Re-worked the new version of The Unknown Together track to be closer to the original release's version while still retaining the live performances. Added a new line of dialogue in the lead-up to Damsel 3, and added an extra dialogue option to the climax. Assorted smaller bug fixes, incl. a bug where TSM's torso would disconnect when selecting a red dialogue option from the Apotheosis route.

Hey folks! Just pushed a new patch that both resolves the save data edge cases we were initially trying to fix in yesterday's patch, and that now includes better failsafes to avoid triggering the rare save issues some users ran into with the following userflow: 1. Playing on October 30th build, pick [wait forever] 2. Game quits to desktop, as intended. Before boot-up, steam downloads October 31 patch. 3. Transition between builds creates new edge case making main menu difficult to access. This patch should no longer cause that issue, AND it should cause games and save files to work correctly for players who experienced the above and did not repair their installs. Next on the short-term docket is fixing some inconsistent animation jumps with [spoiler]the leave with the shifting mound animation.[/spoiler] Longer term on the docket is adding some sort of indicator (a checkmark?) when a given route in the gallery. That one might take a little while though. Cheers, and thank you so much for your patience while we hammered this out!

Hey folks! Sorry again to folks who ran into a weird bug with the [wait forever] option earlier today. I just pushed what should be a fix for those issues to a beta branch. You can access the branch with the password waitforevertest Instructions on how to access a beta branch can be found here: https://uk.gamesplanet.com/community/news_updates/363353-instructions-how-to-access-a-private-beta-preview-or If you ran into the problems that came up in this thread (https://steamcommunity.com/app/1989270/eventcomments/4630356482652714742?snr=2_9_100003_) switching to the test branch *should* resolve the issue. And if this branch doesn't cause any unforeseen issues, I'll move it to live tomorrow. If you're in the majority of players whose game is currently working properly, only try out this branch if you're willing to test it out and make sure it doesn't cause any issues with your game. Cheers, and so sorry if you ran into problems with the build earlier today! Tony

EDIT Hi everyone! Sorry about this. It looks like this update caused an issue for folks who picked "wait forever" on the old build and then downloaded the patch afterwards. You can fix the issue by doing the following: Disable Steam Cloud for the game. Go to \game\saves. Delete gimmick-LT1.save and quick-1-LT1.save files, if present. Go to %AppData%\RenPy\SlaythePrincess-1651597024 (windows); HOME/Library/RenPy/SlaythePrincess-1651597024 (Mac); Linux: $HOME/.renpy/SlaythePrincess-1651597024 (Linux) And do the same as above. That should be it Although I'm not sure how it behaves on transition between patches It also could be quick-1-LT1.save - delete it too if present. If this leads to an error screen, you can drop this save file into your saves file and reboot the game. After it boots, you should be save to load and continue on your previous saves. [url=https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/z8ca0yk8n1za5whba09f1/quick-1-LT1.save?rlkey=091nadldnn8bwxonck4e4a9yb&st=96trpsjd&dl=0]https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/z8ca0yk8n1za5whba09f1/quick-1-LT1.save?rlkey=091nadldnn8bwxonck4e4a9yb&st=96trpsjd&dl=0 Extremely sorry about this issue! But these steps should resolve the problem and allow you to continue without losing progress. Improved logic for [Wait Forever] crash to desktop. It now uses a specialized save slot so it won't write over any quick-saves, and has fail-safes in place to prevent a rare edge case caused by manually loading an old save generated by the fake crash.

Game is in a pretty stable place at this point, so patches are going to slow down. Will still be fixing things as they're reported. In the short term, we're hoping to add an indicator on the route-selection level of the gallery that marks off when a given route is "complete." We'll also be looking to patch in typos that have been reported in localizations. Here's what's been pushed on this build: Corrected incorrectly swapped "Our Song" entries for P&D. Fixed incorrect gallery images and thumbnails for Cage, HEA, P&D, Tower Fixed visual glitch with tsm "hand" sprites seen in tlq Fixed visual glitch with nightmare's dress while puppetted by tsm in tlq Fixed a missing "talk" sprite in HEA Fixed a bug in the adversary where the game could lose track of whether the player had a knife Fixed a bug in the witch that would erroneously grant a gallery unlock under incorrect circumstances Fixed a bug in the finale where a variant of the fury's sprite would not properly display, and instead it would display her default sprites Incremented an unused variable during the mirror conversation to unlock a previously unobtainable dialogue option. Fixed an issue w/ translations where 3 lines in HEA would not play english audio Than you all so much for playing!

Hey folks! Thank you all so much for playing The Pristine Cut. We've been floored by the audience reception, and are so, so happy you've all come back to celebrate Slay the Princess with us in its final iteration. We're extremely proud of the new and expanded routes I think they're easily some of the best content in the game and it means the world to us that you've gotten to experience them. A few things coming up: First thing's first, we're doing a Reddit AMA on /r/games starting at 1pm eastern tomorrow, October 30th! Join our Discord if you want an announcement reminding you when we go live: discord.gg/blacktabbygames Next we've got a survey for you now that you've played the game! Your answers will contribute to an eventual write-up/data dive I'm going to do on the many stages of Slay the Princess' narrative development. It also lets you pick your favorite Princess :) If you haven't played the Pristine Cut yet, I've tried to keep spoilers in the survey to a minimum, but also, maybe play it first! I think it's *really* good! Here's the link: https://forms.gle/6xWWvz8MvQ6f5xu5A If you want to rank EVERY Princess, we also have a poll for that, AND a poll for voice rankings. Will also be contributing to that write-up. We ran this exact survey *before* the Pristine cut, so I'm really interested in seeing how things change! Princess Ranking: https://strawpoll.com/bVg8B4qLMyY Voice Ranking: https://strawpoll.com/NPgxe3NzQZ2 While you're here, I'd also like to highlight some cool physical stuff you might have missed! First of all, a new thing! We did a first wave of chibi Princess sticker sheets earlier this year, and now that The Pristine Cut is out, we're launching a second wave that contains Princesses from the new chapters, as well as the Damsel, Prisoner, Spectre, and Nightmare (plus their chapter 3 variations.) Get wave 2 here: https://topatoco.com/collections/black-tabby/products/ahh-stp-chibistix2 And here's wave 1 in case you missed it: https://topatoco.com/collections/black-tabby/products/ah-stp-chibistix For instance, there's a collector's edition of the game for Switch and PS5! It comes with all sorts of goodies. If you're in the EU and want a cheaper option, we've got a smaller version of that collector's edition for quite a bit cheaper.
We're also making a huge art book that takes the shape of the game. Make choices and see the art from their outcomes!
And finally on the merch front, Slay the Princess is getting a vinyl! The vinyl has two designs: The first is a blood splatter, and you can order it on the Lost in Cult website! [url=https://www.lostincult.co.uk/slay-the-princess-the-pristine-cut]
And the second is a glow-in-the-dark edition, which you can pick up through Serenity Forge:
Both vinyls have the same track list, including orchestral renditions of some of your favorite tracks in the game, as well as my two favorite tracks from The Pristine Cut! (Damsel 3 and Spectre 3, iykyk) Serenity Forge will have cheaper shipping in you're in North America, and Lost In Cult will have cheaper shipping if you're in Europe. And last but not least we've got a chunky pre-episode 5 update planned for Scarlet Hollow. More on that soon, but among other things, we're really tightening the UI! Take a peak :)
All the best, Tony and Abby

Okay folks! I think we finally got the gallery achievement working. If your gallery is finished, you really just need to boot up a new game it'll trigger right away. I also changed the flag for the achievement so, if you were accidentally granted it last time, you can use one of those third party tools to wipe your achievement progress without it automatically resyncing. If you want to wipe the incorrectly given version of the achievement, its API name is: "ACH_GALLERY" (no quotes) A few other fixes: For Simplified Chinese, it turns out I'd accidentally gotten the Princess' spooky and normal fonts (pink and red) swapped. I've switched them back. Please let me know if this leads to any issues and I will fix it right away! For Steam Deck, a display issue was causing the volume sliders in the preferences screen to flow off the screen and become unusable. The Steam Deck is rendering the preferences menu in a *weird* counterintuitive way. While I look into this further, I've disabled some redundant preferences (parallax which doesn't currently work on deck; and auto-forward) so that the sliders display properly and those tools are usable. We've fixed a number of other small issues as well. Thanks so much for your patience while we sort this out.

