I keep a list of indie games that I will advocate for to my friends, coworkers, and random passersby on the street. Slay the Princess, Black Tabby Games’ time loop horror game, is pretty high on that list. It was one of my favorite games of 2023, and while it didn’t edge out Baldur’s Gate 3 or Street Fighter 6 for the top spot, it was easily the most compelling narrative game I played last year. Seeing it bundled alongside some other incredible indie games gives me a chance to advocate not just for it, but for my favorite indie game of 2022, as well.
The SLAY bundle on Steam is a collection of four games coming together for cheap to celebrate the launch of The Crush House, the drama-filled reality TV production simulator by Nerial. The bundle includes The Crush House for 10 percent off, but that’s the smallest savings you’ll get from buying these four excellent games in one package. The $61.43 bundle also includes the modern classic deck-builder Slay the Spire, which folks who have played it love to evangelize. But I’m here to yell about Slay the Princess and We Are OFK.
Slay the Princess is a visual novel that puts you through multiple loops of the same moment. You don’t know anything about who you are or the world you’re in, but you’re told you must enter a remote cabin and descend to its basement. Once there, you’ll find a princess trapped there in isolation. According to the narrator, if she is able to escape this prison, she will bring about the end of the world. How you choose to proceed, whether that’s by using a knife to end her life, talking to her, freeing her, or doing nothing at all, will bring you into one of several diverging paths. But no matter where those paths lead, they all circle back around to you walking toward the cabin again and making a decision about what you’ll do next. Slay the Princess is all about the horror of being known. Through multiple loops, you and the princess will come to understand one another, and it leads to some shocking, fascinating places as each loop shows you new variations of the horrors you’ll enact upon one another.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, We Are OFK is all about the horror of not knowing fuck all about shit. The adventure game by the conglomerate of writers, designers, musicians, and more called Team OFK, often feels less like a video game than it does an interactive musical television show. The experimental, episodic series is an introspective look at four friends trying to figure out who they are artistically while also trying to survive in corporate America. If you feel like capitalism is sucking the joy out of art and making it hard to maintain your personal relationships, We Are OFK is the video game for you. I played it when things were getting very bad at my last job and it really hit.
All four games are worth your time, and I love that someone used the word “slay” to bring together these four pretty distinct and unrelated games because that word can mean two very different things depending on who says it. Whether you want to murder something or serve cunt, this bundle has some bangers that let you do both.
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