It's funny that you picked this update to ask this, since the recent release does something like that with the Mangle+Tentacle Show Forsaken training combination. As for an even more brutal version where it's made clear that you're pretty much pushing a straight path through them... Well, I'll look for a chance to include it. It is true that they're very capable of surviving that sort of thing.
I'm glad you think so! Some of the first feedback I got for this game was that it would benefit a lot even from some minor visuals, so I had been thinking about how to do that without losing the flexibility provided by being a text game.
As
rizldiz3l says, it only applies to Single Play mode, and the options settings are reset when you load a game. However, also note that you can't turn on cheats in the middle of a playthrough. It needs to be either a new playthrough or a Day 1 load.
This was helpful. The game is set up so that it looks for a particular image (empty.png in the portrait folder), and if it can't find that, then it turns portraits off so that it doesn't waste time repeatedly searching for portraits every single time one would normally be displayed. If your portraits folder does include empty.png, then there must be some other problem that would prevent the game from loading portraits even if the setting was left on.
Chosen using selfish actions at the start isn't necessarily a bug, since they sometimes start with broken Vulnerabilities. However, if you didn't get the final battle on Day 50, then that's a bug and I'd appreciate it if you could upload your save so that I can have a look. Just note that Single Play lets you continue past Day 50, so if you skip through text a lot then the final battle might've happened without you noticing.