something about revisiting this made me really grossly emotional. i listened to this ost on a loop for ages before i ever even had the chance to play the game (when it dropped on the ps3 store, cant remember what year that was), so the soundtrack registers more in my mind as one of the definitive shibuya-kei EPs that happens to have a game associated with it. i remember when i finally got to play the game one of the first things i did was put all the CDs my musician friends had made and sent me into my ps3 to play along with their music. this time around i'm able to burn and play my own music the same way.

i guess the song is called overflowing emotions for a reason. thanks vibri <3

"As for military or state violence, I feel like that’s the purest crystallization of a type of legalized murderlust. It’s so completely farcical in the way the stated purposes (defense, security, etc.) differ from the actual outcomes. It’s a libidinal death cult with a serious bureaucratic veneer. The scene that it sets for our everyday life interests me. It’s like an ever-present background radiation of evil." - Ville Kallio in an interview you can read Here

I wrote a sort of strange poem about this game Here you can read. This was during that period of time when a lot of people were doing reviews as poems and I thought they were mostly lyrical and quite bad because it was all based on rhyming or strict meters, which is totally fine. I've created a controversy around myself of being judgemental of other peoples writing, but if you're going to practice and even do it poorly, you might as well do it here. Especially with comments off so people don't bug you. The reason I was only ever annoyed with it to begin with was anger management issues as a result of binge drinking and also overusing the site too much at the time, both things I've gotten a lot better about. Recently about a week ago I finally came to terms to myself as somebody who has in a very real sense been battling alcohol addiction for a long time, admitted to myself and to my real life community I actually struggle with alcoholism, and slowly taking steps towards self betterment and eventual sobriety there. So I want to somberly apologize for the hostile and standoffish precedent I created around me in relationship to that here, even though we are a while out from the last time I stepped on anybodies toes here.

This may be a strange note to start a review of Cruelty Squad (2021) on, but its a necessary one for a few reasons. The first is that to give off the impression I'm a detached observer merely 'peering into' the text from above, as some figure of authority goes against one of the main things the text is actually 'about'. Several times the established person running an organization of authority in cruelty squad blurb at you, in funny memetic ways that illustrate to you that they do not actually have their shit together, and are using their social authority to disguise that fact.

"I've been getting really into "hell". Both as a mindset and as something to strive for in an organisational sense."

"I'm the most powerful person in this room. I control this situation. Everyone's dancing to my tune..."

"I have thousands of followers. They say im blacksuppositoried and debased."

Some of us that are in charge of something think exactly like this. Anybody who has run their own discord or had a 'social media presence' definitely has this 'toying' psychology baked in deep. Occasionally this 'decisionality' is thrust onto you, for instance by making a semi successful game, the creator of Cruelty Squad, Ville Kallio, has opened a portal for themselves they cant close. They are now the 'center' of something, and probably had some of these same issues in the physical art community of being a 'worship statue'. They even admitted to this in the interview I quoted at the beginning.

"Sacrificing your friends to develop your CEO mindset so you can finally ascend to primordial-financial godhood. I feel like these things have sort of leaked into my own life, as I had to start a business due to the success of the game. I was reading Goethe’s Faust and it made me feel like I’ve accidentally made some sort of infernal pact at some point during development, which resulted in all of this. "

Problem is, if you identify with this feeling too much, you start thinking of yourself as a 'moderator of thought' and begin to think in ways the prior quotes from the game show. We have to ask ourselves, how is this way of thinking any different from the weird misogynist Pick Up Artistry thinking that these people don't 'deserve' your glory and should actually bow down to you? How easily can we divorce the world of middle management from larger systems of violence? Rather than using this power as a pure commercial toolset, Ville in the discord server for the game made it incredibly clear that transphobia will not be tolerated. You have to frontload yourself like that or you do completely self isolate and go CEO mindset. I could theoretically ditch all my friends tomorrow into a toxic sludge pit, alienate myself and start working on my Grindset and get a bunch of people to worship my every word. Make one of those stupid fucking paid to use discords. Pimp my patreon out constantly. Treat my connections with people in terms of a career path and not just people I like. Sometimes people say I'm one of the best writers on here and it freaks me the fuck out. It freaks me out that I self gloating something to that effect a few times to. The internet normalized all of these more primal urges to Control the world of violence around you. It's fucked. I mean for instance if you use the internet long enough you stop referring to other people as people, you start calling them 'randoms'. It's ok to be mad at commenters and guess their IQ levels when they even slightly annoy you or get on your nerves. It's ok to get so angry with people for doing something you don't like and letting your friends hang them out to dry for it publicly. It's ok to antagonize people with kindness just because they were mean to you once. Look I got the damn comments off in here. That's not because I'm afraid of you, its because I'm afraid of myself dude. I've done all of this stuff before and seen others do it on here. It's embarrassing.

