i love this game but the game doesn’t love me back, making me love it even more

worst part is, i can’t even put into words why i like it so much

an abusive relationship

Yeah, no. This is not a good game. The visual aesthetic is amazing, and the concept is cool, but the mechanics are pretty trashy. Extremely weak and flighty guns that have no weight behind them, combined with generally simple level design and unintuitive controls.

I love me some weird, dystopic, and artsy-fartsy games. But the game actually needs to be good for me to commit. This game is all substance; it's all meat and no veg. It's gleeful in how post-modern it is with its presentation, but the actual game under the hood is just drab.

This is awesome as an art project. It's lame as a game. This is insanely overrated. It's not offensively bad, but it's certainly not a fun experience unless you already have a long, cylindrical object up your butt.

Only played the first two levels. It's not what I expected; tactical and precise. Pizza-and-puke-core, that Cartoon Network stank that the internet likes. The economics are abrasive. Scrounging a tiny profit and losing it to a nonsense stock market.

The other reviews are funny, unbothered. Honestly being in debt IRL makes this a little less entertaining. To roil in that pain and express the grossness of it all. I get it on a level I don't want to, like other art. Probably won't be picking it up again.

I think people who tout this as an "immersive sim" have done a significantly more damage than the game's hideous art style itself. Not every game that mixes stealth with open-ended mission design is an immersive sim and Cruelty Squad is a prime example of that - it's a miserable experience if you try to approach this like other immersive sim! But... if you throw that whole idea outside of the window and don't try to approach it as immersive sim, but just a mix of a shooter and stealth game, where you are hired to eliminate targets and then try to figure out what works and what doesn't for each mission, when stop carrying about whatever enemies are onto you and you stop carrying about not abusing their simplistic AI - then the game becomes actually very enjoyable and satisfying to play. And then its "shitpost" ideas also start fitting significantly better to the entier concept of the game... and only then you get hooked on the idea of trying to see what else the game is hiding and replaying levels to make later levels easier for yourself.

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.