EXTENDED CUT! First Impressions: Kill the Princess. By The Voice.

“Kill the Princess is about laughing your way through the apocalypse, right up until it stops being funny.”

Core Premise & Initial Impression:

Some say the world ends in fire. Others say ice. From what I’ve tasted of desire, I hold with those who favour fire. But if it had to perish twice, the apocalypse depicted in Kill the Princess? Yeah—it would be a distant contender, right after a Korean boy band that turns its influence toward evil, and a pod of orcas that invents the wheel.

Don’t get me wrong—this novel isn’t unique in its premise. If you’re already steeped in serial web fiction, you’ve seen this shape before. If you’re not, then consider this your orientation briefing.

The world as you know it has come to an end. Not with a bang. Not with a whimper either. It ends with an announcement. A verdict. Playtime is over. Humanity’s stay on easy mode has expired. The training wheels are off, and every creature born of nightmare, myth, and malice is now invited to compete. Not to destroy the world—the world doesn’t care—but to claim their share of it.

And if you happen to be living on that share? Too bad. So sad. You should’ve evolved sharper teeth.

Omniscient Reader’s Viewpoint is probably the most famous example in this genre of urban fantasy, post-apocalyptic progression. If you’re familiar with that work, you’re most of the way to understanding this novel.

But the devil is in the details. That’s why I colour outside the lines. I WON’T BE FOOLED AGAIN, SATAN! You’ll not claim my soul with your Warhammer assembly guides or your IKEA schematics.

By that I mean: chimpanzees share almost everything with us—but in that final sliver lies Mozart, Da Vinci, Newton. You. And, to a lesser extent, me as well.

The author isn’t chasing power fantasy here—and Kill The Princess never pretends otherwise. This isn’t about escalation for its own sake. If you need a point of reference, it’s closer to The Walking Dead than it is to wish fulfilment.

You start with a regular guy. Adam. Even his name is doing the work—Everyman, stamped right on the tin.

He works a regular job. He’s got a regular boss. He lives a regular life—maybe with more baseball than your average Tom or Harry, but every guy needs a hobby.

His everyday comes to an end with the announcement. God—or perhaps a douchewad pretending to be the Creator—decides He’s bored with human affairs. Too much TikTok. Not enough tying a temptress to a table to see if she floats.

He heals every ailment.

Cancer; gone.

Heart disease; gone.

My Taylor Swift obsession—still there. But with the monsters set loose upon the world, it now has to compete with survival for first place.

Survival.

More than any power-fantasy LitRPG where the numbers go brrrrrrr, this story is about survival—and what it takes to stay alive once the world has gone properly mad.

So then, dear reader—did I enjoy it?

Yes. Unequivocally.

There was one story beat that nagged at me. We’ll get into that later. But for the most part, I thoroughly enjoyed this novel. If you’re not looking for an overpowered protagonist LARPing their way through horror like an edgelord with a machine gun, I suspect you’ll enjoy this too.

Why?

For that, we have to look at…

What Works?

Character Voice That Hooks Like a Fish:

I was locked into this story from the second paragraph. Why? I’ll tell you why—voice. Adam, the protagonist, has a genuinely distinctive one. His personality radiates off the page.

Kill the Princess kicks things off with a rant about Thursdays. Adam hates Thursdays, declaring them the worst day of the week, and he makes his case with sardonic grievance spilling off every word. It’s instantly relatable—immediately gripping.

The story doesn’t need to tell you what kind of man Adam is, or what kind of life he leads. You recognise him by how he sounds.

And even though he’s dead wrong about Thursday being the worst day—everybody knows that dishonour belongs to Tuesday—that kind of everyday certainty makes Adam relatable straight off the bat.

He feels real—entirely so. A little like you. A tad like me. A touch like someone you no doubt know. But he isn’t a stand-in. He has a personality of his own. The reader isn’t inhabiting a blank face they can superimpose themselves onto—they’re experiencing his life.

If you’ve ever had something go irredeemably awry, you recognise his hysterical laughter immediately. Whatever happened was never a laughing matter—but when absurdity collides with inevitability, when the outcome is unpleasant and unavoidable, there’s nothing left to do but laugh.

Kill the Princess captures that tension just right, and it does so through Adam’s voice.

Quiet Beats of Existential Horror:

Kill the Princess is replete with clear, well-choreographed action sequences. You should take that as a given—it does action superbly.

But a lot of web fiction does action superbly. There’s plenty that could be said about the well-described, tactile battle sequences, but at this point in my reviewing career, that’s garnish. It isn’t the main course. The action works—but it isn’t what makes this story stand out.

The horror, on the other hand, is another matter entirely.

Am I talking about the monsters? Yes—but not in the way you might expect.

The novel evokes a more alien dread. Not horror that fixates on the monstrous, but on the inhuman instead.

The last man on Earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock at the door.

Goosebumps. Every time.

That’s the kind of horror this novel thrives on. Not the incomprehensible exactly—more the almost human, but not quite.

You can almost recognise it. It’s almost like you. But it isn’t. And it’s hungry. And it doesn’t know you’re not food.

That uncanny valley of dread is existential in nature. The kind that whispers:

“Psst. Psst, biped. Yeah, you—you hairless ape. The Earth revolves around the sun. You’re just another animal but with anxiety. The world will keep on turning with or without you. You’re not at the top of the food chain anymore.

