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When one talks about “exploration” in games, usually what’s referred to is exploring the artificial landmass that the game lays out for you – hitting all the points of interest found on the map in Skyrim is the usual go-to example, or more on the nose, any Ubisoft open world game. But crafted geography isn’t the only thing we can think of as a space to explore, as a game itself can be thought of as an undiscovered country to players booting up a game for the first time. Artificial land mass is included in this, yes, but this also includes a game’s systems, its lore and writing, physics, even glitches and exploits. Sometimes we’re given an incomplete “map” or set of signposts in explicit game objectives players need to keep in the forefront as a sort of guiding star in case they get lost in the possibilities of the game. Other games, like Outer Wilds, drop you into an unknown frontier and ask you to explore it to find what you’re even supposed to do in the game. And then there’s Slay the Princess, which plops you into a dark basement of a game with only the barest understanding of what you’re doing. It’s the fumbling around in the shadows as you map the metaphorical basic walls and features of this game that shapes the experience the game throws back at you. In games like this, it’s less an exploration of an unknown land and more a delve into the unknown.
There may not seem to be a difference between the two, of course. Delving a dark dungeon is exploring something unknown just as much as wandering through a wide frontier is. Boiled down to its essence, exploring is filling in a map both literal and metaphorical. Outer Wilds embodies this perfectly, as you explore a small solar system to learn about both the geography of its planets and the stories of the people and phenomena. You’re not given a lot to go on, just a spaceship and a starting clue or two on where to start. You just must start wandering to whatever catches your interest and investigate what’s there, making connections between the mysteries as you go. Eventually you’ll have “solved” the game by internalizing the knowledge of what’s in it and what makes its world tick, but it’s the process of getting there that makes these games so fun.
Games like Outer Wilds give players a lot of incentive to go in all different kinds of directions, though. Not only are all the planets open to explore from the word go, but they all have wildly distinctive features that are immediately apparent upon even a cursory examination. Much like an amusement park, players are enticed in all kinds of different directions and can investigate what most interests them at any moment at their leisure. The entire game is freeform in its progression before converging on a single point at the close of multiple exploration threads.
Slay the Princess isn’t like that at all, not the least of which is since it is a visual novel and has more limitations on what it’s trying to do. The concept is even limited: You’re playing as a hero of some sort who has been tasked with killing a princess who has been locked in the basement of a cabin because she’s supposedly going to cause the end of the world. You don’t know any context or backstory other than that, and the entire game takes place in the cabin and the woods surrounding it. It’s safe to say that you’re not exploring the land in a traditional sense here. But the more you poke at the game, and the more you explore every one of its multiple-choice text options, the more of the game is revealed to you. In short, games like Outer Wilds show you a glimpse of the possibilities you could find in any given direction before it sets you loose in its largely unknown world. In Slay the Princess, visibility is zero, and every discovery is a complete surprise.
Context is key to how you approach the exploration of each of these games, especially their mechanics and structure. The goal of Outer Wilds is to solve the mystery of the time looping galaxy you find yourself in, and with every clue and mystery solved, you get leads on what to investigate next. In Slay the Princess, though, you just must find a certain number of outcomes before you’re asked to start again and try another one from the beginning. The story branches depending on your reactions – do you slay the princess or not? In what ways do you get to those endpoints? It very much is a “try stuff and see what happens” kind of game, and while context gives you a tiny bit of an idea of what to do next, it’s very much an experiential kind of game. Do enough things and you reach the end. Your actions have consequences, but it’s difficult to predict what those consequences are until they already happened. To the game’s credit, though, what the princess and the world morph into makes total sense and is a logical conclusion to the mini narrative the player is unwittingly creating. It’s a powerful analysis on how players create context without meaning to and provides them with a different motivation for seeing what lies in the pitch black of the game.
In one light, Outer Wilds and Slay the Princess couldn’t be farther apart as games. But they both are different expressions of exploring a game, of stretching as far as you can with what the game gives you to work with and finding where the boundaries lie, what shape the game takes in its totality. And though Outer Wilds does this with 3D space and a web of interlocking mysteries, Slay the Princess uses a combination of text options, a limited number of images, and no foresight into what you’re getting into. In either case, you’re still exploring what the game is offering to you, just getting there through different ends, and speaking to different urges within all of us, whether its joy at plumbing the unknown or piecing together something hidden in plain sight.