EDIT: NO IT'S NOT. ROLLING BACK. This achievement is my path in the woods. I fear I may never leave. Title. The achievement to finish the gallery should now be working as intended. If you've already finished the gallery, just start a new game and get to the first menu in the woods, and the achievement should go off for you. A few other fixes including compressing some images for the new "leave with the shifting mound" ending that make it more performant on windows. And for those of you who missed the earlier patch notes today, we updated the supporter's pack with more stuff, including high res chibis of each princess :) Fixes should be a decent place at this point, gonna slow down and take it a lil easy. Thank you for your patience and for playing our game! Tony

Hey folks! Quite a few little changes here. The gallery will now continue to display "hints" when you hover over thumbnails for CGs, even after you've already unlocked them! A lot of folks requested this change and it was a good idea, so in it goes! Sliders now correctly change color when selected on controller. For the shifting mound [wait forever] sequence, the game now deletes the quick save it creates after you've rebooted. This should avoid a rare issue where manually loading that save after the fact introduced issues with persistent data. In simplified chinese, we have replaced the narrator/voices font with one that is more legible. hope this helps! and then there's a number of other assorted fixes. Note: the "finish the gallery" achievement is still broken. we're actively investigating it - hopefully we have a fix soon. (and regardless, you won't lose progress on the achievement, since it will check against your current unlocks.) we have also updated a few things with the supporter pack: 1. it's now been reduced to two primary folders in the game directory one for music, one for art. 2. for music, we've added an mp3 option for the pristine cut OST (as opposed to lossless) 3. we've added hd versions of the gallery chibis to the art side of the supporter's pack Thank you all so much for playing! Tony

EDIT Granting achievement early to players. Rolling back and pushing the other changes while I take a deeper look into this one. EDIT 2 New update. Gallery hovering and other buxfixes implemented. Finish the gallery achievement temporarily disabled until we drill down the issue. Sorry about that folks and sorry for everyone who was accidentally granted it early. When something is broken but nobody else would realize it isn't working. It looks like a tweak to Ren'py we introduced to improve controller UX for sliders in the preferences menu broke the hover effect in the gallery. We've rolled back that Ren'py tweak, which means sliders won't retain a "hovered" color when selected, but now thumbnails and icons in the gallery should correctly display their hovered variants. Looking into finding a way to make both work at once, but for now, the gallery UI takes precedence over slider UI. This hotfix also includes a couple of things mentioned in Hotfix 5, but that should now work properly (instead of get immediately rolled back) They are: If you've finished the game and are returning for the first time, we check to see if you've earned the "Our Song" achievement, and if so, we automatically unlock the gallery. This should clear up some confusion on how to access it. The achievement to finish the gallery should now function properly. Thanks so much for your patience as we work all of this out.

EDIT I SPOKE TOO SOON. This patch introduced a crash that I have now rolled back. Please download the rollback patch ASAP Achievement for filling out the gallery should be fixed. To trigger it assuming your gallery is already complete, just go through the motions of unlocking any one gallery item (so finish a chapter?) Let me know if there are still issues with that one. Added a check at the beginning of the game to see if players have previously earned the "Our Song" achievement. If they have, automatically unlocks the gallery. Should ease some confusion on how to access it for returning players. I'm still trying to map out a one-time check to partially sync gallery progress to what achievements a player has already mapped out to see how viable/helpful it would be. Since so many items in the gallery aren't tied to achievements, and achievements tend to be less granular than gallery items, it's unclear how much a partial solution like this would actually save time for players, and I'm wary of the risks making any mistakes in its implementation would introduce. So... still leaning towards no for trying that, but wanted to give you all an update and to let you know that I am earnestly looking into it. Cheers, and thanks so much for a fantastic Pristine Cut launch!

Biggest fix: removed a bug where doing Burned Grey earlier blocks you from doing Prisoner 3. Assorted small fixes to typos. Known issues I'm working on today: 1. Preferences screen is cut-off on Steam Deck 2. Achievement for finishing the gallery is not unlocking. (Don't worry, it'll be retroactive when fixed!)

Handful of small bug fixes. A few visual glitches. A few logical inconsistencies. Starting to get tired, so I'll be back at it in the morning!

Fixed a bug where two lines in Damsel 3 were not properly displaying localized text. Fixed a bug in Damsel 3 where skipping through text broke torch placement. Fixed a bug in Spectre 3 where a set of black question marks unintentionally would appear next to dialogue. I'm sure there's something else I'm forgetting in there.

Fixed an issue with Nightmare's "twirl" that caused some performance issues. Fixed a broken achievement for contributing a variant of Spectre 3.

Days mean nothing in the maw of forever. The wait is over. The Pristine Cut is finally here. For those of you who aren't aware, The Pristine Cut is a free upgrade to the base game, that among other things:

• Expands the game by roughly 35%. This means thousands of new voice lines, over a thousand new illustrations, and 17 tracks of brand new music.
• Adds significant glow-ups for The Fury, The Den, and the Apotheosis, each of which has over three times as much stuff to see as they had in the base game.
• Introduces three brand new Princesses that branch off of The Damsel, the Prisoner, and the Spectre.
• Adds an entirely new ending to the game.
• Adds a deep, interactive gallery to help you chart your progress across over 420 unlocks and that brings back your best (and worst) memories with the Princess.
• Provides subtitle support for: Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, European Spanish, Latin American Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, Korean, Japanese, German, Polish, French, Russian, and Italian.
• Brings the game to consoles PS4 + 5, Nintendo Switch, and Xbox! And if you're the sort who collects things, both the PS5 and Nintendo Switch versions are getting a physical release, including a collector's edition!

• We're moving away from Twitter as our primary social media platform. The best places to find us now are Bluesky and Tumblr.
• If you're looking for places to chat about the game with other players, our subreddit and Discord are where to go!
• We're disabling the demo for the time being. This is because the demo isn't localized, and we don't want to confuse our players on the state of translations in the final version of the game. If you'd like to play the demo, you can find it on itch.io.

We're thrilled to announce that Slay the Princess The Pristine Cut will releasing on October 24th. A year and a day after the original's release. Thank you so much for your patience and please enjoy this animated trailer! [previewyoutube=l9S92mzFAkw;full][/previewyoutube] For those of you who aren't aware, The Pristine Cut is a free upgrade to the base game, that among other things:

• Expands the game by roughly 35%. This means thousands of new voice lines, over a thousand new illustrations, and 17 tracks of brand new music.
• Adds significant glow-ups for The Fury, The Den, and the Apotheosis, each of which has over three times as much stuff to see as they had in the base game.
• Introduces three brand new Princesses that branch off of The Damsel, the Prisoner, and the Spectre.
• Adds an entirely new ending to the game.
• Adds a deep, interactive gallery to help you chart your progress across over 420 unlocks and that brings back your best (and worst) memories with the Princess.
• Provides subtitle support for: Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, European Spanish, Latin American Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, Korean, Japanese, German, Polish, French, Russian, and Italian.
• Brings the game to consoles PS4 + 5, Nintendo Switch, and Xbox! And if you're the sort who collects things, both the PS5 and Nintendo Switch versions are getting a physical release, including a collector's edition!

Hey folks! We told you we had more Cool Stuff coming in the near future, and we're happy to unveil the first of said Cool Stuff as part of Tiny Teams! We're working with Serenity Forge to put together a honking 250+-page long hardcover artbook, formatted in a interactive style where your choices guide you to different Princesses, so it's almost like the game, but as a book! Like some sort of... novel... presented visually. Retrace your steps but with your fingers! Look at art from the game! Learn about how Abby designed your favorite Princesses.
Look at that spread! You can pre-order the art book here. We can't wait to share it with you! And here's the hyperlink, just in case that's helpful: https://store.serenityforge.com/products/slay-the-princess-artbook And that's not all Tiny Teams selected Slay the Princess as one of their champions this year, which means we get to be part of a cool (and spooky) bundle. So if you haven't already you can pick up Phasmophobia and Abiotic Factor for a lil bit of an extra discount right now ^^ On the subject of bundles, if you haven't had the chance to pick up Scarlet Hollowour other gameyet, both it and Slay the Princess are on sale with their own bundle, so there's no better time than the present! So get caught up before we Episode 5 comes out next year! And finally, while I know you're all breathlessly waiting for the BIG announcement, we're not quite ready to unveil The Pristine Cut's release date just yet. That said, we will be announcing it in style at some point in the near future, so please keep your eyes on this space, or if you'd prefer other spaces, turn your eyes' attention to:

• Discord: http://discord.gg/blacktabbygames
• Our Mailing List: https://mailchi.mp/70710220f538/blacktabbynewletter
• Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/slaytheprincess/
• Tumblr: https://www.tumblr.com/blog/blacktabbygames
• BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/blacktabbygames.bsky.social
• X, Formerly Known as Twitter, Where Conversations Happen: https://x.com/blacktabbygames

