The Executioner
The Executioner puts you in the shoes of a man who tortures people for a living while trying to retain his own sanity. Fusing elements of a traditional RPG with investigation, exploration and moral decision-making, it invites players take on the role of a man who must seek a signed confession from those he is about to put to death. With a predominantly text-based interface unfolding engaging story, The Executioner promises a dark and unsettling atmosphere, and a world filled with moral ambiguity With the threat of revolution on the cards will you fight for monarchy and tradition or revolt in the name of progress? Do you support emerging science or follow the mystical path? Will you desensitize yourself to the violence you have to inflict or try to preserve your humanity? The decision is yours. So are the consequences. Note: The game will be released in three episodes, each of the remaining two episodes will coming out every 3 months. Each episode will be separate DLC.
Game Discussion
Steam User 43
This Is one of those moments where a "Wait" Option for recommendation would be great.
To put it simply, this game is unfinished, Much Much more so if you are playing in english, Russian It probably wouldn't
be TOO bad.
For starters a good portion of the text in the game when playing in english is either missing or in russian, it took away from the great atmosphere and story this game has, and beyond that made certain choices impossible to comprehend making it feel terrible
when an outcome was beyond my actions
Beyond that the interface is wonky at best, the battle system feels pretty good for what it is, but it's hard to understand and the
"raise the stakes" options seems to not do anything at all, but even in the text options glitches are aplenty and incredibly noticeable, the funny thing is the what I'm going to assume is the "report a bug" option suffers from this and I couldn't understand
what the russian was trying to tell me on how to submit a bug report, going into it fully is impossible, I had experiences with events clearly not leading to what they should, Experiences with events showing no or broken dialogue, and the thing that made me put down the game was a softlock via moving to the "old graveyard" and being able to select literally nothing, not even an option to go back or home.
There are more bugs than this, The torture section is riddled with small issues mostly lending themselves from the tutorial seemingly not ending properly, items not appearing when they should, and the ability to sell rope at the shop endlessly and with no downside.
So why give this game a positive review? Because when the game ""DID"" work right, It was one of the most intriguing and story rich, imaginative, and downright unique games I've ever played. All of the mechanics """"WHEN"""" they function properly add to this game being a great Thriller experience, a "horror" game that doesn't stoop to cheap tricks but also doesn't stoop to tropes either (Mainly from having such a unique Premise) And the sheer amount of content probably rivals The Most open ended RPG's out there, My only real complaint as far as the gameplay itself goes is that especially in a story related game where all of my choices are crucial, having a random luck generated outcome for battle takes a way a bit from the feeling of having my choices mean something, when even the most likely option for success ended up in failure.
This game has potential absolutely dripping from every crevice of it, However I'm going to be honest here, after looking through the game's news and reading up on it, I genuinely believe the developers simply didn't want their eager fans to have to wait any longer for their game and didn't want to delay it again, and they probably wanted to share their great creation with them too, However in my opinion they absolutely should of delayed it again, as this amazing game goes from a 9/10 to a 5/10 REAL quick
due to it's bugs. So If you are looking for reviews of this game, maybe not get it quite yet but keep a SHARP eye on it and wait for the devs to patch it, since when they do I absolutely will be coming back to this game, and I hope you do too as even when I can finish this game I probably will be filled with excitement for what Lesser Evil Games can do next.
Steam User 26
The Good the Bad and the Ugly
The Executioner is a choice-based text game about the hereditary executioner who had to replace his father in this post. There're a lot of "pick your poison" choices and a bunch of interesting characters + tortures as one of the core mechanics.
The story is engaging and I like the variety of choices. The game looks great, drawings, interface, colors - all at a high level. The tortures are okay (nice quote, huh) - nothing spectacular but they fit well into the game. An overall gameplay experience was great before I've encountered first bugs.
The Bad part of The Executioner is the quality of English translation at launch, mostly because of bugs. It should be mostly fixed by now, however, a full fix will take some more time.
And I should mention the Ugly bugs, while some of those could be gamebreaking (or branchbreaking to be precise). For example, I was in a situation when I had to choose a route that I didn't like or to wait for a fix, because it was a dead end with "blank" page otherwise.
If you were lucky enough to not to encounter bugs during playthrough - you'd say that it's a very Good game. Unfortunately, at this time you'd have to be very fortunate for it.
You may buy game now or wait for fixes - The Executioner is a worthy game that deserves to be played, but only after a few patches for fair experience.
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Steam User 34
The game I have been waiting for 2 years. participated in tests, and waited, waited, waited. A lot of things changed in it, it got better harder and I can’t believe that today it has already loaded and you can play it in its entirety. It is filled with difficult moral choices, difficult characters and opportunities to ask yourself questions that in real life will be scary to ask.
I look forward to a complete immersion in a dark, scary, mysterious world. buy play, and join discussions
Steam User 8
The well-written text-based game with intriguing story set in atmosperic grimdark world. The gameplay has elements of combat, resource and character management, but the most interesting part is what the game is about — your executioner job, where you have to interrogate prisoners and make tough choices about their fate, and yours. Some elements of the game are definetly brutal or even gore. And it has great art style and illustrations, that sets the mood.
Steam User 5
The content that is currently there is very good, the story and characters are great. However, the game isn't finished. It ends abrubtly after finishing the first chapter and I can't find any news if there is any more content coming anytime soon.
Steam User 2
the handful of bugs (including having to switch to russian and back to english on EVERY RELOAD) aren't enough to pull down the awesome writing quality.
if only the next chapters were a thing...
Steam User 12
Executioner. Interrogator. Tool of the state. Mindless or not... that's up to you. But the burden of independence makes you a threat in your own right... and makes allies see enemies. Will you be the loyal. pathetic dog, or embrace the inner-wolf willing to bite the hand that feeds... and maybe be put down for it. Maybe you'll forge your own path. No easy answers. Just brutal choices.
The Executioner is a text-heavy game with RPG elements (item-equips, potions, stats, skills to level) that places you as a medieval executioner whose rise to duty comes at his father's wrongful execution. The game is based around a system of torturing and interrogation that challenges you to elicit a confession however possible, with a number of sub tasks to accomplish too. Its narrative often comes from lengthy prose, though I've found it rather decently written so far. The accompanying illustrations are also sharp, distinctive, and quite befitting the grim atmosphere and your brutal duty.
I've put up some footage of the first game-day if you wanna check it out yourself:
It's pretty freaking dope so far. Others are reporting translation errors all over though I never saw the same. There are some grammatical errors in the actual explanations of mechanics and such, though I think the prose was outsourced since it shows fairly advanced writing proficiency. I have seen issues with text prompts where the indicated bold lie text just showed the code instead of being modified. A patch just went up while I was writing this, so that might be squashed pretty soon.
That fact that errors shows up with the blatant "" tag got me considering something else I'd found interesting about the game: you can always tell when characters are lying. I think at times it might require picking up on easy cues like the smell of air mentioned when telling the truth, not always end up bolded. Either-way, its fascinating that the conflict of the game doesn't really come from not knowing what is true or lie while trying to find some median. It's born of how you go about trying to elicit those things from others. In the same way, its you knowing when you'll bite your tongue and be forced to accept truths you know a falsehood. It's rather appropriate to our modern era too where truth is no longer even truth.
You can check out The Executioner on Steam now.
And find more recommendations on our curator page, Weird Wonderful Game Watch.