Awesome / Slay the Princess

• The Adversary & Eye of the Needle routes:
  • Both the Player and the Adversary, after doing each other in, can will themselves back to life in order to continue fighting each other.
  • The Player can choose to fight her unarmed and keep coming back for more through sheer willpower alone. She'll be stunned at how you can keep going despite how grievously injured you are.
  • Defeating the Eye of the Needle in combat. You get to watch the Stubborn and the Hunted pull off impressive teamwork to help you take down one of the physically strongest iterations of the Princess without breaking a sweat.
    • It's even more impressive when you consider that this is one of the few instances where a battle with a combative Princess DOESN'T end with a Mutual Kill or a Curb-Stomp Battle in her favor. Separately, the Stubborn could only stalemate her, and the Hunted could only flee from her. But together, their combination of instinct and determination let you endure her blows and counter her attacks in a deadly dance of death. Even when she manages a counterattack, the Narrator explicitly states that it wasn't enough to kill you, and the Eye of the Needle succumbs to her wounds and admits defeat. While most of the other Chapter 3 Princesses require the Shifting Mound's intervention to save you from the Princess's new form, the Eye of the Needle needs it to save HER from YOU.
  The Eye of the Needle: Hah. You've outplayed me, haven't you?
• The Player killing the Beast from within. Even with aid from the Hunted, you can only outmaneuver her for so long before she catches and eats you alive. But if you still have the Pristine Blade with you, you can hack your way through her stomach (while being digested, mind you) and pierce her heart from the inside.
• The Nightmare route:
  • The Paranoid continuously keeps your body from shutting down from fright through manually maintaining your organs' functioning. He can apparently continue to do so forever, and while he grumbles, he only ever falters when the Nightmare deliberately tries to break his concentration. The Hero, when he tries it himself, seems to have much greater difficulty.
  • The Player stabbing the Nightmare in the heart if you choose the Slay The Princess option. It's a little more so if you let her lead you up the stairs first, as you've essentially tricked her into letting you out of her basement dimension.
    • This, mind you, is when your organs are failing from sheer dread at the potential impossibility of felling such a foe, only to face your fears and go for the kill.
    • The Nightmare is momentarily stunned silent when you do this, as if she genuinely couldn't fathom you having the courage to attack her.
• You and the Prisoner can work together to put one over on the Narrator. If you hand her the blade, she will decapitate herself, and the Narrator will assume she's dead. The Voice of the Skeptic suggests bringing her head, and if you do so, once you open the door, the Narrator will interrupt himself in the middle of his Good Ending speech upon seeing that the world still exists around the cabin. Cue the Prisoner's eyes regaining focus as she smirks and compliments you.
  The Prisoner: Well played.
• Both variations of the Razor's defeat. The Player clears his mind, evicting every voice out of it (including the Narrator) and brings both himself and the Princess back to the basement in the process. With the blade, the two's duel eventually leads to a Mutual Kill that nonetheless elicits genuine awe from the Razor and is described as a "good ending" by the narration. Without the blade, the Player not only dodges the Razor's attacks, but somehow folds the blades of her body in on himself. This is the only thing that ever evokes actual fear from this particular Princess.
  The Razor: You're incredible.
• The Tower & Apotheosis routes:
  • The Tower not only notices the Narrator's protestations, she hijacks him and the two of them narrate the rest of the scenario together.
  • The Player managing to kill the Tower. Despite the godlike power that allows her to trim your dialogue tree and forces you to only mutilate yourself if you resist the compulsion to slit your own throat.
    • You sever the Tower's Achilles' tendon with your blade, then when she falls to her knees, stab her in the heart in utter defiance. The Tower proceeds to have a massive Villainous Breakdown over her godhood's defilement by a "little bird's" attack.
  • The Apotheosis is a Physical God who utterly dwarfs you. To the point that, due to the sheer magnitude of her presence, the very earth around her is drawn up into her orbit. But you can nonetheless choose to take up the Pristine Blade and try to fight her anyway, despite the seeming futility of defying such a being. After, when the Shifting Mound has collected the Apotheosis as a vessel, she notes that in your dealings with her, your will was never broken.