There's this frustrating issue in videogame discourse in which, in order to try and self justify our time to ourselves, we talk about games as 'cultural objects' rather than effective experiences that change our way of viewing things. Most of this is the result of the 'video essay' style catching off like commercial wildfire, and thus imparting some sense of commercial value to the idea that you can 'speak around' videogames as literary texts. I believe the other big result of that is that we all sort of learned from having to undo the 'videogames as vehicles to violence' argument for a long time (and sometimes still do) that, crucially the connection between play and real life behaviors is thin. Gamers went through this moment where they had to learn about cultivation theory as much as they could to ward this stuff off but the problem is that by doing that we sort of nullified ourselves from getting into any sort of public political wanting. This desire to absolutely affirm that a game cant cause real life violence caused us to neuter our own discourse before it could really grow. We are just passive soyjacks playing with blocks in the cornor. We fucking infantalized ourselves through self domestication.

So that's part of the problem. The other part then is to try and get away from this we dont talk about this art form as 'things we learned' partially because learning from art is cringe, learn from academic Journals you room temp IQ having freak. When we do interpret a game text, we will interpret both the front and the back to the point it spoils the magic for others. For instance every video I've seen on Cruelty Squad that takes the work seriously can't help themselves but 'compare' the endings and try to analyze a discreet meaning from them. The game is set up like an ARG where the further you slip in the weirder you learn the world is (for instance a creation myth people believe in that own homes is literally about owning a home). It makes sense, because we were all taught to do this as a book report in school and shit, but it doesn't always translate cleanly to games. Videogames are a continuous act function you experience and push through. It's not like a movie where you merely just 'watch'. There's a reason why one of the most enjoyed novels in game enthusiast (watch out with that term buddy, Gamergate will start knocking on your door) peoples favourite book is House of Leaves, its because its a book you physically travel through, have you fight with to keep reading. You have to hold it sideways, sometimes you have to warp a few pages backwards for a bit. Videogames as narratives, even continuous ones and simple, are more like Choose Your Own Adventure novels, and you so don't see people asking you to analyze those right.

So it ends up putting Cruelty Squad in this awkward and frusterating temporal space, where on the one hand you really want to dig into the niche leftism that Cruelty Squad is existing. Where it pokes fun at stuff like veganism being connected to purity culture issues for instance. But you can't do that without everyone being on the 'same page' about it first and so now you have to back up and address that problem first. The lore of Cruelty Squad being so dense that you want to see somebody break into the mechanics of the story and figure out who the 'real villian' of the mystery is. But since we cant really get into all that without looking psychotic and freaky we just gleefully poke at each other to make the first move. Yet, art isn't about a 'really good conversation' or solving the damn mystery for everyone though. Art is an experience that usually wants to tell you stuff and make you reshape your world a little. I didn't get the other endings of cruelty squad because I'm not that obsessed with the game in that way. The internet can slowly teach you that people like me are normies and shouldn't open their mouths until they 'really beat it'. I know about the fucking Nick Land and Bataille references ok, I read a bit of these people but we dont need to pose as philosophers or completionists to talk about art and the world.

Cruelty Squads level Androgen Assault made me rethink the way I consider the police and the fascism associated with it. None of the police talk to you, they instantly fight you, but you learn throughout that level that the place is a horrifying cult with people testing on each other and the prisoners to Absurd limits. This is blunt and flagrant, your briefing even says that Magnus, head of the narcotics department, is testing on people and making shit difficult for everyone. It's a hard and uncomfortable level. The hallways are way too long. Everyone is running in slow motion. It made me rethink about the police as basically a grooming organization for people lost in their early life. They slowly teach people to repress everything, be violent, and fuck peoples lives up. That doesn't happen overnight, and its only upheld by baking people in the culture of fear and adult bullying. I hate these macho pricks, but they aren't some 'visceral' decision, they are a chemical nightmare scenario. The building for a precinct in the town I live has a few different things.

1. A viewable office from the street: So I saw what the inside of one of these guys offices looks like and its very drab and depressing

2. A plaque on the side dedicated to a confederate doctor

3. A giant fucking face construction on the side of the building, very similar to The headquarters of Mussolini's Italian Fascist Party (1934)

I thought about that stuff as I was working with a fucking horrible hangover today. I saw a bald pig on my way home from work near the bus starting some scene. I know now that this is a lifestyle the mother fucker was tricked into, and I learned it from a game, non verbally. I still hate the dude and would resist him but he was 'constructed', he doesn't have some sort of primal genetic code that made him join the Cop Cult. He's not some sort of low T brainlet normie NPC like the internet tries to convince me of. Just as much as women aren't fucking 'femoids' or any of this greasy internet dungeon speak. A lot of the internet sort of teaches you to dehumanize people like this, and not see where the violence is coming from. It's something you have to sort of unlearn one day at a time. Cruelty Squad is willing to meet you there. Today I this all hit me and I realized I don't want to moderate my fucking friends and stepped down from running a discord as a big attention seeking thing. I can't run around with a chip on my shoulder like that. There's a lot of great levels in Cruelty Squad that reillustrate facts like this, home ownership, office culture, reconstructing a scene of violence and blithe anxiety in a new way. That's art. Thats life. That's why I reccomend this fucking game.