We're thrilled to announce that we've wrapped principal development work on Slay the Princess The Pristine Cut. We'll be releasing it this Fall (date TBD) so we can simultaneous ship the update with both the game's console release (surprise!) as well as official subtitling support for 11 new languages, all with the help of our wonderful new partners at Serenity Forge (who you might know from their publishing work on Doki Doki Literature Club Plus!) There's a lot for us to share about The Pristine Cut, but before we get into the details, please check out our new trailer! [previewyoutube=L6Kg5NCYIkY;full][/previewyoutube] Here's what we've got coming for you: Content

• For those of you who are just now hearing about The Pristine Cut, it's an entirely free director's cut of the game that adds about 35% more content on top of the initial release.
• This includes massive expansions to The Den, The Apotheosis, and The Fury routes, each of which is over three times bigger than their release versions, with tons of variations to discover across multiple playthroughs.
• On top of this, we're adding three brand new chapter three routes that will add even more depth to your stories with The Damsel, The Prisoner, and The Spectre.
• And we're adding a new ending.
• All in all, these additions come to over 2,500 new voice lines, over 1,200 new hand-drawn illustrations, and over 15 new tracks of music.
• We're also adding an extensive CG gallery with over 400 unlocks to help all you completionists track your progress, complete with cryptic hints to help you discover some of the game's more obscure and buried interactions.

• And all of this is coming with a giant wave of localization support, covering the following languages: Simplified and Traditional Chinese, Korean, Japanese, French, German, Russian, Spanish (Latin American), Brazilian Portuguese, Italian, and Polish. These localizations are just going to cover subtitles, so we can be as thorough as possible about maintaining the quality of Jonny and Nichole's performances.

• With the help of Serenity Forge, were bringing Slay the Princess The Pristine Cut to every major current console Nintendo Switch, PS4 + 5, and Xbox.
• And it wont just be available as digital downloads. Youll also be able to pick up a physical edition for the Switch and PS5, with an exclusive sticker sheet and a download code for the games soundtrack.
• And if thats not enough were also doing a Collectors Edition, complete with a 7 inch statue of the Princess, a mirror with a lenticular lens, an acrylic standee, and more.
• And finally (for now), were launching the first wave of new line of sticker sheets, featuring chibi art of the Princesses as seen in The Pristine Cuts new gallery. Pre-order them now at Topatoco

Hey folks! LudoNarraCon is finally upon us, and boy do we have a MOUNTAIN of things for y'all. First thing's first, Slay the Princess and Scarlet Hollow are each going to be 20% off, starting at 1pm EST on May 9th. So if you've been itching to pick one of them up, now's the time, and you can also pick up both game's bundled together for an extra discount here: https://store.steampowered.com/bundle/33452/The_Black_Tabby_Games_Collection/ If you already own one of either Scarlet Hollow or Slay the Princess, I'd suggest buying the other through the bundle, since you'll still be able to apply the extra discount there. At 7pm Eastern on Thursday May 9th, we'll be doing a retrospective Twitch stream where we'll play through the ORIGINAL demo cut of Slay the Princess as well as the first episode of Scarlet Hollow. This'll be broadcast on http://twitch.tv/black_tabby_games/ On Friday May 10th, we've got 2 panels that will be broadcast on the LudoNarraCon Steam page. At 4pm Eastern, I'll be doing a fireside chat with Meredith Gran where we talk about narrative design. At 8pm Eastern on the 10th, Abby and I are on a panel moderated by Patrick Klepek (formerly Vice, now Remap Radio) alongside Ben Gelinas (Times * Galaxy, formerly Bioware + Remedy) and Gareth Damian Martin (Citizen Sleeper.) The topic of this panel is balancing storytelling with player choice. On Sunday, May 12th, at 1pm Eastern, we'll be doing an art stream, specifically going through some of the process of how Abby makes assets for our games! This one'll be simulcast on both Twitch and our Steam page! All the best, and can't wait to share more updates with you all! Tony and Abby

Increased the size of the scrollbar so it's more easily used on touch screens. A couple of small bug/logic fixes. Switched the (Expand) tag in the late game to (Explore) so players aren't hit by unexplained terminology and are less hesitant to look at additional dialogue options in the relevant scene.

As part of LudoNarraCon, we'll be doing a special art stream where we'll be answering your questions about the game and giving you a peek behind the scenes to see how the Abby makes art for the game. We'll be simulcasting on Twitch (twitch.tv/black_tabby_games) and Steam on Sunday, May 12th, starting at 1pm Eastern. We'll ALSO be doing a stream on Thursday May 9th at 7pm Eastern where we'll be playing the original cut of the first Slay the Princess demo and sharing our thoughts on the design process, AS WELL AS playing through the first episode of Scarlet Hollow. Because switching between two games on a Steam broadcast is a complicated mess, twitch.tv/black_tabby_games]we'll only be broadcasting *that one* to Twitch! Hope to see you on one or both streams! Tony and Abby

Added a hot-key to toggle auto-advancing text ("T" on keyboards, left face button on controllers). Added a toggle for auto-advancing text in the preferences menu. Clicking to the next line no longer automatically disables auto-advancing text. At this point, you should now be able to do anything you can do with the quick menu via controller/hotkey inputs, so don't forget you can turn the quick menu off in the preferences. All the best, Tony and Abby

Hey folks! Happy to bring a new small update that fixes some frustrating issues with controller support (but there's still some work to do!) 1. Biggest fix is that controller focus should no longer be lost in scenarios where the quick menu is hidden, the top button in a menu is greyed out, or save file is loaded at a dialogue menu. It seems like the culprit here was allowing draggable mouse scroll on the dialogue menu, which stole focus from the individual choice buttons. This does mean that click-and-drag scrolling was sacrificed, but I don't think many players used that functionality. And you can still use your mouse wheel, arrow keys, or gamepad! 2. When in the preferences and save/load menus, buttons that hard both selected *and* hovered will now properly change color, which should reduce the feeling of the controller getting "stuck." Right now, we're working on a solution to tie how much the scroll bar increments to the size of the previously hovered dialogue option, so things snap better and so that there are fewer options that require multiple interactions to scroll past. But we wanted to make sure you all got these improvements as soon as they were ready! Thank you as always for your support, and happy slaying (or not slaying, but really, you should be slaying.) Best, Tony and Abby

Catching up on reported bugs. Mostly minor, but including: Moment of Clarity sprites not appearing when both flickering and boil effect were turned off. Fixing a corrupted voice file that slipped through the cracks last winter. Assorted typo fixes.

Hey folks! We hope you've all been enjoying the new update (and if you've only bought the game after the update dropped, we hope you've enjoyed your first playthrough!) We'd like to get some baseline player data before you al play the Pristine Cut so we can see how the new and expanded chapters change your thoughts. And there's also just some other player data we'd love to see about how you've played! So we've got three surveys for you:

• A general survey: https://forms.gle/6qTkNoJWnBSB2HdE8
• A new Princess ranking poll, this time separating the Chapter III Princesses out from the Chapter IIs, as well as including options for TSM and the base Princess ^^: https://strawpoll.com/05ZdWooYlg6
• A similar ranking poll, but this time for the voices: https://strawpoll.com/kogjk33o8Z6

Fixed a bug where an end game Princess sprite was placed too high on the screen.

Hey folks! Here with a small update fixing an assortment of minor issues and tweaking a few things. Music

• Adjusted the volume of "Transformation" and "The Apotheosis" to be a tad louder. They should both have a bit more oomph now.
• On the note of "Transformation," adjusted the point where it starts playing such that the opening swell more organically flows into the first animated sequence.

• Added hotkeys for quick saving (F5 on keyboard and left shoulder on gamepads) and quick loading (F9 on keyboard and "Back"/"Select" on gamepad)
• The "controls" menu should now accurately reflect the gamepad layout.
• Mapped a button to toggle self-voicing on gamepads (L2)
• Added an optional toggle in the preferences to turn off the flashing click-to-continue buttons.

• Hotfix 1 (March 28th PM) Fixed the one-time tooltip that you receive after clearing your first loop to reflect a remapping of the skip button on gamepads.
• Hotfix 2 (March 29th AM) Fixed a small number of display bugs.

