The Executioner

Good buy if you like text-based games. Not a favorite of mine, because the story feels a bit dry and too dramatic in some areas, but still fun to play for the most part.

It might sound very weird, considering this is a text-based game after all, but it's simply just the harsh reality. Storyline is just average and mechanics feel extremely repetitive after a while. There's also too many moments in the game where you're given with a mere illusion of choice, as either option will lead to pretty much the same outcome.

My feelings on this game are... Complicated, to say the least. It's got some phenomenal ideas, but the execution (no pun intended) is lacking, to say the least. It delves into some really, really dark topics, but seems too afraid of truly exploring them beyond the most basic surface level. At its core, "The Executioner" sells itself on the premise of making you a torturer/executioner while tasking you with making complicated moral choices that make you pick your duty or your sanity. The very first choice in the game, which makes you select whether you want to execute your own father painlessly or make someone else do it knowing it'll be botched, I thought was a brilliant way to explore that premise. Unfortunately, the game doesn't really follow up on that, and the rest of the choices mostly just affect what stats you get. The characters in the game never feel real. Despite the fact that you're doing some of the most horrible things possible to mostly innocent people (including a literal child, who you need to torture a confession of witchcraft out of), it never feels like more than a stat game. At no point did I think to myself "Hey, maybe I don't want to drive needles under the nails of this guy, that sounds absolutely horrible", but I did think "Hey, I shouldn't drive needles under the nails of this guy now because he's going to recover too much health and it'll make things harder for me later". Maybe that was on purpose. Maybe I was supposed to experience what it was like to be a cold, detached executioner who sees torture as a job rather than the objectively horrible act that it is. But if that's the case, why place so much emphasis on sanity and choices? Why frame the game around the internal struggle going on in the main character's head if he doesn't seem to have it outside of the marketing and the words written out on the screen? It's the same kind of ludonarrative dissonance as when a character claims he isn't a killer in a cutscene and then murders 50 people without remorse the moment the player gains control of him, except even worse because the narrative and player choices are - supposedly - the main draw of the game. It's pretty clear that this is one of the developers' earliest games (it's the only one they've published on Steam, so possibly their first commercial release), and I wish it wasn't. I wish they had gained some experience first and then executed (again, no pun intended) their vision in a much smarter, more nuanced way which...