Everyday is actually a battle, but until I die I will actually wake up and fight that battle till I'm snuffed out for good.

Maudlin Clown Companion

Edit: After playing the game for about a week or two up to gold stake difficulty and unlocking all the cards and vouchers, I have decided it's mediocre and underwhelming. Most of the problem is found in a lack of options in the shop. The demo had us go to ante 5 with 2 options and this worked. The full release has us go to ante 10 with still only 2 options. It feels in retrospect outclassed even by it's biggest inspiration luck be a landlord. It also only has 1 song which gets extremely repetitive. Uncomfortably top close to the appeal of casino flow states in that sense. On top of this the alternative decks force play styles like flush builds or going for chips, unlike the first 2 decks, this makes most of the game a novelty. Longer thoughts from earlier on below but can't in good conscious reccomend this.


I've won 8 different times now over the course of about 25 hours with a few different starter decks. For a roguelite thats not too often but that on its own is not a knock. People will play Nethack for 100 hours without a single win. It's about what you do in a game that matters. The decision making and that overall goal. In a game like Astrea or Nethack these goals are discreet yet ambitious, killing a big heart after going through complicated dice or ascending after dealing with a litany of confusing combat engagements.

Balatro is about taking a 52 card poker deck and using the hands you're given to make points off a sheet to eventually win. When you do win the celebration is mild and unsatifying and it asks you if you want to play endless mode immediately. In one of the early dev builds there was a simple story where the joker that sets the game up and jeers you in the meantime, setting up some fairly simple motivational stakes to beat the asshole joker. That was removed from the finished build, leaving no core motivation to play besides winning for its own sake.

The game is a simple maths strategy game, after you beat a round you are entered into a shop with an option to choose between 2 different cards to buy in the shop and a few 'booster packs' below. All the sounds are satisfying but this is where the game runs into its main issue. The main cards, the jokers, only have 2 options to buy between and especially as you unlock more of the pool that pool becomes flooded with useless stuff. Tarot cards you cant use, planet cards that dont help, jokers with no multipliers, etc. This leads to the fundamental problem of the game: None of the runs feel special unless you have really curated your deck somehow or you have 'won' that particular round. You're just walking into a shop hoping it feeds you what you want (usually early on its mult jokers). If you can get out of the early game then you have plenty of time to decide in the midgame but often, you wont. I've often lost before the end of the first 'boss blind' or in other words the third 'fight'. You only have 2 options, buy from shop or skip a blind. Even if you skip a blind you have to play the next round which expects more points so it isnt usually reccomended. So the meta usually ends up being playing rounds and hoping the shop has useful things. There's a 5$ reroll button but usually it only makes sense to use that when you're desperate. Leaving you with only making a few choices until the mid to end game.

So eventually the game turns into an issue of restarting for a good opener, whether or not you restart you play the opener through. Because the combat engagements are so abstracted there's no feeling like in an ascii roguelike that an early failure is amusing in its own right. You don't fall off a horse and instantly die, or get consumed by a random slime because you forgot to equip your weapon, you just lose to a poker table screen. In my view the input variance was just made too high with a lack of stakes and a fairly simple opening meta to follow (play the first three rounds clean unless you see a multiplier joker).

Finally, the metaprogression unlocks just end up sullying the shop pool, so the game on a base level gets more difficult to play than you started only as a result of input varience increasing. In a world where games like Astrea, Wildfrost, Desktop Dungeons, Griftlands, and Cobalt Core exists, Balatro ends up feeling too simple and yet too high varience to be reccomendable. It's a time sink roguelite, something to toy around with in the background in hopes of a next win. The early game is very satisfying to play but as the shop pool clogs up and the hedonic treadmill hits in you can't help but think you should probably be doing something else. This focus on refining difficulty to this point along with high varience reminds me of how Binding of Isaac played out. At first it was narratively focused, a story of a traumatized kid running through the basement in tears, playing pretend. Eventually that game was turned into an RNG fiesta and made so difficult and took away most of the scaling options through variance that even for most players the ability to win became way too difficult. I feel like Balatro is learning the wrong lessons from late Isaac in this sense. Not every player needs a perfect narrative to anchor their play experience, but the difficulty spike with a lack of early game options just turns the whole game into a grinding treadmill. Mind you this is a criticism coming from somebody who has some of the rarest achievements in the game at the moment, including finding a legendary Joker, so I have actually played the game I'm not just trying to be difficult for no reason.