“And now you have our attention.”

Don’t get me wrong—the novel handles visceral horror well. Inventive creatures stalk the night and tear people to shreds. That side of things works, and if that’s what you’re here for, you’ll find it in abundance.

But if you’re asking what actually kept me hooked, what lingered after the chapter ended, it was the existential horror that had the edge.

Natural Power Progression:

Kill the Princess is not a LitRPG. There’s no soul-bound UI. No stat sheets. No levelling up. No convenient bludgeon of destiny guiding Adam’s path.

But there is magic. It’s discovered, not chosen or equipped. Practised and improved upon, rather than spec’d into.

The voice that begins the apocalypse unseals humanity’s potential, granting ordinary people extraordinary abilities. Whether that means learning to cast fireballs, control electricity, heal wounds by will alone, or turn oneself invisible, people are granted power. At the point I reached before stopping to review, those powers appear tied—at least in part—to personality and aspiration.

For readers seeking progression, this novel promises exactly that. Just not through tutorials or cheats. Power here is built slowly—and only if the characters live long enough to earn it.

They’re learning from scratch. They’re learning by doing. They’re learning by surviving things they should not, long enough for the lesson to take. It scratches that powers go up itch without ever feeling cheap or unearned.

The characters start as weak as you or I, but with unlimited potential. This preserves the tension of survival horror while promising power progression still to come. You want to see what happens when the hunted become the hunters—when survival is no longer the goal, but power is.

I love a good stat screen as much as anyone. But I also enjoy progression fantasy that takes a different approach. This does so to great effect. By choosing to exclude that familiar LitRPG scaffold, the author enhances the verisimilitude of the fiction.

Crystal Clear Prose & Ensemble Cast:

I could go into both of these topics in great detail, but I won’t. I’m on to your games, SATAN! That—and this review is already stretching a little long.

It is worth noting, however, that the prose is crystal clear. Nothing is ever muddled or difficult to parse, which is especially impressive given the assortment of unique eldritch abominations the author has created for this work.

The prose is also evocative—chock-full of inventive and effective figurative language. I can’t fault it. It draws the reader in and keeps them immersed in the ongoings.

And while the story is told in third-person limited, with a tight focus on Adam, the other characters’ voices and personalities are no less distinct or well developed. Interactions within the main cast feel deeply human, deeply real, and—at times—thought-provoking.

It’s a strength worth mentioning. But for a novel with this much going for it, the First Impressions format simply can’t deep-dive into everything.

What’s Holding It Back:

Rapid Character Acclimatation to the Horror:

For all the work Kill the Princess does to reflect human emotion and trauma, there’s one thing that’s been nagging at me.

It’s small, but it bears mentioning. The cast seems to acclimatise to the end of the world fairly rapidly. It’s the one element that genuinely threatened my immersion.

Don’t get me wrong—you do see near-breakdowns in some characters. In others, though, the adjustment feels almost too clean. Maybe I’m being a touch picky here, but I don’t think so.

I’m thinking of a very particular scene in one of the opening chapters. A horror breaks into one of the characters’ homes. It nearly kills them. The response that follows doesn’t quite match the gravity of what just occurred. It’s brushed past too quickly.

And yes—danger lingers. In a crisis, you act. But humans are still human. That moment was the one time the cast felt even slightly unreal, and because of how grounded everything else is, it stood out.

Currently On Hiatus:

This isn’t an issue with the story itself, but rather the nature of the beast that is online fiction publication—a fickle, algorithm-fed creature that demands regular sacrifices and gets angry when you miss a week.

Traction is earned through consistency, volume, and rapid releases. Feed the machine, or it forgets you exist. At the time of writing this review, the story is on hiatus. For a lot of readers, that alone is enough to bounce. Online fiction has trained us well—too many promising stories have vanished into the aether, abandoned mid-sentence, never to return.

If a reader doesn’t trust that an author will finish what they started, they’re unlikely to risk emotional investment. Time is precious. Attention even more so.

And look, I get it. Art takes time. It’s vital to manage burn out.

Yet, having said the above…

Write. Damn it. Write.

Not as a condemnation—more as a primal chant screamed into the void on behalf of every reader who’s ever thought this one might’ve been special. Hiatuses happen. Life happens. But momentum is fragile, and when it breaks, it’s a bastard to rebuild.

That’s not a flaw of Kill the Princess. It’s just the reality of the ecosystem it lives in.

Closing:

This is not a power fantasy dressed up as horror. It’s survival first. Voice-led. Character-driven. Quietly existential in the way that makes you stare at the ceiling for a bit after closing the tab.

Adam is compelling because he sounds real. The horror works because it is not just loud and sharp, but strange and inhuman. The progression promises power without shortcuts, and the prose carries all of it with clarity and confidence. When it stumbles, it does so in the details—and yes, the devil is absolutely in them—but the devil here is a nitpicky bastard, not a deal-breaker.

If you want stat-screens, dopamine loops, and an overpowered protagonist speedrunning the apocalypse, this is not your book. If you want voice, tension, survival horror with teeth, and the slow, unsettling sense that humanity has just been demoted from the top of the food chain—then Kill the Princess is well worth your time.

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