Slay the Princess reminds me how glad I am that I’m not my father’s daughter

When I first played Slay the Princess, it was the summer after I’d stopped speaking to my father. In July of 2025, I was an open wound. My respectable accounting job was making me miserable, the Trump administration was destroying our country, and each day felt like an existential struggle.

So it was hardly a surprise when I fell into the grayscale world of Black Tabby Games’ Slay the Princess. The horror-adventure game places the player in a near-instant dilemma of intimacy and vulnerability. 

It opens with The Narrator telling you that “You’re on a path in the woods. At the end of that path is a cabin. And in the basement of that cabin is a princess.” His tone is a mild, yet instructive British tenor.

Then, he tells you it’s your job to slay her.

[Editor's note: This article contains spoilers for Slay the Princess.]

My father has always been angry, and, I think, afraid of me. I was too opinionated as a young girl*, and by the time I was a teen, I'd already decided I didn't want children. He was a classic patriarch, high on post-9/11 toxic masculinity and hatred of the Other. He didn’t care for the day-to-day of helping me get ready for school in the mornings, but he was always invested in curating my looks: a side part for my hair, Lucky-brand jeans despite the way the tight denim made my skin revolt. According to my mother, it’s because as his child, I was an extension of his will, a reflection of him.

My transness, then, and worse, my love of a transgender woman, was anathema to him.