Hey folks! Thank you all so much for the overwhelmingly kind reception to our new update! We know a lot of you particularly loved the art Abby drew of the Princess orchestra, so we've gone ahead and made it available for pre-order in both poster and t-shirt form! Our shop's taking pre-orders until April 12th before they start printing, and if you order before then, you'll get a lil discount relative to what they'll cost after the pre-order period.
Shirts: https://topatoco.com/collections/black-tabby/products/ah-stp-satv-sh Posters: https://topatoco.com/collections/black-tabby/products/ah-stp-satv-pr And you get check out the rest of our merch store here: https://topatoco.com/collections/black-tabby We also wanted to let you know that we've updated the Supporters Pack to have gifs of the new animations from the update. You can find them in the "concept art" folder! Thank you again, and we're extremely excited to share more of The Pristine Cut with you! Tony and Abby

HOTFIX 1: Fixed an instance of a sprite partially disappearing in the end-game. Fixed a a rare issue where a duplicated folder caused some users to crash on start-up. HOTFIX 2: Fixed an issue for one of the tower/apotheosis ending monologues that would double-play its final line. Added a lingering pause to an end-game hand-holding animation to make it feel more intentional/organic Fixed some typos Removed some accidental extra fury lines that didn't have voice acting Restored a cut line of argumentation in the finale.

Hey everyone! We're both extremely excited to share a surprise content update with you all. This is not The Pristine Cut, but it's our answer to a pretty important question:

Should I wait for The Pristine Cut to play the game?

• Transformation
• The Shifting Mound (Movements, II, III, V)
• Apotheosis

Patch Notes for the big "End of Everything" update, sequestered here so there aren't any spoilers on the big announcement post. Still spoiler tagging out of an abundance of caution: End Game

• [spoiler]The Shifting Mound encounter now has fully animated transitions between vessels.[/spoiler]
• [spoiler]Menus in The Shifting Mound encounter have been expanded and restructured it should now be more clear which dialogue options are specific to a given vessel vs which options directly address the Shifting Mound.[/spoiler]
• [spoiler]Added several argumentative through-lines for the encounter; it is also now clear when a given response is a continuation of a previous option.[/spoiler]
• [spoiler]Edited several vessels' "poems" to have improved flow. Re-wrote The Eye of the Needle's "poem" entirely.[/spoiler]
• [spoiler]Significantly expanded the conversation in the basement at the start of the "Unknown Together" ending.[/spoiler]
• [spoiler]Added two new dialogue options in the Long Quiet scenes to challenge the unfinished mound's style of speech.[/spoiler]

• "Transformation," "The Apotheosis," and "The Shifting Mound (Movements II, III, and V)" have been reworked to include live orchestral performances.
• The entire soundtrack has been converted to FLAC and remastered for an overall improved audio experience.
• The Supporter's Pack has been updated to include a new orchestral EP. In addition to the tracks mentioned above, this EP also includes live renditions of "The Princess" and "The Damsel"

• The quick menu has been updated to have icons/a proper UI. It's also been moved to the top left of the screen, which should resolve the majority of issues players have had with the controller getting stuck.
• The narrator's scream in the Tower route has been re-recorded to be a little more tonally fitting.
• We should be caught up on bug fixes.
• The Voice of the Broken no longer appears for a single line in the Razor route for playthroughs where he isn't present.
• A small number of lines previously cut in the pacing patch have been restored.

• For archival purposes, we've moved the final updated version of the release build to a separate beta branch on Steam. We think the changes in this update (and the upcoming changes in the Pristine Cut) only make the game better, but in case you prefer that earlier version, or in case you're curious to see what older versions were like, it's now available to you.
• You can access this beta branch with the password "originalrecipe"
• To enter this password, right-click the game in your Steam library, select properties, and then navigate to "betas" in the sub-menu.

Hey folks! We've been a little quiet here, but that usually means we're too busy cooking to have the time for writing the longer updates we like to write. But it's time for an update! First thing's first, the script for Slay the Princess: The Pristine Cut is finished! And we're very, very happy with it. It adds a little over 43,000 words to the length of the game, or, putting it another way, extends the script by about 25%. These additions include significant expansions to three chapters (Fury, Den, and Apotheosis), several brand new chapters (sorry, those details are going to remain hidden for now), and a restructured and bigger climax that should feel much more fluid to move through and that will give you all even more avenues for self-expression. [previewyoutube=2wus22Sz8dg;full][/previewyoutube] As part of this update, we also hired the Czech National Orchestra to provide live strings and piano to several important tracks in the game. We hope you enjoy this live performance of the title track in the attached video. While we're keeping the in-game version of this track the same as it already is for the Pristine Cut, this live version will be available on streaming platforms, and also available for purchase through Brandon's store and the supporter's pack. Several tracks in game *will* be replaced by live versions, including Transformation, the Shifting Mound Movements, Apotheosis, and more. While we think this rendition of "The Princess" is beautiful, there's a quiet loneliness to the release version that we want to retain. As a few other notes, we'd also like to take the opportunity to let you know that:

• We've started work on more merch. You can pre-order a hoodie here, and a t-shirt here. You can also pick up sticker sheets, extra Thorn posters, and some of Abby's comics from our store.
• I know some folks have asked about less minimalist apparel designs as well as other merch. To all of you, you'll be excited to here that we have a lot on the roadmap for the rest of the year.

This was originally going to wait until the Pristine Cut, but since the work is done, figured we might as well patch it in now. This patch mostly tweaks the intro pacing for a number of Chapter 3 setups that felt a little too repetitive/tedious. Tweaks were made to:

• Moment of Clarity (the ending is tighter)
• Apotheosis (intro trimmed)
• Eye of the Needle (skeptic intro trimmed)
• Fury (intro trimmed)
• Grey (intro trimmed, mostly on Smitten side)
• Wraith (intro trimmed, mostly on Spectre side)

Fixed a handful of additional corrupted voice files. Soon we shall be free.

on and on it goes, until your patch notes are not your patch notes are not your game! thanks for bearing with me on this - want to be as on top of fixing these lil issues as soon as possible when they crop up! EDIT: I'm gonna stop spamming hotfix notes at this point. If you see a small update over the next day or do (like the one that just went out at 6:28 EST on 12/24), it's fixing another corrupted audio file. Apologies to anyone who's running into these (fairly rare) issues while I continue to fix them: they're rare enough that I'd rather keep the overall mix of the remastered audio as opposed to rolling back to the version before the remaster. If the issue meaningfully persists after another couple of days of patches, I'll give the whole thing a fresh pass, but in the meantime, putting out a small fix a couple times a day lets me still enjoy Christmas :) If you run into any issues, please be sure to report them on the Steam forums or on the relevant bugs channel on our discord. Forums: https://steamcommunity.com/app/1989270/discussions/0/3873717982252461671/ Discord: http://discord.gg/blacktabbygames EDIT 2: All issues w/ Chapter 3 voice glitches should be fixed; still looking for the stragglers in other chapters but all issues should be resolved soon ^^

Fixed another 6 or so corrupted audio files. Thank you for bearing with me while we hunt down the remaining sound issues from the audio re-work. Given the rareness of these issues (appears to be ~1% of voice files, possibly fewer), patching individual files as we go seems like the most effective approach. Bulk re-exporting everything would leave me worried that it wouldn't fix the issue, or that *different* files might have issues. As mentioned in the previous post, if you run into any outstanding audio issues, please report them on the bugs channel of our discord (discord.gg/blacktabbygames) or on this Steam thread: https://steamcommunity.com/app/1989270/discussions/0/3873717982252461671/?ctp=5 Thank you all so much! Tony

Patched several more corrupted audio files. If you run into a voice line that doesn't match the subtitles or that is garbled or cuts out, please report the line and scene to the Dialogue Issues thread: https://steamcommunity.com/app/1989270/discussions/0/3873717982252461671/ Each file is a fairly easy fix once identified, and I'll be keeping a close eye on reports in the coming days. Thanks so much for playing, and Merry Christmas + Happy Holidays!

somebody found a pantshittingly terrifying broken voice file so rushed out another hotfix to save your ears. you're welcome

Patched corrupted voice files on the NoKnife!Chapter 1 path introduced by the audio patch earlier today.

Hey folks! Happy to put out a chunky update today - I just finished remixing and remastering Slay the Princess' audio. Voice lines in particular should have far less variation in loudness with the new build. As part of the remastering process, we also switched voice and non-looping SFX over to FLAC, which shaved about 2.5 gigs off the total install. I don't think we'll be taking things any further on that front, since we'd like to keep both audio + visuals lossless. If you run into any bugs front this update, please verify your install before reporting the issue. Steam sometimes has some trouble trouble with larger patches for Ren'py games, and there's enough of you saving the world that a few of you are bound to get corrupted installs from the patch. While mixing should be much better overall, please let me know if you run into issues, particularly around any specific voices being too loud or quiet on their given routes. Some of the softer voices were tough to find the right level for, since bringing them too close to the baseline most characters use made them sound far too loud (hunted, cold, and paranoid were the biggest offenders.) Aside from any bug fixes over the next week or so, this will be the last update the game is getting before The Pristine Cut some time next year. And as one last added note, there are 8 days left to pick up a Thorn poster!
Extras will go up in our shop after we're done printing, but they'll be a little more expensive then, and I'm not sure how big a print run we'll be doing outside of pre-orders. Here's the link: https://topatoco.com/products/ah-stp-thorn-pr All the best, and happy holidays! Tony and Abby

Hi everyone, Thank you all so much for supporting our work and helping Slay the Princess reach a level of success that gives our studio the freedom to make our games completely on our own terms and the way we want to make them moving forward! We're extremely proud of what we've made with Slay the Princess, but now that the dust from launch has started to settle, we think we can make it even better. So we'd like to announce The Pristine Cut edition, releasing next year (date TBD). We don't want to give away too many details just yet, but you can expect:

• Several new chapters.
• Significant expansions to several chapters already in the game.
• And more to be revealed at a later date!

