#stp original route

[msfcatlover]

Commissioned the amazing @magua-vida to draw my original Princesses, The Dancer & The Dream! I'm absolutely delighted with how they came out, they both look so pretty and bursting with personality!

For anyone who doesn't want to click through, you get the Dancer if you unlock the Princess's cuff & die of a heart attack, making her flighty but concerned, fussing over your health & safety. The Dream is Dancer's unique Chapter 3, who you get if you fall asleep in the cabin with Dancer fussing over you, and is smotheringly protective to the point of aggression & possessiveness while acting manipulatively sweet & fragile.

She just wants to take care of you... even (or especially) if it means chaining you up to keep you safe.

[voice-of-the-dumbass]

I can’t draw nails augh

[msfcatlover]

I could see this diverging a few different ways.

You chase her out of the cabin, she is claimed by the Mound (see route layout.)

You manage to corner her, but like any cornered animal (including rabbits) she puts up a valiant fight. You stab her heart, but she rips your throat out. You bleed out, and wake up in the forest of The Den.

(This is your alternate ch.2 -> ch.3 path, the same way you can get the Fury from either the Tower or Adversary, the Wild from either the Beast or the Witch, the Grey from either the Damsel or the Prisoner.)

For cornering a frightened, panicked girl who wanted nothing more than to flee and killing her in cold blood, the Voice of the Cold joins your chorus.

The Hare will not take the blade; she's too frightened. But by throwing it away and demonstrating that you have no others hidden, you can win her very faint trust. The open sky & lack of tunnel give the Narrator very few options for killing you off, but He calls down a blizzard to try to stop you.

If you chose all the right dialogue options, you can shelter her in your wings, leading to either her being taken by the Mound wondering if people can truly change, or a new variant on the Wild as you freeze together.

(If the Wild, either the Voice of the Smitten or the Voice of the Cheated will join your chorus, just like with the Thorn, depending on your exact words.)

Otherwise, she runs off, still unwilling to trust you beyond the threshold. She disappears into the storm, and then everything else does too.

Chapter II: The Hare

Edit: Basic Route info and theoretical end speech beneath the cut.

To be frank, I mostly just wanted to draw Princess as a bunnygirl, but I did still have some thoughts about the route, though nothing too in-depth. Rather than come up with a new dialogue option, I figure it'd be best to take advantage of options that are already there. Currently, both instances of slaying the Princess when the Narrator compels you lead to Witch, but what if the second time led you somewhere else? Internal logic: Soft Princess has just dodged your first (initially unwilling) strike, proving to be swift enough to avoid you, though clearly in a panic. Despite her unease, she's much faster than you. Like you're a... tortoise, and she's the Hare... Just roll with it. (I don't think anyone's noticed/mentioned her crown has that turtle shape on it)

For the snow thing, I just wanted to give her a dress that'd allow her to run, but didn't want to go with a loincloth like design a la Adversary. I settled on that short, fur trimmed one and thought "what if there was snow" and hey, now there's some manner of conflict and explanation for why she's not chained up and is able to avoid you.

And extremely early draft of a theoretical Shifting Mound speech. For context, I imagine you have to sort of chase Hare out of the cabin. Make her choose between constantly avoiding you, or heading into the freezing winter air she's afraid of. "Survive, evade, run. Flee, escape, take shelter, hide, live another day. But death comes all the same, whether it waits outside your door, or comes barreling through it. Do you look it in the eye, meet it on your own terms, or do you keep running, do you keep hiding? You drove me to make a choice, and only in choosing to confront the cold death I feared was I truly alive. One always has a choice to make, even in fear.

But without that fear of the end, do one's choices truly matter? Can a life mean anything if your decision to survive, or to die, is as meaningless as your decision to breathe? Is being given that choice so unimportant to you?" -That fear is what pushes one to survive, but it makes life itself terrifying. "Or is it the terror itself that makes life worth surviving? The fear of not seeing what comes tomorrow?" -I would never take that choice from you, or from others. "Then make your own choice to join with me once again, and give back that choice to the world."

