This title isn't too in-depth of an experience gameplay wise, but is extremely profound through its themes to the point it stuck with me for weeks.
Is death and nothingness preferable to eternal guilt? Is it truly worth it to stop a world from turning apocalyptic if it means your own hands will be responsible for its destruction?
What does purification even mean? What are morals, if you have to destroy everything to ensure that moral code?
I kind of have to rate the game highly, because when I played through The Judge's ending, I genuinely lost contact with reality. I didn't cry, I totally shut down, for hours. It was like a fit of psychosis. I wasn't even aware that a video game could have such an effect on me.
I kind of have to give it a perfect rating based on that alone, right?
The whole game is based on perspective. Nothing changes, but the actions stay the same. The Guardians are incompetent. The people of this world are neurotic. All that's left is bleakness no matter the outcome. You have two options.
One, blame The Batter, and feel the guilt of The Judge for the rest of eternity.
Or two, return this contemptible world to nothingness.
The Batter appears as a monster, but whether or not you think he truly is that way is up to you. It's such a profoundly unique way of handling morality in that The Batter reduces everything to its purest blacks and whites, clearly having a misguided savior complex through his acts of abject genocide... But not entirely being wrong. He even requests the help of The Judge, implying that he doesn't want to fight him at the end, and views The Judge as the only being of the world in question not experiencing neurosis. As well, The Judge views their world as corrupt, but hates The Batter's methods. At the end of the game, he also begs The Batter to join him. They need each other, but their ideologies are so far apart, they can never come to a solution together.
The Batter is a truly amoral, inhuman figure, whereas The Judge is the last monument to the failure of the Guardians echoing the last gasps of a dying world.
If you choose The Batter's side, The Batter stays the same, being a humanlike figure.
If you choose The Judge's side, The Batter turns into a monster.
The Batter is the same person either way. He only changes in appearance because he's viewed as an enemy. He holds the same ideologies either way.
The other characters are equally compelling.
The Queen is one of the few people in the game who calls The Batter an extremist hellbent on destruction. It's easy to see her point of view, because The Batter's ideologue is to essentially perform mercy killings. At the end of the day, The Queen is a mother protecting her infant son from The Batter's rampage through righteous means. The Judge asks The Batter to expiate sins that they both are guilty of, and prevent "this monster" from completing his work.
Whereas The Queen is naive through her well-meaning, Enoch has a heart made of ice. He's a monument to how human sin corrupts each world, including this one. Even then, however, he is not an amoral individual. Enoch insists on giving the citizens of his zone drugs to prevent them from becoming Burnt, malformed souls with horrifyingly distorted bodies. He shows a more pragmatic attitude, but his solution is misguided, as we see denizens in other zones which haven't become Burnt. Citizens and specters murder each other over these drugs.
Dedan is resentful towards The Batter, even after he helps the Elsen rid his zone of the Specters. He's a permanent malcontent, and will never help purify the world, even if it helps his people. He barely even enjoys his own existence, let alone anyone else's.
Japhet is the epitome of naivety turned into madness, as he summoned the Specters as revenge for his subjects fearing him.
Zacharie is a permanent optimist, who takes it upon himself to remain ethereal in his role to aid the player. It's unknown what his connection is with Sugar, but sugar in the game is the drugs I referred to earlier. Sugar asking The Batter to say goodbye to Zacharie is... Utterly soul crushing on a level I haven't seen from any work of fiction before. Zacharie's reaction of, "I guess it's better like that", made me have to stop playing for several days. I understand the metaphor, Sugar is the drug that keeps him happy, the only thing he really had left. Sugar is the one thing The Batter doesn't call purified, as her childish nature simply betrayed her innocence. She's the only thing The Batter truly refers to as 'dead' across the entire game. Even through that one line of text, you can feel just that one pang of regret, that it was no longer a genocide, but instead an omnicide.
The ending of the game is just a different beast entirely. It perfectly encapsulates that there's just nothing left. It's either The Batter literally flipping an 'OFF' switch to turn the world 'OFF', or it's The Judge just wandering... Endlessly. The Judge is left with a chosen few left to run the world, and even then, it's likely the Secretaries will swoop in to finish them off, with the purification of each zone.
Was there even a choice? Was everything going to die like this anyway? Is The Batter a monster, or simply an accelerationist to the inevitable?
It's a game that gets me thinking every time I see anything of it. No game has made me go through so many separate stages of grief and epiphany. It's a brilliant look into the cosmic nature of morality and it's basically a must-play for anyone interested in indie RPGs. Quotes from nearly every character in the game are pure power etched into writing.
"Hence nothing remains but our regrets."