Hey folks, Back to the grindstone! The biggest update here is to the Supporter's Pack, which now has a lossless version of the OST (FLAC), as well at 7 new wallpapers and some concept art for you to check out. Beyond that, we should be roughly up to date on reported bugs. Some noteworthy changes:

• Adjusted controller interactions with the dialogue box. Specifically increased the amount the scrollbar moves when you use the dpad to move up/down the list for dialogue options. I'm working on figuring out how to tie the amount the scrollbar moves to the height of the currently hovered option, but Ren'py's being a real hassle on that front.

Here by popular demand is everybody's favorite shot of everybody's favorite Princess,* The Thorn! And this time, nobody's going to take her away from you. Celebrate your freedom by hanging this 18x24" poster on your wall. Or on your ceiling. Or wherever else you'd like to hang it, because once you buy it, it's your poster, so we can't tell you what to do with it. We're offering discounts on pre-orders through the end of the month, and extras will be up in our online shop in January. Link to the poster: https://topatoco.com/products/ah-stp-thorn-pr Link to the shop, where you grab a sticker sheet and goodies from our/Abby's other stuff: https://topatoco.com/collections/abby-howard If this does well, we've got some other merch planned for next year *okay maybe not everybody's but she is a TOP contender.

Hey folks! Just wanted to drop a quick update to let you all know that we managed to take home a win in the Best Indie RPG category as part of the OTK Video Game Awards! Thanks so much for supporting us and lending your votes, it's very cool to have won something ^^ And with this I think (hopefully) the voting side of awards season is finally over, so posts will return to your regular-old game updates! The next thing coming up is our livestream on December 16th, where Jonny, Nichole, and Brandon will be joining us for a full playthrough. Jonny and Nichole will be doing their parts live and Jonny doesn't like listening to his performances so this will actually be the first time he experiences the full game. We'll also be sharing developer commentary as we play and answering your questions. And we might (will) be teasing a very cool announcement as part of the stream. We'll be broadcasting to our Twitch channel (http://twitch.tv/black_tabby_games), and uploading a VOD to our YouTube channel (https://www.youtube.com/@blacktabbygames) after the fact. Hope to see you there! Tony and Abby

We've got a new date for the Slay the Princess Livestream December 16th at 11am EST. For those of you who missed the initial announcement, we'll be doing a full playthrough with Jonny, Nichole and Brandon with the voice sliders turned down to 0 so both Jonny and Nichole can read their parts live! This should be extra fun because Jonny ~hasn't~ played the full game and only knows his half of the script, so it'll be his first time experiencing things ^^ We'll also be making a special (Slay the Princess) announcement on the stream, so be sure to stop by! Stream will be on our Twitch channel: https://www.twitch.tv/black_tabby_games And a VOD will be uploaded to our YouTube channel after the stream: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC6bbk3AuxgkmTlIqmTgv2mQ Also, while you're here, a reminder of several ongoing awards programs that could use your votes! There are only TWO DAYS LEFT to vote for Slay the Princess in The Horror Game Awards. Vote for us for Best Indie, Best Narrative, Best Performance (Jonny) and Audience Choice: https://thehorrorgameawards.com/vote/ In the OTK Video Game Awards, vote for Slay the Princess for Best Narrative and Best Indie RPG: https://www.otkvga.com/vote We're up against exclusively AAA budget titles for best narrative, so it'd be ~extra cool~ if we managed to scrape a win there! And then on IndieDB, vote for us for indie of the year! https://www.indiedb.com/games/slay-the-princess Thanks so much for supporting us and playing our games, and we can't wait to see you on the 16th! Best, Tony and Abby

EDIT: Slay the Princess is ALSO a finalist for best narrative and best indie rpg in the OTK game awards. Please *also* lend your votes for us here: https://www.otkvga.com/vote Hey everyone! We're finally back home and have some exciting news to share with you all, as well as a small ask: Slay the Princess is a finalist for ~four~ categories in The Horror Game Awards, all of which need your vote. THEY ARE: [olist]

Hey folks! It looks like the Steam Awards are coming up soon, so if you've enjoyed Slay the Princess, please consider nominating us for Outstanding Story Rich Game! Heck, nominate us for ~every (relevant) category~ if you want, because apparently you can do that this year! Thank you again so much for making this launch such a wonderful experience we really can't express how happy it's made us to see people enjoy Slay the Princess so much. Best, Tony and Abby

Hey folks! Trading Cards, emotes, badges, and profile backgrounds are here! Hope you like 'em ^^ A big thanks to everyone who's shared their condolences for Abby's family this week. It's meant a lot to hear from you all, and we really appreciate all of you bearing with us while we get things sorted. A few things coming down the pipe:

• We're still looking to find the rate date to reschedule the livestream for but we'll let you know as soon as we have one.
• The Steam Awards nomination period is coming up at the start of the Fall Sale we'll have a separate post for that when voting starts, but when the time comes, we'd appreciate your vote for Outstanding Story-Rich Game. Each player is only allowed to submit a game to a single category, so it helps if we all focus our efforts in just the one direction.
• We're finally running out of bugs to fix, which is nice! There's still a few bits where I'd like to improve the mix, but work there's been slowing down a bit.
• We've got a few accessibility fixes we'd like to make that are a little more complicated to implement, and still looking to make controller support less janky.
• Some other really cool stuff that isn't ready to be announced, but that we're comfortable teasing. Keep your eyes peeled in the new year!

Hey everyone! Mark your calendars, because we're doing a very special livestream on November 18th, starting at 11am Eastern time on our twitch channel: https://www.twitch.tv/black_tabby_games We'll be doing a full, live playthrough of Slay the Princess with a twist: the voice sliders are going to be turned down to 0, and Jonny and Nichole are going to read all of their parts live. Brandon Boone, our composer, will also be there (but after talking about how much of a logistical nightmare it would be, there won't be live music.) While we play, we'll be taking questions from the audience, talking about the development process, and maybe chatting a bit about what we've got planned for the future. Hope to see you there! ~Tony and Abby

New patch went up, here's the quick summary.
Finally finally finally finally, the bit where you could get softlocked on chapter 1 should be fixed. Remixed the audio for [spoiler]The Shifting Mound fight[/spoiler]. She should no longer be louder than the rest of the game, and the audio quality for the in-game version of the transformation track should be significantly improved. Various smaller bug fixes, including clipping issues with some sprites, a few other lines of audio getting loudness adjusted, and some typos. The accessibility menu should now correctly be directly accessible from the main menu. What's Next Controller support could be a lot better. I think this is probably a longer-term project on my part. Ren'py is a little finicky and assumes choice menus will be wholly represented on the screen instead of presented in a scrolling box. I'm not sure the best way to immediately improve the feel of that scroll, but it's something I'm actively thinking about. Sound mixing overall could still be better. I have a backlog from the pinned thread, but I wanted to make sure the worst offender, [spoiler]the Shifting Mound fight[/spoiler] was addressed in the short-term. On that note: Install space - right now, the game has a lot of uncompressed audio, since working directly with those raw files makes my ongoing efforts to tweak sound and gameplay issues much much faster. Once I'm confident everything's in a more settled state, will be converting voice files to flac to save space while preserving quality. We won't be compressing any of the visual assets in the game - want to make sure those remain as crisp as possible. A few other accessibility fixes are on our roadmap as well. Ren'py's built in accessibility fonts scale directly to font-size in terms of points, which means that right now, if you switch to a different font, the Princess' text will appear much larger than any other text, and can occasionally run off the screen. I'm not sure what the best fix for that is just yet since we're just leaning directly on our engine for that functionality, but I'm hoping I can figure something out. We've maybe been starting to think about some more fun things that aren't just fixes but for the time being

Drowned Grey should no longer [spoiler]accuse you of murdering her if she killed herself in the prior chapter.[/spoiler]