[knockknockitsnickels]

Themed Slay the Princess Playthrough Ideas

Someone Explodes: Razor -> Fury -> Wild (via Witch) -> Cage -> Happily Ever After

Big Princess: Wraith -> Razor -> Apotheosis -> Eye of the Needle -> Den

Narrator has a Very Bad Time: Princess & Dragon -> Apotheosis -> Moment of Clarity -> Wild -> Thorn

Hard to Draw: Beast -> Moment of Clarity -> Razor -> Cage -> Fury

I would Trust them to Watch my Drink at a Party: Spectre -> Prisoner -> Adversary -> Wraith -> Thorn

Opportunist is There: Razor -> Wraith -> Moment of Clarity -> Witch -> Happily Ever After

I'm out of ideas suggest YOURS in the comments thanks

[ty-bayonet-betteridge]

forever thinking about how the long quiet embracing their full divinity involves The Voices coming back. like yeah being plural is basically the same thing as being a godi'll cosign that

[salty-an-disco]

Original Chapter 2 concept:

When you enter the cabin, you keep Narrator's words about the princess lying and cheating in mind and make sure to interrogate and prod at her every statement in the basement.

The princess gets visibly distressed and irritated at this, feeling even more trapped under your interrogation and getting more angry the more you doubt her words ("I don't know! I just don't know! What else do you want me to say?"). Hero suggests that maybe you should lay off a bit, and Narrator shows irritation at the fact that you keep questioning instead of slaying.

If you keep up the interrogation, getting closer so that now the princess is also physically cornered, the princess will snap at you and use her chains to trap and strangle you, screaming like a trapped animal.

Everything goes dark and you die.

Chapter II: The Weaver

You're accompanied by Voice of the Interrogator, and go to the cabin to find a moist stone building with walls covered in a silky thread. In the basement, there's a regular-looking princess waiting for you, tho you can't quite make out her face from this distance. She screams at you to help her, that there's a monster nearby and to please save her soon.

If you do, you'll find yourself getting dangled in webs, and that the 'princess' was just a decoy set up by the real princess, who was waiting for you on the ceiling.

[msfcatlover]

Oh, I can so see the Princess getting more & more upset, staring you down, eye twitching, but unable to rip herself free as you stubbornly insist to the Hero & Narrator that yes you can do this forever. Tugging on her chain until her wrist starts to bleed, but unable to summon the desperation to chew when her patience has become a defining trait. Stubborn silence eventually beginning to crack—still unwilling to talk to you while you still hold the blade, but challenging what the hell your problem is, asking if she’s so scary that you’re paralyzed, eventually half-furious/half-begging demanding to know what’s wrong with you, why you keep staring at her like that—

The Narrator trying to press the issue by making your body start to give. Legs tremble, then you fall to your knees—maintaining eye contact is a choice, keeping hold of the blade is another. Eventually your arms will give out too, but you can twist your head to keep looking at her.

The dark shadows forming under her eyes. The blood dripping from her manacle, the flesh puffy & inflamed around is. The chapped, dehydrated lips. The sunken, starved look settling into her cheeks. Slumping back against the wall, as feeble as you are.

(It could just be shadows, of course. Tricks of the light.)

Too dangerous to approach. Too dangerous to leave alone. Too pathetic to be a threat. Too threatening not to take seriously.

(Oh, she is a contradiction~)

Her last words are probably something like, “What do you want from me?” or “Too stubborn for your own good… but I guess we’re the same then.” or “Why are we doing this again?”

Some fan princesses before i go to bed. Lore on them in the morning if anyone cares put ut in the tags if ya want that ig

[bottomschlatt]

stp voice of the opportunist is the kinda guy to request someone perform a mormon ‘baptism for the dead’ for him in his will just on the slightest off chance they’re actually right. this makes him a bit of a slimy weasely shithead and also it makes me want him so fucking badly

[strixcattus]

It's kind of cool how in the original STP demo one of the routes is the Fury, which is obviously the prototype of the Adversary, but comes with the Voice of the Broken, who ended up in the Tower chapter.

