Cruelty Squad is a very interesting game, one that I thoroughly enjoy but also feel somewhat sour on.

I love the art style, vomit on the screen that somehow ends up being cohesive when you actually play the game. Same thing with the vibes, the bleak and hyper-cynical capitalist hellscape where human life is worth less than the price of the organs. However, the game is very on the nose so it feels less like scathing commentary and more so a parody. The writing is also quite funny and fits with how absurd the game is. The music does suck though, it fits, but it just sounds like ass. The absurdity also extends to controls and game systems as well.

What is the reload button? If you said R then what were you thinking you buffoon, clearly it would be holding right-click and slamming your mouse downward you stupid idiot. R is logically the interact button. L-shift is aim-down-sights, swap weapon is C, and crouch is X. This is the way God intended man to play FPS games. To keep to wackiness going, there is not one, not two, but three different stock markets; one for actual company stocks, and the other two are for speculative biological investments, human organs and fish. I am a big fan of Balls Fish.

Levels are large and filled with multiple routes. You may even notice places that you can’t reach. That’s where bodily enhancements come into play. Ever felt like your appendix is just being a freeloader and not contributing enough, then why not make it a grappling hook. Why stop there, make your back and feet shoot gunk to jump and zoom around the place. Frickin’ absolve yourself in a flesh suit to be more protected but removing more than have of your visibility. The augments are all very thematic and some really shake up how you play the game, like the grappendix. The grappendix is one of the earlier augments that really shake up how you approach missions. You start off peaking around corners to get the jump on enemies, to flinging yourself to your target and finishing levels in less than a minute. There is one caveat though, why is everything so expensive. There is cheapo stuff, but it ranges from boring to making the game nigh unplayable, looking at you nightmare goggles.

If you want to truly experience Cruelty Squad, you have to grind for money. Which I guess fits the capitalist hellscape, but this is a game, and I want to have fun on a game. You don’t get paid relatively much for completing missions, so you’re forced to play the market. Playing the stock market is not something I enjoy doing, I want to be a Cruelty Squad employee not some wannabe stock trader. You can also grind for fish, especially a certain sewer dwelling fish, but again I want to play Cruelty Squad, not be a fisherman. It sucks that you have to go through menial garbage, just to open up the game. Also, the “final” level sucks. The best parts of the final level are the shortcut that skips the godawful block pushing puzzles with Gorbino from megahit Gorbino’s Quest harassing you and the ending. The rest of the level is fine, it’s just that terrible block pushing. Additionally, difficulty selection is overly convoluted, even for this game. If you’re confused how difficulty selection can be convoluted, then pay attention to the screen borders and you’ll figure it out soon enough.

Cruelty Squad is a truly absurd and strange game. I wish is didn’t feel as sour as I do on it, but I walk away from it thinking about how one of a kind and different it is. That alone elevates it to something special, even with my gripes. It is definitely worth experiencing firsthand.

There's a Wes Anderson film called the French Dispatch which features a short story that really resonates with me. It's about an artist in a prison who paints flesh-colored blobs using Lea Seydoux's nude body as a reference. An art salesman played by Adrien Brody finds these paintings, and presents them to a group of investors, looking to make a killing off the prisoner's work. In the presentation, Adrien Brody shows the investors an illustration of a perfect sparrow, showing that the prisoner knows how to make realistic art, but chooses to make pink flesh blobs out of Lea Seydoux's naked body; saying it's the difference between a good artist and a genius artist.

Cruelty Squad was made by a genius artist.

o texto desse jogo tem tanta carga vinda das consequências de se viver em um capitalismo-tardio-pré-apocalíptico que eu não conseguiria discorrer apropriadamente sobre ele mesmo se eu me colocasse nessa função. tudo que eu sei é que eu gosto que Cruelty Squad é um immersive sim estilo Thief (com foco em assassinato e ações perturbadas). a gente precisa de mais jogos estilos Thief. eu gosto das vibes horrendas e do design de fases que consegue incentivar exploração e ao mesmo tempo me punir por enfiar meu nariz em lugares estranhos. o melhor de tudo é que essa contradição funciona dentro do loop de gameplay (já que você nunca perde muito progresso morrendo) e nunca se torna frustrante demais.

