I am very curious about how your wrong playstyle/different interpretation of Slay the Princess
TLDR: I played a significant chunk of the StP's individual routes before I discovered how to get its actual 'ending', because I was unaware you were supposed to save your progress between playthroughs! This has made me think a lot about how some of the game's parts don't quite fit together very neatly.
For context, I first experienced Slay the Princess via the demo (highly recommend: better for the dev than you pirating stuff, enjoying it, and then never paying them). This never goes beyond the start of the second chapter, and hence you have to return to the menu whenever you 'finish' any route. And because they're short snippets of the full story, you don't need to save or load.
So I was under the impression this was how you were supposed to play the main game too. When I finished a route, I just quit to go to sleep. Sometimes I would play two routes consecutively, but I never saved. Whenever I encountered the character between worlds talking about how she would reassemble after you played enough routes, or the mirror sometimes changing, I would just go like 'huh. That's neat. It's taking a while for that to progress. Wonder what big surprise they have for us there?'
It took me nearly 3 weeks and partially spoiling the game for myself for me to realise that there was not in fact a master plan the devs had, and that I was just completely oblivious to genre conventions. The question you could ask among the lines of 'why can't I go back and replay the same route' tipped me off that I was doing something wrong. Because I had done that several times.
This has informed how I view the whole game, because when I finally got to the 'full' endings, I wasn't that impressed. Part of it was that I was expecting something cooler for all my time spent in the game, which I understand isn't completely fair on the creators. But what is more fair is how it's made me notice that the 'overarching' narrative threads of StP are the weakest parts of the game. At least next to the actual 'in-between' stories.
StP's overarching story has a philosophical question of whether you should stop things from changing to save the world, but its individual plotlines are far more personal than that. In the cabin in the woods, you can get your psyche and will shattered by a creature out of a horror movie, join consciousnesses with your partner only to be torn apart by your previous memories of your conflicts, and be paralysed and dying slowly alongside someone you backstabbed and despise. But because the sheer combinatorial complexity of everything you can do in this game, you never really delve into the connections between those choices, and what it might say about your thoughts on the larger question at hand.
My most recent experience with this was a playthrough containing Happily Ever After, which still let me pick the ending where you reset everything to how it was in the past. It would've been interesting to see how the game responded to someone who decided to free the princess after torturing her with the same domestic life over and over and over again, but ultimately decided reset the game and make her forget everything just to replay it. How would that change if she had done the same to me as the Moment of Clarity? But because the only run the ending has comments on is your first, all I got for that was a comment that the Princess tried to kill me the first time I met her that game.
Honestly, that ending was still pretty impactful, just because it managed to make me think about whether I should've tried to back out there given my past run. But I don't think that was intentional at all, and most other playthroughs I've done don't have an ending nearly that thematically coherent. You can pretty much choose any ending you want regardless of how you've played.
The whole sequence with each individual Princess coming back to meet you during the finale is also emblematic of this -- you just kinda shoot through one after another of their questions with a single word reply. They're secondary to the spectacle of the Construct breaking and the Shifting Mound arising.
And even if you like the Shifting Mound and the Narrator and the Voices, they're also still weakened by this. They're not allowed to have too much unique dialogue because any route they're on might be the first time you experience them, so they can get really repetitive even if you like them. The Shifting Mound has a lot to say, but she's very distant from what you've experienced in the world, and you never really get a look into how your full ascended partner has learnt about the world outside of the comments of the individual princesses. They literally mind-wipe the Narrator between each run (though I will give marks for the fact you can comment on him regretting his actions in Happily Ever After, whereupon he coldly disregards it!)
I don't know if I'd suggest they actually try change the game because of this. I ultimately still loved it. And it's gotten me to think this much.
Plus, it'd be a hell of a lot of programming and words to account for all the possibilities; there are people who enjoy the large-scale philosophising; and most of the game's moving parts are good individually. We need to have art projects in the world that aim big, but maybe don't hit every target (assuming they don't accidentally say something horrible in the process). It stirs up the imagination, and I think I empathise with people who try to see every part of their dream project through.
I suppose that I just think Slay the Princess would've had a bigger impact on me had they narrowed their focus down a little more, specifically onto the personal experiences you have with the Princess. It is a love story, after all.