And then we get to the actual game, and there's a chapter called Fury again, except she's the merged Chapter III of the Adversary and the Tower, the two routes that she split into over the course of development. They tore her apart and reassembled her from the pieces, which is a little funny, given how her entire chapter is themed around her tearing herself and you apart. There's a thematic parallel between the narrative of her chapter and what actually happened to it in development.

...And now she's going to get an expansion which is apparently "very big" and "has even more MEAT." I wonder if that's going to bring in the "pieced back together" part of her game development arc.

[beartitled]

Did you play the pristine cut of STP? What do you think of Dragon, Cage and HappilyEverAfter if so?

Spoilers for STP pristine cut under read more (+ a lot of text warning)

Hehe I see STP ppl are excited and want more silly comics

Well there’s a lot of things to say tbh 👀

Overall really enjoyed new content so far

It kinda feels like a fanservice for the people who already played the game

Which is not a bad thing, don’t get me wrong ☝️

I just view the original game as a perfect instalment, which doesn’t really need a continuation

New scenarios is just a pleasant bonus

(I’m one shot/short story fan okay 👉👈)

I already saw Dragon and Happily After routes

Yet to see all the variations the Cage route has to offer (heard ppl said it’s the most diverse one)

The Princess and The Dragon

HEY REMEMBER HOW I SAID I DON’T LIKE THE IDEA OF CHANGING THE GENDERS OF THE CHARACTERS BC THAT WAY THE DYNAMIC WOULD BE UNSETTLING?

YEA SO THIS ROUTE EXPLORED THAT DYNAMIC GUYS

I enjoyed this route, bc again

It’s scary, uncomfortable, makes you feel unsafe and uneasy 👁️👁️

Awesome depiction of how scary this type of situation would be

And of course bonus points, we got to see the bird bois 🎉

(Opportunist go brush yo teeth, u spooky lookin ass)

Happily ever after

Ok

Noooow we’re talking

I love that route, it’s my favourite so far

The pain, the suffering, the absolutely devastated British crowman

Brilliant, chills

This one actually feels like a missing part of the og game to me

I wanted to go into details about my opinions on that route in the future post

But now I want to talk 😈

👏Smitten👏my boy👏how are you in your edgy villain era already omg

Can we just admit for a second how badass Smitten is for escaping protagonist’s body?

Like-💥

This was the first route I saw and was like “Ooooh that’s probably the new gimmick, every voice is doing to escape and shenanigans happen” AND NO Smitten is just that guy™️ absolute chad

Minus points for “we will give her something she doesn’t know she wants yet”

*hits Smitten with newspaper*

Bad voice 💥🗞️bad 💥🗞️ we listen to what 💥🗞️our queen 💥🗞️wants 🗞️💥🗞️💥💥

But it works okay

The atmosphere is immaculate, I was legit concerned for a moment

Ok now give me a moment to be a nerd ☝️🤓

I love how this route gives Smitten flaws

I think finally we saw that every voice has them, because voices are an isolated part of a person, a pure feeling if you will

And Smitten represents that naïve love idealisation/love obsession

The guy loves the princess, she is pure perfection to him

This feeling is blinding and honestly pretty toxic irl

During the whole og game Smitten was never conflicting?

He pretty much the comedic relief of the whole game (and least it felt like that to me)

I think he was kinda a missed potential

Yes, love is sweet

Crushes are can be funny, silly and overall just positive

But it can be so destructive, so painful and so so exhausting when it gets to the point of obsession

And that route gives you a direct illustration of it

Which is amazing

I honestly think we don’t have enough media just showcasing this feeling of obsessive love and how dangerous it is

(yandere trope doesn’t count 👿 this trope just kinda glorified the issue)

And the tragedy is SMITTEN IS TOO DELUSIONAL TO EVEN UNDERSTAND WHAT HE’S DOING WRONG

My poor poor birb boy

He’s too focused on doing everything perfectly, to make princess satisfied, to make us satisfied, why isn’t it working? He does everything he can, why doesn’t it work? How doesn’t it work?

