A downloadable game for Windows, macOS, and Linux

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"A Princess in Another Castle" is a meta puzzle pixel-art game where you play as a rebellious princess looking to break free from her damsel-in-distress fate. Instead of waiting to be rescued, she takes matters into her own hands and uses the game's own glitches to forge her own path. It's a tribute to glitches of retro games and a nod to feminism in the world of gaming.

The Characters

In this game, you'll encounter several unique characters, each with their own role to play.


  • The Princess: Tired of being a mere trophy, she rebels against her intended role and seeks to escape on her own.

  • The Developer: A mediocre young coder who hadn't planned on the Princess "coming to life" and trying to change the course of the story.

  • The Evil Magician: Jealous of the love between the Princess and the Prince, he has locked the Princess in his castle and expects a confrontation with the Prince.


Gameplay

The game consists of around twenty levels, each representing a different location in the castle, plus a secret level. Players will need to use a variety of glitches, such as memory corruption, collision bugs, and physics engine exploits to progress. Despite the game's seemingly poor coding, there's always a way out!


Controls

wasd / zqsd / uldr: move (both qwerty and azerty are automatically supported)

space/enter: jump, confirm

f: toggle fullscreen mode

e: interact

escapce: cancel, open menu (within a level)

"A Princess in Antoher Castle" also supports controllers!


Extra Features

In the game, you'll find a compendium that lists all the glitches you've successfully used to complete levels. Each glitch comes with a brief description of how it works, which game it's derived from, and a small video showing the glitch in action in the original game.

If you get stuck, the game also offers a hint system, unlocking up to three hints the longer you are stuck in a level.


Language

"A Princess in Another Castle" is available in French and in English. You can switch between the language you want directly into the option menu in the title screen.


Soundtrack

The game's soundtrack is a simple, retro-style score, composed directly with a digital reproduction of a Super NES sound chip, providing an authentic feel of the era's soundtracks.

Join the Princess on her journey to redefine her destiny in "A Princess in Another Castle"!

Download

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Click download now to get access to the following files:

apac-win.zip 86 MB
apac-mac.zip 99 MB
apac-linux.zip 87 MB

Comments

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Really well done on the art style, its unique! I also thought the puzzles were pretty unique as well, very cool meta 4th wall breaking! Polish it up a bit more, make the mechanics a little more clear and I'd say you got the next big hit!

Thank you very much, glad you liked it!

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Good central gameplay concept, a lot more fun than I expected from the itch page.   Only played up until the ladder level (which I liked a lot!)  
The game is visually emulating the style of old platformers, but it clearly isn't one, technically speaking.  This means that some 'glitches' feel more contrived than others.

The most fun glitches were the very physical ones, that had to do with multiple systems in the world interacting.  My favourites were spamming e while holding a box to shift yourself backwards, and jump+e while on box to get high up with the box in hand.  These glitches felt like the natural outcome of poorly-thought out, but fundamentally simple programming.  I've written games with glitches like these!  The first ladder glitch felt good, too.

The glitches that emulated old games felt weaker to me, specifically the one about limited numbers of sprites being able to be drawn on the screen.  It's fake: the game box physics 'really' behave the way they do, but this behaviour is scripted.  In old engines, you got that sort of visual glitching because the game was fundamentally low-level and you were reading memory at an offset you weren't meant to.  Here, the glitching is a sprite drawn in an editor!  Because it's 'fake', this glitch can't combine with any other puzzle mechanics (which is presumably why it only exists for one level, then is removed).

In this game, you have the player controlling the princess, and the narrative figure of the dev embodied in-game, trying to fix bugs as she uses them to bypass obstacles.  But there's a hidden, 3rd character:  the real-life Dev, responsible for the bugs.  
The game presents a fiction that it's an old, 16-bit game or whatever, but it clearly isn't.  The sprites move freely
Some of the bugs really feel like they were added by ingamedev.   They feel like a naturalistic part of the game world (that is, the fictional game we're meant to be controlling a character inside of).  The sprite bug doesn't.  It was clearly added in by RealLifeDev, and I think it weakens the game mechanically and thematically, because once I saw it I started second-guessing whether any later puzzle would have an answer that lay within the pre-existing physics of the game world or whether it would be some scripted reference to old game engine limitations (that this game does not have!) that I'd just have to guess. 
If the author had actually made the game 8-bit and actually used sprite slots, that puzzle could have been good - because you'd have been able to integrate it with the rest of the game!
But as it is now, I don't think it fits with the puzzles involving block glitches (which are great).
The other glitches fell inbetween the box glitches and the sprite vanishing for me in terms of how much I liked them.

I like a lot of things about the game.  A game about glitches in the game itself could be really great, and I see fragments of that greatness shining through here.  I hope the author makes a version 2, or in general keeps making games and gets great at it!

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glad you liked it!

allright i just got access to your screenshot.
No, this is nothing important. It's just a reference to TBOI :)