How do you review cruelty squad?
What even is there to say about a game so seemingly uncaring of it's outward perception?

In a literal sense Cruelty Squad is an anti-capitalist immersive sim set in a latest-stage corporatocracy where the cryptobros won and you're forced speculatively gamble on human organs as a side-hustle to cover you rent. That is an explanation of what cruelty squad is and you could just play it as such, enjoying the intricately designed 3D environments and gameplay, but that doesn't really capture the anger that cruelty squad conveys.

A viscous hatred towards the gig-economy manifested in the barest form holding no pretense of what makes acceptable art, compressed by a global pandemic and subsequent lockdown into a barely palatable expression of discontent and trauma with the systems that dictate our lives. I keep coming back to this game every few months because I am so inexplicably enamored with it, maybe a way to relive that moment of fear and isolation when the world felt like it was closing in, or a means of catharsis against the political and economic realities the game reflects. I'm not sure, but when playing cruelty squad I can't help but feel it understands the uneasiness in the world, the anger of it's creator left unbent to metaphor or further explanation, laid bare when there's nothing left to hide.

A profoundly innovative title where the mere act of describing the actions you commit in the game illustrates the ideas the game is trying to communicate more than any other video game has thus far.

So many other games try to wow you with the cool things you can do. "I cut a robot in half with a samurai sword after turning into a vampire for a 5% damage buff." In Cruelty Squad, I killed a politician and then proceeded to idle the in-game stock market for 7 hours for 2 million dollars so that I can buy a 1 million dollar house isolated from the world but I didn't have enough money for all the body modifications I wanted, so I went into a pharmaceutical business and murdered everyone and dismembered their bodies to harvest the in-tact organs to sell on the same stock market.

The horrendous visuals accomplish a more cyberpunk aesthetic that only leaves you wondering what the fuck happen to make it look like this? It's one of those expressions only a game can bring out of me. The last I played a video game that evoked this response was Bloodborne, where I stared at a woman in a wedding dress with a bloody stomach looking upwards towards the next boss, where I'm met with a baby crying and the title card, "Nightmare Slain." Chrono Trigger might be another example for others.

An additional note I would like to add regarding the attempts at dissecting this game are as follows: We are past the age of originality in video games. So many people are trying to undermine a game's artistic value in favor of lame comparison's to other existing games. I get the fact that video game's are not very old and we have all played many video games, and the generation of "the first ever gamers" are only a half-century old, but I really wish people would shut the fuck up about calling it some Deus-Ex-like-like-like-like Game-like like-like when I could floor all of you by calling this game Grand Theft Auto V Golden Eye because this game has a stock market that is influenced after certain character's in the story die and it's a first person shooter where the gun goes wavy. If the mechanic added into the game doesn't really add anything to the game itself, it's because the game sucks a buffalos ass after fucking it 7 times.