HE’S TOO LOVESTRUCK TO TAKE A STEP BACK AND REFLECT

AAAAAAAAA

God I’m insane about Happily ever after

As a person who struggles with this exact feeling of idolising and obsessing over ppl, I just really feel that route

Goth Smitten incoming *coughs*

Thanks for your question ❤️ hope you enjoyed reading my mess of thoughts💥

Share your thoughts in comments/reblogs if you want ppl

[msfcatlover]

Might I recommend:

@simcardiac-arrested's The Hive & The Web (1, 2, 3, 4, 5)

@salty-an-disco's The Weaver

@embraceyourdestiny's The Forgotten isn't technically that, but feels like a great bridge into a spider-based Chapter 3.

I have no idea what would cause this kinda princess but I want a spider princess SO BAD. I want her to have terrifying chelicerae and too many red eyes and saliva dripping from her mouth and a hiss in her voice and her to be climbing on the ceiling like pls see my vision

[msfcatlover]

The Dancer

Slay the Princess route where you insist there has to be a key, convince the Narrator to let you go back upstairs to retrieve the knife, and manage to escape the cabin to search outside of the window, where you find it half-buried in the garden. The Narrator tries everything to make you drop the key or give up the idea, every step back down into the basement is a different form of agony, before you finally drop to your knees at the Princess’s side (mid cardiac arrest) and unlock her cuff.

The Princess is delighted. She grabs her unshackled wrist with a brilliant smile, leaps to her feet and dances about the basement, revealing in her freedom. Then, suddenly, she realizes how bad off you are, and that joy melts away into panic as she tries to figure out a way to save you the same way you saved her.

She can’t, of course. You’re out of breath, wheezing, and can’t manage more than a single word before your heart finally gives out. Everything goes dark, and you die.

The Princess you meet in Chapter Two is a little bit ditzy, a bubbly attitude, and is already free. She has tiny fairy wings, thin antennae on either side of a crown of morning glories, ribbon-y ballet slippers (not proper pointe shoes, probably), and her dress is modeled after old-school ballerinas. You know, with the floofy bell skirts Edgar Degas so loved to paint.

(And here’s some lovely fairy ballerinas in somewhat similar dresses)

She’s protective & worried, and already out of her chains when you arrive. She cries out in joy when she hears you coming down the stairs and races over to meet you, giving the Narrator one hell of a fright. Because the last thing you saw was her staying in the cabin to try to save you, she prioritizes your health over her own freedom, fussing over you. Her cabin is much cozier, with a basement that actually looks like a livable room, right down to a little fire with a cook pot simmering underneath the window.

If you choose to stay & share a meal with her, you will eventually nod off beside the Dancer, her fingers gently brushing your feathers.

The Narrator says you don’t know how long you slept, and you will never know. Because you never wake up. You shirked your duties, and slept straight through the end of the world.

Any other route will inevitably lead to you two escaping together. Unless you kill her, in which case you get the Burned Grey.

(“This one is revelry, but she is also grieving. She never thought anyone would care enough to help, but you sacrificed everything for her. She will make for an effervescent heart. Do not mourn her, for she has found the love she longed for.)

.

Chapter 3: The Dream The Dream’s skirt is longer, back to floor-length, but also formed of wispy layers of torn silk, making it look almost smokey. Her tiny butterfly antenna have become big, feathery moth-y ones, and her wings now drape down her back like a cape. Her eyes are solid black, but refract light enough to look more like large gems than holes in her face. When she smiles, her teeth are sharp.

She is syrupy sweet, just as caring as the Dancer, just as clingy as the Damsel. But there’s an edge to her now. Your last thought was, after all, likely wondering if she had tricked you, to try to trap you down here. She now cares more about holding you at her side than she cares about her freedom, and would happily keep you trapped in that basement with her for eternity if she thought it would keep you with her. Her innocence is more manipulative than genuine—she will not hesitate to whip out the tears or feign hurt in order to get her way, and her protective affection is now borderline smothering.

