It's easy to take a glance at Cruelty Squad's unpleasant artstyle and dismiss it for being obvious and unsubtle about its intent, when most of critical praise seemingly rests on its ability to create a playable shitpost deep fried meme that bluntly satirizes the sewer corporate modern age we live in and not much else inbetween. That however would be understating the talent and craft that is required to make such effective "heavy handed" art like Cruelty Squad.

Baffling to realize that this was Ville Kallio's first shot at videogames, because he displays such a strong understanding of the medium and utilizes so much of its strengths in ways that no other developers have really tapped into to create what I can only describe as a arthouse masterpiece of counter intuitive art and game design. Our infactuation with cyberpunk dystopia has created such pleasing worlds to look at in all of fiction that the only thing Cruelty Squad had to do was present the existential nightmare we already live in it its true colors. Making a house the most expensive item that gates you from the rest of the game's content might come across as portentous hassle for the player and an easy cheap jab at Capitalism™, but it doesn't make its statement any less truer and effective.

Getting accustomed to Cruelty Squad vomit inducing textures ends up becoming an inevitability, and the game beneath it surprisingly reveals enough enticing complexity and kinesthetic gratification that will distract you from the uglyness of it all. DNA taken straight out of Quake make traversal in Cruelty Squad's industrial purgatory oddly satisfying and addicting to exploit as you discover there is fun in retrying missions to find new secrets in the open ended maze like levels and speedunning CEO and landlord assassinations, raking in the dough to invest and buy more expensive game changing implants that further blur the line between man and biomachine monstrosity. Sooner than expected, you end up forgetting the garish mismatched colors and low poly disorienting textures that assault your senses, and Cruelty Squad ends up becoming just another game to master like all the others that came before it.

Were this any other game, I would be taking down a couple of points for it losing its luster after the initial hours, but Cruelty Squad losing its repulsiveness over time just ends up reinforcing its message that much more. In the same way that Cruelty Squad visualizes what violent videogames must look like to our parents, it displays for a brief moment the reality and future humanity has devised for itself, as if putting on the They Live glasses for the first time. But eventually we get used to it. And we forget, we comply, we find pleasure in it. Luckily we get the chance once in a while to experience something like Cruelty Squad to remind us that we are all just meat sacks ticking up and down on a graph, selling ourselves short to the highest bidder.

PS: The easiest method I found out to make quick money in Cruelty Squad was to kill Elon Musk's personification over and over again and betting on the stock market right after. Something very poignant and cathartic about that. Don't tank my crypto next time, asshole.

SWAT 5 but instead of copaganda its a Francis Bacon painting with a biopunk filter. This shit is the most arresting video game I've played since...I don't know when. I really hate to throw this in the 'needs a write-up' pile but there's so much to gush about here. The instant quotables ("I've been getting really into "hell". Both as a mindset and as something to strive for, in an organizational sense."), that OST, the gunplay that perfectly emulates the old skool tacticool FPS games, the level design, the secrets (did you know there's an additional hard mode that has rare enemies, new sections, & additional targets?!), the implants, the cryptic but emotionally evocative storytelling, both the LIFE and the Entrapment cutscenes, and just the whole indescribable aesthetic of the game. I've seen and experienced a lot of media that takes comfort in being dark, disdainful, and dreary, and indeed have the same emotional arc as this, but none do it with the quite the same balance of levity, futility, mania and malice like Cruelty Squad does.

Edit: So I saw that the dev retweeted this excellent video review of the game, which touches upon the actual themes of this game, which is something I neglected to mention in my gushing here.

I'm not a big Bataille fan, but this game inspired me to take a second look at his work, particularly the Accursed Share, and I'm finding his words increasingly compelling. There's something so...accurate about the way Bataille describes capitalistic societies as being excessive growth & energy without any tension release. The "growth" of Capital, and the resulting inequality, is like an endless edging session that has turned the temporary delay of gratification into an eternal permanence of longing, a longing of gratification that is never coming (haha penis). Gone are the days of the potlach, Bataille notes, in which inequality was solved in a cathartic day of gift-giving and redistribution ( and maybe some orgies ;) ); what we have instead in capitalistic societies is that the wealth is concentrated into luxuries, with redistribution being only done "as necessary" through welfare. The excess & inequality is entrenched in the capitalistic system.

What gives me hope, and what gave Bataille hope, and what ultimately Cruelty Squad is hoping for, is that the growth will overflow at some point. A potlach is just a sexier, voluntary revolution--one of the capital P Points of The Accursed Share is that the excess growth in any economy must be dealt with; the problem with capitalistic societies is that the recursive spending on luxury and the restrictive spending on welfare isn't really dealing with the issue of growth. The excess growth, if never dealt with, will spawn its own revolutionary growth that'll find itself amongst society's most spited and downtrodden. For Bataille (and for me), this was American Descendants of Slavery; for Cruelty Squad, it's the gig worker. It's not just some 'le random xd' moment that Cruelty Squad Man begins his journey waking up from a depression nap in his small weak-ass apartment; it's recognition that the revolution will find its strongest energy in the depressed, the marginalized, the unlucky, and the unloved. The final text of Cruelty Squad is a quote from Bataille emphasizing the inevitability of this revolutionary energy; this era will collapse or it will burst, whichever comes first.

And after that?

G O L D E N A G E

this game is full of pretty things.
this game is full of pointless things.
this game delivers a powerful story.
this game delivers 80% of it's story and themes in less than an hour.
this game has a lot of content.
this game took me 30 hours.
this game has two halves, one of them is very cool.
this game has two halves, one of them is very boring.

two halves, just like omori
idk haven't played it