounded if he was swapped in.

And beyond that, I couldn’t get the following line from the Shifting Mound’s monologue about the Deconstructed Damsel out of my head:

“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.”


We couldn’t just use the word skepticism to describe the route’s entry point and not include our lil’ over-analytical guy. So we took some time this month to re-record those lines with Jonny and make the changes to the game, and now that itching need to fix “just one more thing” is finally gone.

This is probably the final content update for Slay the Princess (though, never say never I suppose.) Ever since we started work on The Pristine Cut, I wanted to end my work on the game with the conclusion of Happily Ever After. I’m grateful for the opportunity for that to finally be the case.

I hope to see you all tomorrow with Scarlet Hollow’s relaunch, but even if I don’t see you there, thank you all for the life-changing support you’ve given us. I hope our game means as much to you as it means to us.

All the best,
Tony