é um daqueles jogos que usam a dificuldade e seu design como uma piada feita às custas de quem o joga, e quer saber? é uma boa piada. são múltiplas boas piadas. eu gosto da fase que tem um trampolim insanamente forte no meio de um prédio que te atrapalha pra entrar na sala importante mas que te oferece uma ótima forma de escapar do caos causado por suas ações. amei bastante. um dia eu faço o conteúdo pós game.

this game kicks ass
it's pretty much a perfect blend of immersive sim, tactical and retro shooter elements and it lets you do fuck all in its world, it's unapologetically indie with how much freedom it gives you
not to mention the mindfuck that is the artstyle and soundtrack, they become so appealing the more you progress that it becomes hard to enjoy anything that isn't a complete assault of the senses
underneath all of the irony of the game being created by "consumer softproducts", or one of the npcs saying "fuck libtards", or people being obsessive with "chunkopops", it carries a very nihilistic message which definitely rubbed some people the wrong way but i don't think you should take it that seriously. also i fuck with it so idgaf

it's worth noting that Cruelty Squad is not only the first game I've ever 100%'d since Sonic Adventure 2 but the only game i've ever immediately went back to complete again after beating it, and i just today beat a third playthrough (on the Hope Eradicated difficulty this time).

considering games for me are usually one-and-done experiences i'll pick up, put down and just sort of digest for years at a time before going for the odd replay this speaks volumes to just how tight cruelty squad's gameplay is. i'm still finding new potential strategies, routes and builds with which i can approach levels that by this point i basically have memorized

Cruelty Squad Isn't a game for everyone, It's purposely Ugly in a style that of early 2000's webpages, it's soundtrack makes you feel on edge at all times, the game is very unforgiving in terms of difficulty and to top it all off, the very little story it shows and its mechanics of the stock market of human organs that encourage you to mow down innocent people so you can sell whatever organs are still intact, paint the world of Cruelty Squad as a bleak, hyper-capitalist nightmare where human life is worth less than the bullets that take it.
Depending on your reaction to the following statements, Cruelty Squad might be a game you'll never touch, or, like myself, one of your new favorites.

This is as much of an immersive sim as it is a fishing simulator. You are given a lot of tools to tackle on every mission, but that supposed variety to beat each assignment doesn’t really mean much in that the gun you use and the augmentations you equip only change the path you take, whether it be peacefully or violently, assault or stealth. You are given a fishing rod to, well, fish, but it doesn’t take any more effort other than clicking at the right time when a fish shows up. The point here is that Cruelty Squad isn’t really an immersive sim in that every action I make doesn’t affect the world beyond what happens to me during the mission I’m playing, and since you can get killed in a matter of seconds if you're not careful enough, so there's barely any room for errors. In any other case, this would be a failure, but here it may seem intentional, as life in this world seems to be static and cyclical. There was this one target in Darkworld I think that said something along the lines of: “I was here last time you came and I will be here the next time”. Thing is, nobody really dies in Cruelty Squad. You can get killed as much as you want, but your body will be reconstructed again, and it seems that it is the same for the targets. Everyone is doomed to relieve the same fate over and over, to kill or be killed. As long as it is profitable.

The world is utterly disgusting, the art style is nonsensical for the most part, humans are creepy looking and dogs are mutated beyond belief, and interiors are big yet full of nothing and with a hostile, sometimes maze-like, architecture. Every aspect here works in service of generating the biggest repulsion it can to the player. There's this one moment in the game, in Miner's Miracle, where the camera will switch to the first-person point of view of another person aiming at you with a sniper rifle. They never shoot at you, they're just aiming, like a constant threat. Everyone in this game seems to be in a constant state of paranoia. In Paradise, a seemingly normal neighborhood, most houses (if not every single one) have armed security that will shoot at you even if you're not trying to break in. NPCs talk about how they hate this world to its core and how their fellow coworkers are not trustworthy, and they even ask you to kill them. In the House level, there's an NPC - NPC which, for some reason, has its own name and can be killed forever, probably has something to do with being from the countryside - that not-so-subtly threatens you for being there, and every other NPC in this level will do the same if they’re not shooting at you. Most NPCs will tell you how much they hate their lives, the world and their particular situations, and the ones that try to do something good for the world are the ones you are sent to dispose of. People do not look friendly, even in the Headquarters, when they tell you that they're here for you, you can feel they're not trusty. There's something in their face, in the way they smile… it feels fake.

Everything has this feeling of being fabricated, that everything has lost its meaning. You get killed and your body gets reconstructed to try again. Rinse and repeat. You buy a house in the peaceful countryside to find out it's a murderous energy fueled hellscape that will let nothing in from the outside. People at the disco talk about wanting to game-end themselves. The player character casually watches a mass-shooting in the street during the intro like it's the sort of thing he watches every day. Some augmentations are either not that helpful or their description and effects are so vague you might think they don't even work. The value of a human body is determined by what the market dictates and a human heart can lose all its value in a matter of seconds. Cruelty Squad would be a really simple and not that impressive exercise on nihilism, but the thing that makes it stand out for me is that there seems to be a human heart at the core of it. During the intro you're told the player character has depression, the third ending has this text that starts talking about childhood, broken dreams and hopes being turned into ashes to become just another pawn in the corporate game, and the MC wears a shirt during the whole game that says LIFE. There's all this iconography in reference to LIFE and DEATH, there's a human being who is suffering, who wants all of this to end, who wants to be human once again. This might as well be a modern retelling of RoboCop with a hundred layers more of deranged nihilism. In all of its surrealism, there seems to be a component of reality, the constant agony for the rotten state of the uncaring world and the little value human life holds is very real. There's raw and fictionalized reality all over Cruelty Squad. Despite how unreal everything is, this could perfectly be the world we currently live in.