    The Apotheosis: Even now, you defy me. Do it, then. Show me what you think it takes to end what's destined to end everything.
    Voice of the Hero: Yeah. Do it. Show her.
    [End this.]
• The Witch route:
  • The Narrator describes the Player holding his own against and The Witch in a brutal brawl that breaks every rule of honorable combat and sinks past the lowest of the lows in terms of tactics.
  • The Witch revealing that she could've slipped her chains the whole time.
  • The Player having the sheer stones to give up the blade to the Witch as a peace offering. Granted, it ends up with him dead but it does shake the Witch's mistrustful nature and opens the door in the next chapter for true reconciliation with her as the Thorn.
• If you ignore the Narrator's attempts to turn you and the Princess against each other and instead choose to "turn inward" and find your freedom during the Wild route, you and the Princess use your roots to stretch throughout the woods to the outer edges of the Construct, seeking out a flaw. You finally find it: a plane of glass that buckles under your combined pressure into a crack in the world. The Narrator panics, demands that you stop, warns and threatens you with what he'll do if you don't, but it's all in vain. Pushing against the crack, the two of you widen it into an opening that gives you a glimpse of something. Something outside the Construct.
  • This route is notable in that the opening in the Construct is one of the few instances of color in the game, and it's the only one that isn't red. It's a green-yellow light glowing from beyond the crack in the world. The only other time you see this light? When you and the Shifting Mound awaken in the "There are no endings" ending and break free of the Construct. This moment where you work with the Princess in the Wild route is a hint at the power you both have together.
• Some of the possible final interactions the Player can have with the Narrator are this.
  • Simply smashing the mirror shards instead of even bothering to hear the Narrator's exposition period.
  • Telling him that you're finding a way of saving the Princess instead of slaying her.
  • To his credit he simply accepts his loss, but not before giving one last jab, referring to you as petty for that last act of defiance.
• The "There Are No Endings" ending where you decide to join the Shifting Mound in godhoood may mean the death of the universe someday, but it also brings returns the possibility of rebirth. Yet despite the cosmic significance of what you both do, it feels small in comparison to the two of you breaking free. What gives you the strength to shatter the walls of the Construct? The quiet Love Confession of the Shifting Mound. In the face of The Power of Love shared between two gods, the Construct collapses.
• The "And? What Comes Next?" ending is as awesome as it is heartwarming. The Player can just reject the options forced upon him by the Narrator or the Shifting Mound. Instead, the Player, with the Voice of the Hero's help, can be brought to the heart of the Shifting Mound where the Princess is waiting for the Player's final choice.
  • During the Shifting Mound's attempts to bring the Player around to her perspective, the Voice of the Hero is able to pierce through the noise, reach out to the Player and lead him to her heart, where the Player can speak with the Princess and resolve things once and for all; definitively proving himself worthy of his namesake.
  • What makes the Voice of the Hero's role in resolving this conflict so awesome is that he did it by being The Heart. During the game he couldn't grant any supernatural abilities to the Player like some of the other Voices could, and in the end he shows that Heart Is an Awesome Power by being the one to grant the Player the option to end the conflict between the two by to simply talking it out.
  • When you meet with her in the cabin, the Player can convince the Princess to leave together with the Player to face this next unknown as mortals. All done through The Power of Love from the Player, the Voice of the Hero's assistance and the Shifting Mound's willingness to trust the Player. Break from the Creator's Construct without slaying the Princess and it all adds up to one crowning moment of awesome.
• The developers and cast did a stream of the game on December 16 2023, in which Nichole Goodnight and Johnny Sims read all their lines fresh, proving - in case it wasn't proven already - what range and ability they have. On the Nightmare route, Johnny recited the Voice of the Paranoid's Survival Mantra constantly between his lines as the Narrator and the Voice of the Hero, making it even more intense in certain moments. Nichole's voice didn't have the distortion of the lines in the actual game, which if anything let her performance show off even more.
  • For many artists, hands are difficult to draw and so the prospect of drawing the Shifting Mound is very daunting. When that's brought up in the stream, Abby laughs and says that she can do hands in her sleep, from any angle.

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