The Executioner is uniquely atmospheric and uniquely unfinished.
The Executioner wears its mission on its sleeve: It’s a visual novel that seems grimly determined to immerse the player into the stark realities of the Dark Ages. These are not the Dark Ages from the King Arthur novels, oh no. These are the Dark Ages where even the king led a miserable life and everybody else basicallyThe Executioner is uniquely atmospheric and uniquely unfinished.
The Executioner wears its mission on its sleeve: It’s a visual novel that seems grimly determined to immerse the player into the stark realities of the Dark Ages. These are not the Dark Ages from the King Arthur novels, oh no. These are the Dark Ages where even the king led a miserable life and everybody else basically drowns in misery, **** and disease. Lives are cheap, death comes quick and the poor semblance of justice that can be had is found at the sharp edge of the tools of the royal executioner.
Which is you.
The game sells the relentless bleakness hard. A lot of this is the job the player has: Not only are you the man that swings the axe, you are also the man that tortures the confession out of the suspects that justifies swinging the axe. Also also, you’ll be the one cleaning up the bodies.
If that doesn’t sound like fun to you, I hear you. I actually bounced off the game at first, and hard. But I just couldn’t stop thinking about it. And then I realised: This game is selling a very unique kind of fantasy: Being a righteous man in a terrible time. It presumably also allows you to be a complete monster and revel in the depravity of your profession, but at least in my playthrough, it never quite stepped over the line into edgelord territory. The game isn’t completely dark, either. It will make you work for it, but it does serve up a few kernels of purpose and fulfillment which feel deliciously bittersweet.
Still, it’s a hard game to get through, emotionally, and that’s mostly because the game isn’t a pure visual novel. The most horrifying part of the job, the actual torture, is implemented as a minigame. It’s… a lot. “The Executioner” is very good at making the player feel complicit in the horror it depicts. The very few woodcut-like illustrations in here don’t help either: Their depiction of hopelessness and atrocity is very effective.
Combat is also a minigame, and the protagonist even has an inventory and a skill tree, even though both seem largely inconsequential. Which brings us to the main problem I had with the game: “The Executioner” is woefully unfinished. The plot of the game only covers one chapter and it is painfully obvious that the developers intended to have many more chapters after that. There are several story arcs and all but one just peter out without any kind of resolution. The main plot of this chapter does find a satisfying end but even there the characters clearly haven’t completed their arc yet.
The same can be said about all the gameplay systems. Bugs abound, inconsistencies too, the inventory seems completely useless.
And yet, the prose the game serves is so evocative, challenging and engaging that I can not regret the 3-4 hours and bucks I spent on the game. I can’t say that I have ever played something alike, and that’s… something.
TLDR: IF you are looking to challenge your narrative consuming self and you’ve already finished Spec Ops: The Line, you will find something unique here. Just don’t expect a fun time, or a finished product.… Expand
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