Once upon a time, there was a wolf. She lived in the dark forest and sang to the moon in a beautiful voice. A young prince snuck out of the castle to listen to her song, but when he tried to see her, her monstrous instincts forced her to react, scratching out his eyes. The wolf felt terrible about this because she loved the prince, and so she went to the Forest Witch to seek a cure for him. The witch offered her one, but only in exchange for something precious to her – the very singing voice that had drawn the prince to her. But the wolf gladly gave it up for both a cure and a human form…although the cure could only be cast if she could guide the now-blind prince through the dark forest to the witch's home.

The Liar Princess and the Blind Prince is a narrative platformer steeped in fairy tales. Canny readers will already have spotted three major tale types in the above paragraph: the prince's lost eyes are a reference to Rapunzel's 1857 version, the witch's bargain is taken straight out of The Little Mermaid, and the wolf herself is a combination of Little Red Riding Hood and her nemesis, while the later inclusion of goats draws a line to the less-well-known tale of The Wolf and the Seven Kids - and this is only in the first two chapters of the game. If visual novels are illustrated adult and young adult fiction, this game is an interactive picture book.

It absolutely feels like one in execution. The art is dark and beautiful, giving the game an eerie feel, furthered by the music and the only spoken dialogue, read by a narrator. Each background is hand-drawn in a muddy color palette, while both prince and princess look almost like a child's drawing with their simple designs and tiny crowns. Most striking are the monsters, including the princess's wolf form. Their proportions are off in unsettling ways, like the wolf's size and the placement of her eyes, while the “goats” have round mouths full of sharp teeth and look more like a leech combined with a yeti than the animals we call “goats.” Creatures in the forest are either deliberately unassuming or pure nightmare fuel, like the frog/fly combination that lives in the mushroom nursery. It's a Maurice Sendak nightmare.

Gameplay is an interesting combination of simple and frustrating, although this is the point where I admit just how astoundingly terrible I am at platformers. (The only one I've ever fully beaten is Forward to the Sky, and I'm still not sure how I managed that.) The basic idea is that you control the princess as she leads the prince along the forest path. To make sure he remains with her, you need to hold down the “j” key, so she takes his hand, while also holding the movement key (a or d, depending on direction) and possibly the jump key (k). If you're uncoordinated, this can be a challenge.

There are basic platformer obstacles to be dealt with as you progress through the woods. Small cliffs must be jumped up, springy mushrooms must be bounced on to jump higher, and switches must be activated to remove obstacles. The usual “get on the moving platform” bits are also present in several forms – both manufactured lifts and stump-backed turtles – and at times, there are monsters to fight. The most interesting element of this is that some puzzles can only be solved in wolf form. You toggle between wolf and princess by pressing “i,” and you must not be holding the prince's hand or in a low-ceilinged space to manage it. The wolf can make higher jumps than the princess, and as the story progresses, the puzzles that require switching forms and teaching the blind prince to do more things grow more complex. There isn't a hint feature, but you can skip stages if you want to, although you'll miss collecting leaves and other items.

The game has both an autosave feature and a manual save, with three save slots available. (These look like bookmarks in another nod to the story's bookish roots.) You can easily load an autosave if you mess up, but be aware that you'll have to replay the beginning of the save back to where you either died or got stuck, so there is a repetitive element here. Manual saves don't require this, so if you're coming up on a puzzle you suspect you're going to struggle with, you could save just before it…assuming you can tell it'll be tricky, which often is not the case. Both the princess and the prince can die, and death sends you back to the most recent autosave point and is bloodless. It's a challenge rather than a punishment.

If platformers are frustrating to you, The Liar Princess and the Blind Prince may not be your game, as it can get tricky. But it's hard to fault it when everything else is so beautifully done, from the haunting music to the picture book cut scenes to the artwork. It's an exquisite, unsettling journey – which is exactly what a fairy tale should be.