The Liar Princess and the Blind Prince

A look at the story for this year's The Liar Princess and the Blind Prince.

Platform: PS4 (also on Switch)
Release: 2019

The Liar Princess and the Blind Prince falls outside of my usual gaming preferences in that it's a puzzle-platformer, and while I like puzzles, generally speaking I hate platformers (because my coordination sucks and jumping across moving platforms is the bane of my existence). But I really liked the premise and that despite its platforming genre it primarily focuses around its story, which is why it's one of the few non-RPGs, non-visual novels I'll be covering on my blog.

The Liar Princess and the Blind Prince is about a wolf who gives up her singing voice to transform into a human princess and help the prince she accidentally blinded. On their journey she slowly falls in love with the prince, and comes to realize that her true self could never be with him.

Fortunately, the platforming in Liar Princess is fairly easy for these types of games, so I gave it a shot and was able to play through the entire game (which means I struggled with the last level, but I was able to finish it).

Be warned, there are spoilers below.

The Liar Princess and the Blind Prince is a bit of a riff on Hans Christian Andersen's "The Little Mermaid." It opens with the wolf singing in the forest on top of a cliff, and unusually, one night she discovers she has an audience. The prince can't see her from down below, but applauds because he loves her music. Surprised by this, the wolf decides not to eat him.

This goes on for several nights, until one night, after a performance, the wolf doesn't hear him applaud. Instead, she discovers that he's been climbing up the cliff to get a look at her. Afraid that he would hate her if he saw that she was a monster, she tries to cover his eyes once he gets close. Unfortunately she miscalculates and claws out his eyes instead. Worse, the prince falls off the cliff from her unintended attack. When she grabs him with her claws, he panics, thinking a monster is trying to eat him, and forces her to let go.

He's then brought back home by one of his kingdom's soldiers and the wolf learns that he's been isolated by his parents who are ashamed to have a disfigured son. Feeling guilty, the wolf wants to take him to the witch of the forest who can cure the prince, but he would never let her lead him there as a wolf, because if he touched her, he would only feel the monster who had hurt him. She goes to the witch alone first and trades away her most precious possession, her singing voice, so that she can become human and lead the prince there so he can be healed. The wolf is also informed that whenever she steps into moonlight her true form will be revealed.

Now as the titular "liar princess," the wolf visits the prince and pretends to be a princess from a neighboring kingdom who has come to help him.

The art style is simple, but expressive, allowing the audience to easily understand what the two characters are going through. Throughout their journey, the princess leads the prince around obstacles and enemies, shapeshifting from princess to wolf and back again. And it's a nice touch in that the player often has to hold the prince's hand in order to lead him where to go. He always looks a little lost without her, and smiles when they touch. Notably, it is not possible to hold his hand while a wolf, and if the princess enters moonlight during gameplay (not as part of the story) she will let go of him.

Their story is presented with a fairy tale sensibility, so it never really does a deep dive into what is realistic and what ought to make sense. It helps that the prince is a little naive, so he doesn't particularly question which kingdom the princess is from or any of her strange habits, which is good since she doesn't hide the fact she eats raw meat, rejoices in finding dead bodies to eat, and seems to have an abject fear of fire.

To be honest, the prince isn't the brightest bulb in the first place, going to a forest full of monsters just because he heard some lovely singing, but his complete and utter trust in the fundamental goodness of the people (actually monsters) that the pair meet along the way has a softening effect on the princess.

Being a predator she's used to being on the top of the food chain, and would have happily killed a family of monstrous goats for dinner, but when the goats complain about starving, the prince convinces her to find them some food instead, and after the goats are fed she leaves without killing them. The father goat is curious about why she is keeping a human around though, and if she intends for him to be a source of emergency rations. This forces the wolf to evaluate just what the prince means to her.

As the story progresses, the wolf discovers how much she enjoys traveling with the prince, and the two of them have a grand adventure together. She shares with him that she was the one whose singing he enjoyed so much, but since she gave up her singing voice to become a princess, she can no longer sing to prove she is the performer he had been looking for, nor can she tell him what she truly is, because the truth would destroy whatever relationship they have.

It's easy to understand the wolf's ongoing deception. What might have started as a way to make amends becomes increasingly complicated the more she wants to have a future with the prince, and without her ability to sing she can't explain her original circumstances. The wolf as she is, simply looks like an opportunistic interloper and the prince makes it pretty clear that he is terrified of the monster that attacked him.

And it's not as though she doesn't try. She really would like the prince to be able to understand who and what she is. It's the very normal fear of rejection that holds her back.

The game is not kind to the wolf, forcing her to grapple with the fact that humans and monsters have never gotten along and that it might not be possible for her to protect the prince as much as she'd like if she can only touch him while she is a princess.

Eventually, no matter how hard the princess tries to hide who she is, she lets down her guard, and ends up holding the prince's hand when a brief shaft of moonlight lands on them. That's all that's needed to turn her arm back into a wolf's and the prince finds himself holding on to a monster.

In a scene mirroring the opening, she tries to save his life when he accidentally falls off a cliff to get away from her, but he chooses to fall rather than be dragged up by a monster (who he still assumes is out to eat him).

This last act is probably the weakest because the big reveal about the wolf's identity has already happened. It opens with the wolf trying to find and save the prince as the witch's forest burns down around them due to the fire started by the prince's lantern. He is surprised that the wolf comes to get him since she had to overcome her natural fear of fire to do, but decides to trust her again pretty quickly, even though she's not given the time to tell him the full story of what happened and what she went through (not even how she gave up her singing voice for him in the first place).

Instead the pair put her deception behind them so they can focus on finding the witch and apologizing to her (with the understanding that she can fix everything, even the fire, if she just calms down). The forest fire levels are honestly more puzzle platforming and less story, which is probably fine for the genre, but I would have liked a little more since the pair pretty much put everything about their relationship on hold until the witch becomes rational again.

And once she does, we're at the ending.

Though the prince tries to stop her, the wolf pays again to restore the prince's eyes as she has wanted to do the whole time, and this costs her both her memories of the prince and her ability to take human form.

Some indeterminate time later, the wolf resumes her nighttime habit of singing at the moon, though she doesn't know why since she's terrible at it. The prince, having learned absolutely nothing in the way of survival instincts, has not forgotten her though, and climbs up the very cliff where he got blinded in the first place and gives her a bouquet of flowers, saying that he has come to see her again. He calls her "Princess" just as he had when they were travelling together.

Thankfully the wolf reverses her midnight snack assessment of him, and they rekindle their friendship, but now she no longer has to hide from her audience. As the game says "...although the singing was not great, it was filled with warmth and honesty..."

It was a very sweet ending and I like that even though they reunited, the wolf doesn't get her memory back, which would undo the sacrifice she had made in the first place. And there's something touching about seeing the two of them sitting side by side as the little wobbly notes of her new voice grace the screen.

I hope you've enjoyed this look at The Liar Princess and the Blind Prince, and if you haven't already voted for what I'll cover in an upcoming RPG or VN Talk, there's still time to take the survey for the Reader's Choice game I'll play from my backlog while I'm recovering from surgery. It should be open for at least another day or two after this post goes live.