It’s easy to fall under the Dream’s sway, but like the Nightmare, she really just wants to mold you into what she wants most. It will take a good deal of trickery of your own to coax her out of the cabin, or else the Shifting Mound will take her around when she clasps chains on you, insisting it’s for the best & that you’ll thank her later.

(“This one is shelter & desperation. She knew only captivity and so sought it as a means to protect the only person who ever cared. Her vulnerability is real, but she coveted your company more than your health or happiness. She will make for a passionate heart. Do not mourn her, for she has found the love she longed for.)

.

No original voices, I think. The Dancer & Dream strike me as Smitten & Paranoid routes, respectively. They are (probably obviously) basically alternate versions of the Damsel & Nightmare, after all.

And you know, I think it’d be interesting to see Paranoid deal with a Princess who just seems nice until things start to ramp up.

[voice-of-the-dumbass]

Does anyone want to reblog with their original route/chapter ideas? I have one I’ll reblog with later!

[dangthatscrayz]

Yooo we got the goals of 2 likes on the last one (ignore the fact I’m one of the people who liked it)

Slay the princess swap au part 3

(Btw this is going to be the damsel/smitten route first cus I like them both)

Ignore the bad grammar and spelling mistakes they don’t exist shhhh

Anyways for this smaller segment I will mention that the way you get each princess in the game is how you get there swap-au voice counterparts. If you brought the knife talked to the monster attacked him and gave up you’d get the broken and the voice of the tower. Make sense? It’s like og slay the princess but you touch grass. The forest will change in chapter 2 and in chapter 3 the cabin will be changed like in the og the design elements slowly creeps out. I didn’t change any of the names but switches voice of to the princesses

Name changes/role swaps (btw gonna try to keep the personalities from the og game in the swap au):

The hero/the voice of the princess

The captor/the voice of the world-ender (the captor is just a more adamant version of the hero wanting to do what the narrator originally told them to do and that’s keep the princess in the cabin or kill them or they will end the world)

The smitten/the voice of the damsel

The opportunist/the voice of the witch

The hunted/ the voice of the beast

The paranoid/the voice of the nightmare

The skeptic/the voice of the prisoner

The broken/the voice of the tower (I got good plans for this one trust me)

The stubborn/the voice of the adversary

The cold/the voice of the specter

The cheated/the voice of the razor

The contrarian/the voice of the stranger

You get the point basically the “The” and “the voice of” swapped

(Lore spoilers down here)

I’m planning on this au being after the ‘good ending’ in stp but the narrator gets so bored he wants to die so brings the princess back and puts the monster outside and wipes there memories and gets the princess to kill the monster, that’s why in part 2 and 1 he mentioned the monster surely killing the princess no second thought

[neverpathia]

fuck this shit

have my voice of the broken

and please ignore how elementary my art looks

it's not the full design unfortunately, but a little guy is a little guy, I hope. + the original pencil-and-paper lineart.

now I was gonna go by a specific order, like starting from voice of the hero and all, but broken just resonated with me too much and I thought we could make a pretty neat design out of him so there we have it.

okay I have quite a bit to say about him

come on, the fact that he's the most like me out of all the stp voices surely says something. tower route isn't exactly how my very first playthrough went, true, but once she beat the ever loving crud out of me and the rest of the route unfolded

I had to do a double take he's so real wtf

everything Broken says is something that has definitely passed through my mind at some point or another, especially when it came to a few relationships of mine. the way he just defaults to surrendering. taking the easy way out, the ONLY way out, which is in fact only digging yourself deeper into the problem. somewhere in your subconscious, maybe you know this. but what other choice do you have? she's above you in every way possible. don't you want to please her? isn't this how it's all supposed to go? and, besides, you don't want to taste the alternative.