*Note I haven't done ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING yet but I've done most of the secret levels save for House and Trauma Loop and thats just because they require a fuckton of grinding for money and idk when if I'll ever get it done.

Yeah this game is really fuckin good and I wish I wasn't such a jackass about it years ago.

When a game looks like cruelty squad you're essentially fighting an uphill battle with me, and it didn't help this came out next to a lot of other low effort cashgrab "retro indie boomer shooters!!!" that would fill the weaker sections of Realms Deep streams didn't help one bit. From what I saw this game was just a giant ironic shitpost somehow masquerading as some stupid fake deep "we live in a society" bullshit.

Not the case at all.

Cruelty Squad is unconventional. Very unconventional. But it rides the line so thin that almost everything is still readable, and the gameplay behind all that is addicting as shit.

The game is objectively ugly on purpose. But everything on the hud is still readable and you can easily understand what's going on. Yes, I'll admit some of the bright colors did get to me and gave me a headache after a bit at points but again it surprisingly didn't bug me as much over time.

If I were to describe this game, it would be "first person hitman with deus ex powers for schizos". You have targets on your hud, and you're tasked with killing them. How? Doesn't matter, just get it done. With a few exceptions Cruelty Squad's levels are exactly what make imsims so special, and the powers and weapons you obtain are just the cherry on top. It's funny, this game has a lot of stealth elements, but at the same time I wouldn't even totally call it a stealth game with how many points you'll probably just end up gunning people down. But you gotta go a certain way about it. You can't just play this like a doom game, you gotta be precise, take cover when it matters, go for headshots. It's incredibly satisfying and the short completion times for each levels help encourage replayability all the more.

My only real complaints if anything is that noticing enemies can be a bit hard I feel sometimes? At least in crowded areas where so many people look the same so that got annoying sometimes. The last level also felt really obtuse and bad for the sake of it. That was entirely the point I'm sure but it just felt like a slog to get through.

Finally not sure if it's like this for anyone else but this game has some weird performance degradion over time for me, at least on my system (GTX 3060). Like, when I'll boot the game up, everything is a rock solid 60+ like it should be, but usually after like 9 level loads/retries the framerate dips into the 40s and I don't know why. I THINK its because the game is still trying to process stats of NPCs after their death on top of things like the stock markets? But I don't know, maybe this is just a me issue or something.

Other then that this has to be one of the most fun indie fpses I've played this year and I'm really upset at myself I didn't try it sooner. If you're still turned off because of the visuals or fans like I was, at least give it a try with an open mind. In terms of raw gameplay, this is a must-play for imsim fans as far as I'm concerned.

the invocation of georges bataille at the end of the game nicely sort of reframes everything happening aesthetically here under a portrait of excess. the gunk, the bile, the filth of it all, isn't meant to represent some sort of far off hypercontextualized future, but instead a poeticizing of the now. by dwelling in the now, we're forced to confront the space we've alienated from our day to day. the space of expenditure then inevitably leads to the most abstracted of our reality: death.

beneath all of this though, if that was too much or too little, is a very very competent immersive sim. the care here comes across in the numerous ways you can approach the missions, on top of secrets in maps, weapons and gear. very viable to go brain empty and enjoy the vibes.

no rating

old "tactical" fps-inspired speed game (5 stars) disguising itself as--wearing the rotten skin of--a lame BITING absurdist-melancholic anti-capitalist satire only redeemed by its comedic flair (3 stars maximum). ultimately very gay; im sure the Themes of this game are novel to many but to me it's just grating and tiring to hear about how crapitalism bad (however sophisticated the way it is said; however idiosyncratic its influences) for the gorbillionth time. all the ground tread here was already tread better by swift, verhoeven et al. too mechanically engaging and atmospherically interesting to not give 5 stars but i will likely [love-]hate this game even more if it becomes anything close to a trendsetter for indies, especially since they're almost certainly going to be less funny and less intelligent. i'm just not very interested in your trite politics, sorry!

The best example of "video games as art" from at least the past decade.

This game is pure outsider art, actively hostile to the player and wallowing in complete disregard for conventional gameplay mechanics. Will you hate it? Probably. Will it give you a headache? Almost certainly. That's all part of the Experience. Learn to enjoy it.

If not, I dunno, rate it a half star on here like a dumbass. Just know that everyone is laughing at you.