HEXECUTIVE ORDER

You're a mage, and the government knows it. They put a collar on your neck and wired you into the basement of a ministry so you could keep the lights on. It turns out the people running the country aren't quite people, and whatever they keep under the city is getting hungry.

One morning the collar glitches for half a second. That's enough.

HEXECUTIVE ORDER is an old-school shooter where you fight with spells instead of guns. You break out of a detention center that isn't on any map, and then you just keep going down. Open-plan offices, an evidence archive, a dead metro line, a lab that grows things in jars, and a lot of places further down that were never meant for paperwork. 44 levels, and they get stranger the deeper you go.

At first you have a pistol and barely enough magic to light a candle. Your spellbook is sitting in the evidence room, filed as Exhibit #1. Get it back and you'll have frost shards that work like a shotgun, lightning that jumps from one cubicle to the next, fireballs, hail, a comet you can drop on a crowd and a holy beam we called Heresy. Up close there's an iron cross, and it gets bloodier the more you use it.

Between levels you stamp a form to get a new perk. A shady merchant called the Broker sells spells and upgrades for the soul shards you rip out of your enemies, and later on he'll let you fuse two spells into one. That's how you end up with a pig that freezes people solid. We're not going to explain the pig.

It starts out as office satire, with memos about printer etiquette and announcements reminding the staff that magic isn't real. Archivists bring the dead back with a rubber stamp and locked doors want a request in triplicate. Somewhere around the lower floors it stops being funny, and the bosses down there have been in office for a very long time.

There are red barrels too. You know what they're for.

Everything in this game is made up, the government included.