defiance can't be an option anymore. it's a path fraught with danger and fear and the Broken is blindly submissive because it's the only thing he can be. he can't let himself think like a person or feel like a person or even be a person anymore if it's all just going to get taken away from him.

maybe he's bitter. maybe he hates the world. maybe he wants to let himself feel something that's not simply her, and her, and her.

but it's too risky, too dangerous. and it's so much 'easier' to just...not. just do what she asks, because there's a course of action put before you, and you won't be hurt if you do what she says. and you don't want to be hurt. and everything she's already doing to hurt you is so much better than everything she CAN do if you defy her.

and she loves you. in this twisted, unbalanced, unfair way of hers, she loves you. call it love because you don't want to know what else it can be.

you hate this love. it suffocates you. it drowns you. it seeks out the cracks in your soul. it enters them. it expands them. but it's the only thing left in there anymore.

it may look like a choice when you reciprocate it in the same unjust way. it's turned against you and you're just blocking off your escape, that's what they see. but what does the Broken see? safety. protection. an escape from whatever she can and has thrown upon you if you don't.

you can have "whatever you want" at the cost of a "you."

I feel so bad for him, but I can't help but feel that I...am him. Just 'choosing' to submit and keel over and accept your comfortable little prison is kind of real. It's 'choosing' safety and sloth at the cost of my autonomy, but since when had it even been a choice? external circumstances nudge you towards a corner. your own willpower, or rather lack thereof, backs you further into that corner. the Broken is too familiar.

and yet the way he always makes it a point to hear others out. he empathizes. he soothes. because he doesn't want them to be Broken like he is, or rather, he's the only other one who's just as Broken and he knows how much it sucks. to be at war with yourself all the time yet you yourself are stuck and stagnant and unmoving in everything you know you hate as much as you try to pretend you love. everything you do, every second you live, as wrong as it always feels. he wishes for a choice where he has never had one himself and he can, in a way, live that choice through others.

maybe I'm just projecting idk

fyi there's a reason I gave him that particular hairstyle. it's tied together and weighed down with two teardrop-shaped ornaments. like how he's so restricted and it's heavy, it's so heavy, being sad all the time is a bitch and you can only be tired. yet the braids are still ornate. still straight and silky smooth, still beautiful. but what then? and what if a few strands threaten to escape? it means nothing, it's still what it is. helplessly fixed in place, but who would think about it.

[blacktabbygames]

I’ve been a big fan of STP since the first demo, but I’ve been curious about one thing in particular with every new update: Is there any reason why The Stranger route got changed so many times? Was there story troubles with the og design and voice (which I personally liked but that’s neither here nor there) or something like that?

It was a few things: 1. Her voice, while very fun and spooky for a couple of lines in the demo, would have been incredibly grating (IMO) in a prolonged conversation. I know Abby in particular had to cover her ears anytime we watched a stream get to her.

2. The original plan for the route was far too open-ended. All of the other chapter 2's were shaped/limited in scope by the constraints you already had from your relationship with the Princess in chapter 1. Aside from the stranger existing as a contradiction of Princess and world-ending monstrosity, there was no relationship there, which meant the potential scope of it was was enormous for what, IMO, felt like would be very little payoff.

3. Design-wise, a lot of people didn't quite understand what we were going with for her initial look — (a combination of Princess + !Princess as well as a ton of potentialities crammed into one space.)

So overall it wound up being a lot cleaner to focus on how you got to the chapter and what you saw, and to make it a more direct examination of choice and relationships in the face of the infinite (as well as a peak behind the curtain without any of the context necessary to fully get what you just saw.)

I've seen quite a few people bemoan the fact that we even let them get to the stranger as their first princess and I've seen comments wishing that we blocked them off from her until at least the second loop but IMO:

We don't want to hold anyone's hand and force them to play a specific way. (And the game gives you several options to opt-out before you trigger the stranger.)

I actually really like the Stranger as the first Princess encountered by a player. It adds interesting thematic bookends to each side of the story, and turns your experience into something else entirely.