Hey folks! A couple of quick updates Slay the Princess made it to the semi-finals for the Players' Choice category in the horror game awards. If y'all want to help push us to the finals, you can vote for us here: https://thehorrorgameawards.com/nominees/playerschoice/ We're also going to be doing a Reddit AMA on /r/games this coming Wednesday, November 1st, at around 2pm EST. We'll send an update when we have a link. Should be a good time! We're also wrapping up work on Steam Community items, so hopefully badges, trading cards, and profile backgrounds will be up at some point in the next week ^^ Thanks so much as always for your support, it means the world to us! ~Tony and Abby

Noticed that the Thorn route had some missing assets which have now been restored. Please enjoy one (1) additional romantic CG. Fixed a few bugs; readjusted levels on some more voicelines that were too quiet. Please continue to report instances where the lines are too quiet or the music is too loud in the dialogue/sound issues thread: https://steamcommunity.com/app/1989270/discussions/0/3873717982252461671/

Fixed a rare but major issue with an ending of The Den chapter that [spoiler]could lock players out of going downstairs without the knife in the end game.[/spoiler] Adjusted that One Breaking Glass sound to be quieter. Hopefully it's finally at the correct balance where it still has an emotional impact, but no longer causes issues for players using headphones. Assorted fixes to volume levels on lines that were too quiet, small typos in the script, and voice lines that were slightly different than the subtitles. Changed the file structure in the supporter's pack so that wallpapers are sorted into separate folders based on resolution.

Hey everyone! I can't express enough how incredible this release has been. Slay the Princess has been a deeply, deeply personal project for the team, and to see it emotionally resonate so strongly with so many people has blown even our wildest hopes out of the water. So from the bottom of our hearts, thank you so so so very much. We've seen a lot of requests these past few days for a Supporter's Pack, and we're happy to share that we've just launched it. It contains the entire OST as well as 163 HD wallpapers from the game, each of which is available in 1080p, 1440p, and 4k UHD (16:9 aspect ratio.) You can pick it up here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2642210/Slay_the_Princess__Supporters_Pack/ In terms of what's next: We're going to be doing a special livestream on November 18th to celebrate the launch. Exact time and details pending, but we have something really exciting planned for it, and you won't want to miss it. You can follow us on Twitch to get notified when we go live: http://twitch.tv/black_tabby_games Localizations and Ports! The game's outperformed our sales expectations, so I feel pretty confident saying that we'll be looking to tackle console ports and localizations for some time (probably late) next year. We're still figuring out the details, but at the very least, we're planning to localize to Chinese, Japanese, and German, and we've seen a ton of interest in Spanish and BR-PT as well. Apologies if you're waiting for a localization to play, but we're a two-person studio and we want localizations to be ~excellent~ so we're being cautious about how we commit our time as a resource. Game Updates: Slay the Princess is the game we wanted to make, and thanks to our last-minute delay, we were able to restore the only significant cut content in time for the official release. (In case you're curious, the cut content was DO NOT READ IF YOU HAVEN'T FINISHED A PLAYTHROUGH [spoiler]the white on black illustrations that introduce each vessel the Shifting Mound summons in the game's climax.[/spoiler] Because of that, the main updates we're looking to do are general quality of life fixes. The most significant ones:

• Adding a CG gallery accessible through the game's menu where you'll be able to look at art from key moments you've unlocked over the course of playing.
• Text-scaling for alternative fonts selected in the accessibility menu isn't working as desired, with the Princess' font significantly bigger than the dialogue menu and narrator fonts. This is a complicated issue to fix and might take a while for us to figure out a work-around.
• Some players have had off-experiences assuming that [spoiler]like DDLC, Slay the Princess relies of metadata across all of your save files. We're currently considering ways to implement a warning that this isn't the case the neither feels immersion breaking in the moment nor spoils anything about the structure of the game in advance.[/spoiler]

~Rare set of circumstances allowing players to accidentally soft-lock should finally be fixed (knock on wood) ~Various fixes re: typos and parallax clipping.

Added a direct link to the OST through the end credits in case you'd like to make a personal playlist. Fixed an issue that [spoiler]would allow players to repeat the Tower multiple times on a single playthrough[/spoiler]. Various assorted fixes to text. Issues that we're currently investigating: 1. There seem to be rare instances where players can get soft-locked on the [Slay the Princess] menu in chapter 1. I believe I've plugged the remaining holes in the logic there, but please report if you run into this issue. 2. There's an issue where switching to another font through the accessibility menu can cause sizing issues. The Princess' font, by default, appears smaller per "point" so it has a higher point value to adjust it to be more legible, but these size differences carry over to alternative fonts. Fixing this one is probably going to take some time. 3. There's a rare issue caused by the the Steam overlay that causes the game to crash (frequently when players try to load a save.) This seems to be an issue for some other games, too, but if you run into it, you can resolve it by turning off the overlay. Will continue to investigate further. A couple of people have asked about trading cards and point shop items. They're definitely on our radar, and we'll start looking into them once we've had a little time to recover from launch. Thanks so much for being so supportive! Tony

Fixed another instance of being able to access a chapter three from somewhere it shouldn't be accessible from. [spoiler]Should no longer be able to get to the Wild from the Beast if you've already gotten there from the Witch[/spoiler] Quick Load button re-enabled. It seems that there's a rare issue with the Steam Overlay interacting weirdly with load functionality. I'm assuming this is an engine-level problem, and have opened a ticket on the Ren'py Github sharing the details folks have reported. If you run into issues where loading crashes the game, if possible provide traceback information in the bugs channel, and also try validating your install before resuming your game.

Fixed another rare instance of a player was able to proceed to a certain chapter 3 when they shouldn't have been able to. [spoiler]Players who had previously encountered the Fury via Tower were rarely able to subsequently reach the Fury again through Adversary[/spoiler]

Thank you so much to everyone who's enjoyed the game so far. Fixes below: That one Razor achievement should work now (but you'll have to satisfy the conditions from scratch.) The quick load button has been temporarily disabled until I can figure out why it's crashing the game for some people. You can still quick save as normal, and you can access your quicksaves under the "Q" tab in the save games screen. A particularly loud breaking glass sound effect was tuned down a little bit. There was some missing logic on the Witch route that occasionally allowed you to visit a third chapter you should not have been able to visit. (Being intentionally vague here, but feel free to look at the bugs thread for details) Fixes to various small typos and visual glitches. Hope this helps, and a big thanks to everyone who's made this an unbelievably warm release! Cheers, Tony

Fixed an achievement that was accidentally granted when it shouldn't have been. Framerate should now be by default set to your monitor refresh rate rather than 30fps A couple small visual fixes.

Whatever horrors you may find in these dark spaces, have heart and see them through. There are no premature endings. There are no wrong answers. There are only fresh perspectives and new beginnings. This is a love story. After a little over a year in development, Slay the Princess is finally here, and the early reviews have been glowing!Here's what some people have been saying: An existentially horrific visual novel, with an incredibly well-written plot, a beautiful score and graphics that will enrapture all senses. One of the best narrative games of 2023. 10/10 Voxel Smash There isnt a single thing I dont like about Slay the Princess. The presentation is beautiful, the story is fantastic and moving, the voice acting of amazing characters is done phenomenally well, and the branching paths of the story give you what feels like unlimited possibilities. 10/10 Try Hard Guides Slay the Princess will stay with you for a long time, I think. Its absurdist and dark and haunting in a way that not a lot of games are. If you have an itch for something thats spooky but also morally confronting and you will be thinking about it for days to come, its impossible not to recommend this. A- Player 2 You can pick up the game right now and play on Windows, Mac and Linux. The base price is $17.99, and there's also a 10% launch discount, as well as a Steam bundle with Scarlet Hollow that adds an extra 15% off. If you already own Scarlet Hollow on Steam, you can still complete the bundle to apply that extra discount! Thank you so much for supporting us, and we can't wait for you to play! ~Abby and Tony

Hey everyone! I know you've all been extremely hyped and patient for Slay the Princess' release, but we had some issues passing certification on Steam that forced us to delay until Monday. Those issues were finally resolved as of this morning, but that resolution happened after we already had to confirm a delay for other storefronts, and we want to make sure everyone we work with gets to launch the game at the same time. The new release date and time is Monday October 23rd at 10am EST. We're probably even more upset about this delay than you are we've been working around the clock for months to get this game as good as possible for release, but fortunately it's just going to be a few more days! And we're going to be taking advantage of these extra few days to restore some content we had to cut to make tomorrow's release date. You'll only get to play Slay the Princess for the first time once, so we're excited for the opportunity to make a lot of people's first experiences even better. On a brighter note, early reviews for the game have been absolutely glowing, so you're going to be in for a treat. Here's a snippet to keep your hype train going:

