CanCon, Kickstarter, Vote

Welcome to the Stone Soup Weekly Digest! This is where I share what I'm up to and some of my favorite things from around the internet. Subscribe to Stone Soup to get this in your inbox every week.

I’m Going to Can*Con!

It's my delight to be a guest of honor this year at Can*Con in Ottawa! I'll be there November 1 - 3. If you're attending, be sure to come say hello!

Love Letters Kickstarter is going strong!

I am still so excited that the crowdfunding campaign for Love Letters: Reasons to Be Alive is fully funded! Every dollar we earn beyond the initial goal will be distributed among contributors. 

Go check out the Kickstarter for the full description, access to the support tiers (including one that gets you a curated care package from me!), and a sneak peek at the contributor list! You can also see a preview of the first essay in the series.

Support Your Community

You may be aware that in November, the United States will hold an election. If you are eligible to vote in this election, it’s absolutely vital that you confirm your voter registration status. Voter rolls are being purged and tampered with on a regular basis throughout the United States, so being previously registered to vote is not a guarantee of your current status. 

• Click here to learn your current voter registration status
• Click here to register to vote in your state

CLICK HERE for a round-up of more resources that will allow you to serve your community by getting vaccinated, voting, and helping support those who are currently in need around the world.

Alasdair Stuart Reviews: Slay the Princess

The incredibly insightful Alasdair Stuart is a pop culture genius, reviewer extraordinaire, and regular Digest contributor. Be sure to subscribe to The Full Lid for more brilliant pop culture analysis.

There is always a princess. There is always a cabin. There is always a killer. That killer is always you. Alone on a path in the woods, you find yourself wrapped in the comforting truths being whispered to you by the voice in your head. A princess is imprisoned in a cabin up ahead. She will end the world if she lives. Kill her. Become the hero.

The fundamental hypocrisy of those two statements are the magnetic poles of the game. You are a hero who is a killer. You're a killer who wraps the heroic lie around your eyes so you can't see the woman you're murdering. You are free only to see how free you aren't, and as the first couple of game loops pass you will push against the walls and find them closing in on you. Eventually  you'll go to the cabin, eventually you'll pick up the knife, eventually you and the Princess will both die and when you do you will wake up on a forest path, with a precise English voice whispering heroic lies to you. 

Again.

Slay the Princess is title as game loop and game loop as game. You go to the cabin, you talk to the Princess, you rail against the inevitability of what you're being told to do and you do it. And then you go to the cabin, you talk to the princess and round and round you go.  The genius of it lies in the story that it builds through the repetition of those beats. It's like the photographic negative of a copied tape. Instead of each version degrading, it becomes sharper, more focused. The mirror you see at the end of every iteration becomes a little clearer, the knife sits a little heavier in your hands. The princess, and you, shift form as the loop repeats. Sometimes she’s a victim, sometimes she’s a monster. Each time you die, and kill, you both understand a little more of the trap until, eventually, you realize the trap doesn't matter.

It never did.

There is always a princess. There is always a cabin. There is always a killer. That killer is always you. But you are never just a killer.

The genius of Slay the Princess lies in the intimacy of its horror, and the hope behind the blood. The hand-drawn art is nervy and precise, stark when needed and surreal when you least expect it. The voice acting is stunningly good and incredibly demanding. Both Jonathan Sims (The Magnus Archive/Protocol) and Nichole Goodnight (The Leviathan Chronicles) play more shards of their characters as time goes on. Two broken mirrors reflecting each other as they spin out into the void and never quite separate. Because this is a love story as well as a murder story, and as these two characters define each other into abstraction, you realize what they do; the murder isn't the point. The princess is never just a victim. You're never just a hero, and there is always another path through the Woods.

Slay the Princess is brutally hopeful, terrifyingly romantic and relentlessly inventive. You haven't played anything like this before and if you're playing it for the first time, I am deeply envious.

Slay the Princess is on Steam, GOG, and consoles now. On the 24th of October, the Pristine Cut will release. If you already own the game, it's free. If you buy it, after the 24th, you'll get it baked in.

If you like Slay The Princess, you'll love Scarlet Hollow, their in-progress, epic interactive fiction about a small southern town and the supernatural forces menacing it.

Black Tabby Games are on social media here.

Nichole is on social media here.

Jonny is on social media here.

Featured New Release: The Night Mother by Jeremy Lambert, Alexa Sharpe, and Becca Carey

The moon is stuck like a broken clock in the midnight sky, the sun a distant memory. No one in this quiet seaside town can remember how long this unnatural darkness has lasted. No one, that is, except for the curious girl who lives in the graveyard, caring for the dead: twelve-year-old Madeline Tock. In gratitude, the departed whisper their worries to her, sounding just like her overprotective but loving father: beware this endless night and she who causes it.

Because there’s someone else who can hear the whispers, too . . . someone whose gown is a map of the cosmos, hair a tangled constellation, eyes like the lights of faraway stars. The Night Mother. Her elemental duty is to gather the souls of the dead in her lantern, then send them to their eternal rest as beautiful moonlight. But when her hunger for power drives her to take souls from the living, Madeline bravely stands up to defend her town and those she loves. Can Madeline help bring back the sun, or will she be lured by the starry promises of this mysterious woman? 

Barnes & Noble | Bad River Website | Local Library | Find an Indie Bookstore

Currently Reading: Voice Like a Hyacinth by Mallory Pearson

Art student Jo Kozak and her fellow classmates and best friends, Caroline, Finch, Amrita, and Saz, are one another’s muses―so close they have their own language and so devoted to the craft that they’ll do anything to keep their inspiration alive. Even if it means naively resorting to the occult to unlock their creativity and to curse their esteemed, if notoriously creepy, professor. They soon learn the horrible price to be paid for such a transgressive ritual.

In its violent aftermath, things are changing. Jo is feeling unnervingly haunted by something inexplicable. Their paintings, once prodigious and full of life, are growing dark and unhealthy. And their journey together―as women, students, and artists―is starting to crumble.

To right the wrong they’ve done, these five desperate friends will take their obsession a step too far. When that happens, there may be no turning back.

Barnes & Noble | Bad River Website | Find an Indie Bookstore

If you’re a paying subscriber, this month’s Supper Club members get a recipe postcard from me this month! See you there!

—Gailey