69 Things To Do With A Dead Princess

So You've Finished 69 Things To Do With A Dead Princess And You're Confused

I picked it up on sale last year because the art looked interesting and I had some free time. What I actually found was a 3-hour interactive museum tour dressed up as a horror game. Most people expect body horror, jump scares, actual puzzles. You get none of that. The game is basically a walking simulator in an empty castle. You walk from room to room. There are things in the rooms. You click them. Sometimes you read something. Sometimes you hear a voice. That's the whole loop. It's short, it's pretentious, and it gets a lot of people mad.

Where To Get 69 Things To Do With A Dead Princess

The game is on Steam. That's basically the only way to get it unless you count a couple of sketchy key resellers. Price usually hovers around $5 to $8 on sale. Full price is roughly $12. I'd recommend never paying full price for this one. The content doesn't justify it. If you're on console, it's on Xbox and PlayStation as well. Steam is where most people are though, so community discussions and guides are mostly PC-focused. The game runs fine on integrated graphics. You don't need anything fancy.

How To Actually Play It

Open the game. You're standing in a dark castle hallway. A woman named the Princess speaks to you through a voiceover. She tells you to clean the castle. Every item you pick up gives you a weird poetic description. That's the core mechanic. There are multiple endings. I think there are six or seven. To get them, you mostly just need to explore thoroughly and click on the right things in the right order. The game tracks what you've done. The ending you get depends on how much of the castle you've actually inspected. Some items trigger events. Others just sit there. A few items need to be combined. The combination system is buried in the inventory screen and not explained anywhere in the game itself. I found it by accident after three hours of wandering around.

One thing the game doesn't tell you: there's a save system but it's automatic. It saves whenever you enter a new room. If the game crashes or closes, you lose maybe thirty seconds of progress at most. Don't bother looking for a manual save option. It doesn't exist.

The Real Problem People Run Into

Most people get stuck trying to trigger a specific ending without realizing they missed a room or an item. The game doesn't give you a checklist. There's no journal that tracks what you've found. I hit this wall hard around the third playthrough. I kept getting the same middle-tier ending and had no idea why. The workaround was essentially to map out every room myself. I opened a blank document and started writing down every clickable object in each room. Took about two hours of tedious work but it revealed that I was skipping the west wing entirely on casual playthroughs. Once I went back and cleared every single room, the missing ending unlocked immediately. If you're stuck, the only real solution is thoroughness. Go into every room. Click every item. Check behind doors. The game hides significant content in rooms that look empty until you actually examine the walls and floor.

Counter-Intuitive Things Beginners Miss

First, the horror elements are almost entirely optional. If you just walk through the castle and pick up items without reacting to the scary parts, you'll still complete the game. The unsettling audio and visuals are there for people who want to feel something. They don't affect gameplay outcomes at all. Second, some of the most important story elements come from items you'd naturally ignore. A cracked teacup in a side room. A dried flower pressed between pages of a book. The game rewards patience, not speed. People who rush through in two hours miss roughly half the narrative. Third, and this is the one nobody mentions, the game has a hidden secondary playthrough mode that unlocks after beating it once. You keep all your discovered items but gain access to new rooms and new narrative paths. Most players don't know this exists because the game never acknowledges it. It's just there if you start a second run.

When This Game Isn't For You

Be honest with yourself. If you want actual puzzles, combat, meaningful choices, or a long runtime, this isn't the game. It's a 2 to 4 hour atmospheric experience with a strong authorial voice. Some people call it pretentious. I call it whatever it is. It's a mood piece with gameplay attached. The biggest flaw is pacing. The middle section drags significantly. You'll walk from room to room with nothing happening for maybe forty minutes straight. It's not buggy or broken. It's just slow. If you can't sit with that, stop playing after the first act and don't feel bad about it. Also, the voice acting is inconsistent. Some lines are delivered well. Others sound like they were recorded on a laptop microphone in a hallway. This isn't a technical problem. It's a creative choice that divides people. I found it added to the surreal tone. Some people find it jarring. Both reactions are normal.

If you want something similar but more substantial, try Papers Please if you want meaningful mechanics under a weird aesthetic. Or What Remains of Edith Finch if you want a longer narrative walking simulator with better variety. But 69 Things To Do With A Dead Princess is its own thing. It's small, it's weird, and it won't pretend to be anything else. I've played it three times now. I still haven't seen every ending. The second playthrough mode keeps adding new content I didn't notice before. It's not great. It's not terrible. It's exactly what it set out to be, which is rare enough that I respect it even when I'm frustrated.