• "An existentially horrific visual novel, with an incredibly well-written plot, a beautiful score and graphics that will enrapture all senses. One of the best narrative games of 2023." 10/10 - Voxel Smash
• "There isnt a single thing I dont like about Slay the Princess. The presentation is beautiful, the story is fantastic and moving, the voice acting of amazing characters is done phenomenally well, and the branching paths of the story give you what feels like unlimited possibilities." - 10/10 - Try Hard Guides
• "Slay the Princess is a prime example of why visual novels are one of the most powerful and hard-hitting offerings in gaming today. Its an astounding tale where nearly every aspect elevates its narrative to new heights." 9/10 - Press Space to Jump
• "Pierced throughout with evocative, hand-drawn visuals and flawless voice-acting, Slay the Princess might have just slashed its way to the top of my favorite games this year." The Indie Informer - 9.5/10
• "An all at once engaging, intriguing, funny, satisfying, and deep experience." 9.5/10 - PC Invasion
• "Slay the Princess will stay with you for a long time, I think. Its absurdist and dark and haunting in a way that not a lot of games are. If you have an itch for something thats spooky but also morally confronting and you will be thinking about it for days to come, its impossible not to recommend this." A- - Player 2

Hey folks! We're going to be taking down the Slay the Princess demo when the game launches, so if you haven't played it yet and would like to, it'd be best to play it in the next day. If you're planning on buying the game regardless and haven't played the demo, I think it would be a slightly better experience skip it and go straight to the full release on Friday! About a month after release, we're planning to rehost both the original and director's cuts of the demo on the Slay the Princess itch page for the sake of having a historical archive of the game's development. (Game has changed a lot since demo 1, and there have been some changes to the demo 2 content following its release as well.) Thanks so much for your support and understanding testers have really enjoyed the full game and we can't wait to share it with you on Friday! Best, Tony and Abby

Hey folks! We had the incredible good fortune of getting to debut Slay the Princess at last year's https://store.steampowered.com/sale/tinyteamsfestival2023]Tiny Teams festival on Steam, and as Slay the Princess nears the end of its development, we're coming full circle and participating once more. For those of you not in the know, Tiny Teams is an annual festival hosted by the good folks over at The Yogscast as a celebration of games developed by studios with a core team of five or less developers. Slay the Princess' core team is just the two of us, (Tony and Abby), though we wouldn't be where we are without the phenomenal contributions of:

• Brandon Boone (Music)
• Nichole Goodnight (The Princess)
• Jonathan Sims (The voices in your head)
• Phil Michalski (Sound design)

• Art for both the Tower and Adversary is finished. In case you missed it yesterday, we shared another small preview of some of the many, many pieces of art you'll see in the latter's final release. Those two routes combined have about as much unique art in them as the entire demo.
• We've also finished all of the writing for: Adversary, Tower, Spectre, Nightmare, Stranger, Witch (as well as quite a bit of other content we're not gonna talk about.) We've also finished work on hopefully the last trailer we'll ever have to do for the game. The script is a little over 100,000 words right now, and the final game should probably clock in at ~120,000. For comparison, the first demo had ~16,000 words of content, and the second demo had ~36,000 words.
• Brandon's also been knocking it out of the park with the soundtrack, and we've brought in Amelia Jones (who did vocals on the Hollow Knight OST) to help round out a couple of particularly important tracks, and her contributions have been stunning.

Hey folks! Short, but exciting update here. Work on Slay the Princess is continuing to stay on schedule. At the time of this posting around half of the routes for the game are fully written, and we're on track to have the rest of the script done by late July/early August. We've also got a few exciting events coming up on the calendar, including an exclusive new trailer and announcement as part of Fear Fest on September 6th a celebration of horror games put together by Feardemic and hosted by IGN. You'll be able to catch the whole event on IGN's youtube channel. It should be a great time, and we hope you tune in! Until then, be sure to join our discord (discord.gg/blacktabbygames) or follow us on social media to keep up to date on the game's development. Best, Tony and Abby

Hey folks! As part of our exhibition at this year's LudoNarraCon, we're going to do an art stream this Saturday, May 6th at 1pm Eastern time and taking your questions!

Tweaked the on-ramps to the Beast and Witch routes, making it easier to attain the Beast and more difficult to attain the Witch. Should be a good balance now where people struggle less w/ the beast specifically (and witch should remain very accessible!) Additionally fixed a couple of small typos/errors

Hey folks! Now that we're back from an incredibly exciting PAX, I want to do a devlog about the new demo. To that end, here's a survey that'll help with the writeup (and that'll help us mathematically determine Best Girl): https://forms.gle/zCsktLotoEP16bbj7 Also, while you're here, a quick update on the past couple of weeks, as well as what's to come. We've been floored by the overall reception to the new demo not only has the community response been incredibly, warm, but Slay the Princess has been making the rounds across the press space. Here's just a few highlights from the past couple of weeks:

• Kotaku - This Horror Time Loop Game Stole PAX
• Paste Magazine - The Best Games We Saw at PAX East 2023
• Destructoid - PAX: Slay the Princess is a twisting, creepy, captivating moral dilemma

• [url=discord.gg/blacktabbygames]Joining our Discord
• Subscribing to our mailing list
• Following us on Tumblr
• Joining the Slay the Princess subreddit
• Following us on Twitter

Hey folks! After much intense labor, the new Slay the Princess demo is here for you to enjoy! We made the first demo in just a couple of weeks to see what it'd be like to work on a game jam type project, so we wanted to take the opportunity to really expand on what was there and to release a more fleshed out version of it in line with the final vision. This new demo features: New lines and scenes in Chapter 1 4 new Chapter 2 Princesses, bringing the grand total to 10. 10 new tracks of music. A massively expanded opening to Chapter 2. All-in-all, there's probably about an hour or so of never-before-seen content in this update! If you happen to be attending PAX East this week, we'll be showcasing this new demo there as well, and there'll even be a standee of the Princess you can pose for pictures with! There's 12 new achievements to find in the demo since we overhauled the Chapter 2 experience for every Princess, we reset the "ending" based achievements, and there's a couple others to find as well. Thanks so much for your continued support, and we can't wait to show you more! ~Tony and Abby

Hey folks! Just in time for PAX East, we've got a new demo releasing on March 21st. You can think of this update as a sort of director's cut the original demo for Slay the Princess was put together in a couple of weeks as a bit of an experiment to see what it would be like to work under game jam conditions. This new release is closer to our vision for the game, and features some reworked scenes in chapter 2, an expanded beginning to chapter 2, tons of new music, and four new Princesses to meet. All-in-all, this update adds somewhere between 30 and 50% more content to what you've already played! On the off chance you're attending PAX this year, you'll be able to play the updated demo at our booth, but otherwise you'll be able to play it on Steam starting on the morning of the 21st. If you're extra impatient, though, you can play the test build right now by joining the alpha tester tier on our Patreon! It's still too early to nail down a release date for the finished project, but everything's coming along pretty smoothly, and we can't wait to share even more with you! Thank you as always for your patience and support, we wouldn't be able to make this game without you! ~Tony and Abby

Hey everyone! Excited to share some pretty big development updates! The first is that Slay the Princess was just selected to be part of this year's PAX Rising showcase, meaning we were one of just eleven indie games given a free booth for the convention. We'll be bringing a massively updated demo with us, including an expanded chapter 2, some more outcomes in chapter 1, and ~four~ new Princesses you've yet to meet. And if you're not able to make it to PAX this year, no worries! The new demo will be going live on Steam at the start of the convention, so you'll still be able to play it as soon as everyone else from the comfort of your home. On top of new content, we'll be pushing some QOL and UI changes to the demo as well.
The new textbox should feel more cohesive with the setting, and we're including a toggle-able quick menu at the bottom of the screen. I know some folks wound up going through the demo without realizing that they could save their games, so hopefully this saves new players a bit of a headache, and if you'd rather hide it, you'll be able to turn it off in the game's preferences. We've also been working on a sticker sheet with chibi versions of all of the Chapter 2 Princess evolutions, including the ones you haven't met yet. Those'll be available for purchase alongside the new demo ^^
We're both very happy with how the script has been turning out, and can't wait to share more of the game with you. Thank you so much for your continued patience and support as we make our lil' game! Best, Tony and Abby

Hey folks! We've finally finished Scarlet Hollow Episode 4, which means it's time to start thinking about what the rest of Slay the Princess' development is going to look like. A word on the former before we get to the latter. For those of you not in the know, Scarlet Hollow is our other game, an episodic horror visual novel, currently on Episode 4 of our planned seven. It's a little different than Slay the Princess, but a lot of the same heart is there.

• It's choices matter horror game with a healthy dose of humor.
• All of the art is hand-illustrated by Abby Howard (who is also one of the co-creators and the illustrator for Slay the Princess.)
• It's a more grounded story, where you're investigating a series of paranormal events in a small town tied together by an unseen thread.
• The game is too expansive/complicated for us to add voice acting, so unlike Slay the Princess, you'll have to do some reading.

Hiya Killers! We're nearing the home-stretch of Scarlet Hollow Episode 4's development, so we figured it'd be high time to announce a release date and share a new trailer. Once this episode's out, we'll be revving up for more work on Slay the Princess, but in the meantime, there's plenty of content in the Holler for you to sink your teeth into! [previewyoutube=LLfEzv57SjI;full][/previewyoutube] Episode 4 is set to release on November 22nd. I feel like we say this every time there's a new release, but it's also a long one. The full script for the episode is around 800 pages and somewhere around 200,000-250,000 words, bringing the total length of the game past One (1) Lord of the Rings or One (1) Infinite Jest in total content. Episode 4 has a lot of opportunities to revisit the consequences of earlier decisions, as well as even more new mysteries to unravel! And things are going to start to really steam up for certain romance paths. We're extremely proud of how Episode 4 is turning out, and we can't wait to share the full chapter with you next month! A few other notes:

• The game is currently on sale for Steam Scream Fest! If you haven't had the chance to pick up a copy, now's a great time! Scarlet Hollow is never going to dip below 20% off before leaving early access, and there's going to be a price hike before the full release, so if you've been holding out for a steeper discount, this is as steep as it'll get for at least a couple of years!
• If you want to get your hands on part of Episode 4 early, test branches available for Alpha Tester Patrons. A chunk of Episode 4 is available there now, and there'll be an update to the build later this week that brings things up to ~Episode 3's length content-wise.
• We have an ongoing crowd-funding campaign for a Wayne plush with glow in the dark eyes. There's ~two weeks left in the campaign as of the time of this writing, so please check it out if that sort of thing interests you!

Just an event to let us broadcast to our store page

Ongoing event to allow us to loop developers stream during Next Fest.

Hey everyone! Slay the Princess is going to be taking part in Steam Next Fest starting on Monday, and we wanted to celebrate by putting together a new trailer and teasing more art for the full release! Check it out here: [previewyoutube=ux1WogFXF8o;leftthumb][/previewyoutube] The trailer.
The Fury.
The Nightmare.
The Beast. In preparation for Next Fest, we've also spent the past couple of days working with the talented folks at Team Dogpit to put together a shader to handle Slay the Princess' animations on the GPU, rather than pre-rendering them as video files. The result should be a massive jump in performance on most machines. We're still keeping the animation toggle as an option in the preferences, in case players would prefer an animation-free experience. On top of dramatically improving performance, this update should significantly speed up development of the full game, since we no longer have to manually render each art asset; reduce file size, since all of our art assets can be stored as pngs; and allow for a faster turnaround on bug fixes. There's also a handful of compression artifacts that should no longer be present, specifically with a couple of more detailed assets losing some color information. We have two streams planned for Next Fest on October 3rd at 8pm EST, and on October 4th and 11pm EST. We'll be joined by Nichole Goodnight, the Princess' VA, and will be playing through the demo and taking your questions! If you'd like to help us reach even more Heroes before Next Fest, replaying the demo and sharing the game over the next two days can go a long way for extra visibility! Thanks so much! Tony and Abby

Join us for a special developer live-stream as part of Steam Next Fest.

Hang out with the developers and they play through the demo, and questions about the game!

Hey folks! We just patched the Slay the Princess demo with another round of significant performance optimizations. It's worth noting that these optimizations required us to refactor the demo's file structure, so the patch for this requires you to effectively redownload the entire package. High level notes: [olist]

Hi everyone! We're going to be doing a special Q&A livestream tomorrow, August 28th, at 6pm EST on our Twitch channel: https://www.twitch.tv/black_tabby_games We'll be playing Phasmophobia while taking your questions, and we'll be joined by Nichole Goodnight (Princess VA) and Brandon Boone (composer) Here's the details:
Hope to see you there!

Hey folks! It's been about a week since the demo came out, so we wanted to put out a survey to get a sense of how players progressed through the story and what they're most excited to see in the full version of the game! You can fill it out here: https://forms.gle/p8CWgbRMZCX5muN86 Thank you so much! We're excited to share more with you in the coming months! ~Tony and Abby ps Scarlet Hollow, our other project is also 20% off until Monday, which is as cheap as it'll get before it leaves early access!

Hi everyone! Apologies for the new download - we've just just finished re-rendering every animation in the demo to help make the game more CPU efficient, which means every animation needs to be re-downloaded for this new patch. At least on the machine we've used for development, this update should reduce CPU usage from between 50% to 2/3 with minimal loss of visual quality. It's possible that some older machines might still struggle with the load of layered HD animations, but as of yesterday's patch, the game now also has a toggle to turn those animations off in the options menu, at which point it should be no more resource intensive than any other visual novel. Cheers, Tony and Abby

Hi folks-- As we mentioned in yesterday's update, we've just pushed a new patch to the demo that comes with a toggle for the game's animations. If you've been having trouble with your framerate, you can flip this toggle at any point in the game's preferences. (Accessed via main menu or by hitting escape) Turning off animations should allow the demo to run well on most machines! Thank you so much for your patience while we got this sorted, and we hope you continue to enjoy the game!

Hi folks-- Thank you to each and every one of you for a jaw-droppingly warm reception to the Slay the Princess announcement and demo! We just put out a patch for the demo, the first stage of a two-stage process to improve its overall performance. Today's patch has roughly halved the file-size of the game's animations, which winds up improving its CPU usage by a fair bit. We may see if we're able to switch over from pre-rending our animations in after effects to some sort of custom shader for the full release (honestly a little outside of my wheelhouse!), but at least for now, there should be fewer framerate drops. In case the changes in this patch aren't enough to fully improve performance issues on your end, we're about halfway-through implementing a graphics toggle that lets you turn animations off at any point in the game, which should allow it to run as smooth as butter on pretty much any device! Testing out the work we've done so far, toggling animations off will use about 1/10th of the total resources the most recent build uses, so the game should accessible on pretty much any machine! We expect this second patch to be live at some point tomorrow ^_^ Thank you again for playing our game, and we can't wait to share more of it (and Scarlet Hollow) with you! ~Tony and Abby

Hey everyone! After a week of waiting with bated breath, the Slay the Princess demo is FINALLY here for all of you to sink your teeth into :) There are 13 achievements, seven endings, and about 1.5-2 hours of gameplay in the demo if you're trying to hit 100% completion. If you have a good time, don't forget to wishlist the full game, to check out Scarlet Hollowour other narrative horror game (20% until August 8th!)to follow us on Twitter, or to join our Discord! Happy slaying! ~Tony and Abby

Hello everyone! Thank you all for the incredibly warm reception to our new game! We're so glad that folks are as excited about Princess slaying as we are. Since people have been asking, we wanted to make a quick post to share some info on the demo: It'll be available to the public this coming Monday, August 1st as part of the Tiny Teams event on Steam. (And there'll be an itch version as well. Content-wise, the demo should be about 90-120 minutes of gameplay if you're going for every ending, and contains roughly 1/6 of the full game. (That's an extremely rough estimate, but that's at least the overall length we're planning for.) We've set up Steam achievements for the demo as well you'll be able to use these as a rough guide to hunt down each ending, as well as some other fun little secrets we've buried in there. If August 1st feels like too long to wait, fear not we also have an alpha tester tier on our Patreon that can get you a key to the demo *right away!* Joining this tier will also get you early access to alpha builds of all of our games as we continue to develop them. Likewise, if Slay the Princess seems like fun and you haven't had the chance to try our other game, you might like Scarlet Hollow! It's an episodic horror visual novel set in a crumbling coal town in North Carolina where spooky stuff just keeps on happening. We're releasing Scarlet Hollow episodically the first three of our seven planned episodes are out right now, and are about 375,000 words of content, thousands of hand drawn sprites and hundreds of backgrounds, and 8 hours of gameplay for a single playthrough, with enough replay-value that quite a few of our players have already logged well over 50 hours! You can also talk to a 'possum in it. (We're stuck on a train right now so we'll upload images when we have a better internet connection!) And if you want to give Scarlet Hollow a try for free before deciding if you want to buy the full game, the entire first episode is FREE on Steam forever.