It's a shame because I was looking forward to balatro but I think while it will be a flash in the pan for a while it won't ultimately stand up to the test of time. Unlike something like Vampire Survivors its not egregious, because runs arent strictly stuck to a time limit you have to sit through, nor is it an eye sore, nor is it entirely without decision making. Yet, the difficulty being as high as it is, without any narrative amusement for failed runs, means that it becomes mind numbing repetition to play. You end up playing just to win to unlock the next meta progression unlock (which can all be unlocked from the menu anyway if you don't care about achievements thus nullifying any goal other than 'win'). The appeal of the game only lasts for the first dozen unlocks and first win and becomes more or less busywork after that point. I will probably get 100% but I'll remember my experiences with it in a year far less fondly than Colbalt Core and I think on some level a game you can feel happy reminiscing about matters a lot more.

This was just okay, but videos and such talking about it led me to expect something better. The first 15 minutes are pretty damn fun, but it's kind of just the same thing for the whole runtime. It gets absurdly hard and unfair very quickly too, with enemies frequently swarming you in a way that only provides nearly frame perfect escapes.

The controls are a bit weird, probably worked better on the arcade version, but rather than aiming with the d-pad you have each button correspond to a direction to shoot in, with diagonals working by pressing two at the same time. It's kind of wonky using a keyboard, but I don't think it seems much better with a controller (at least not the diagonals). Not that I'll play it again to find out. It may be actually pretty close to a decent game, but man it is really exhausting.

Low opinion here not because I'm some NEET-phobic conservative but because nameless (and, curiously, genderless) protagonists dating people as a way of 'knowing' grosses me out. There's a lot about how standardized this specific format of short RENPY dategame has become to the point that ends up making games like Milk Outside and Doki Literature Club seem like these astounding subversions outliers to the genre. However to whatever extent that can even said to be true, it would mostly be because short 1 night date Visual Novels are almost at odds with themselves. Why does the nameless protagonist named 'you' go on the date. Why depict this world with intense visual depth but have a faceless dissociated protagonist?

Your protagonist can constantly call her cute, its the only compliment really on their mind, but how dissociated it felt when the girl said 'so are you'. Obviously the idea is that the bland questioning of your character and ease with which they can be positioned as the 'inquirer' is so that its easy for the reader to place themselves into the text, but is this really even working anymore? Haven't we broken away from this bland self insert protagonist as a people like a decade ago?

To illustrate why this problem effects the mechanics, let me take a moment and analyze one of the decisions you make in the game. At one point Kara expresses about how 'fucking based' it is to be a NEET, and you're offered 3 responses:
1. It is?
2. Definitely Based
3. Whats a NEET

The issue is that option 2 and 3 openly contradict each other in terms of the internal knowledge of the player character. Either they know what a NEET is and concur, or they don't know what it is. But the knowledge of one should rule out the other, these options are presupposed based on how aware the player behind the screen wants their player character to be. This means that the player character knowledge is not fixed in place. So either we live in a world where the player character knows what a NEET is but pretends they dont, or they don't know what it is and pretend they do. In either situation the character, if not percieved as a 1 playthrough stand in for the player is being a duplicitous snake. However the innocuous plausible deniability and wish fulfillment doesn't question this contradiction or bring it up. The player unimersed in the experience though sees it right away, and these contradictions in option sections remain for the entirety of the experience.

While there's an obvious criticism to be made about how this flux in player knowledge is immersion breaking, its not the only issue. The other problem is that it limits the scope of player choice to be so obvious that it reduces any impact out of choosing at all. The choice is pretty much made for you on first play based on how much you already know and feel about the topic of NEETism or how much you want to pretend you want to know. There's no fundamental diversion in questioning her in one option or agreeing with her in another, its all in the name of trying to shmooze her at the end of the day. Yet almost all the choices in this game are fundamentally questions based on knowing. Now obviously you can still play with a nameless 'knowledge flux' character like this but their status within dating games should not be so assumed. This is a function that works better for an edutainment game like Tomato Clinic. Or a therapeutic inquiry like with Milk Outside a Bag. But in games based around the idea of dating it registers the experience as canned and phoned in, your player character is a nothing so actually getting more intimate means nothing.

The 'edutainment' consideration is being teased at through a cultural relationship obviously, but does so to an extent that is almost distracting. Trying to mix the aspects of learning with the fiction of intimacy can and often does threaten to undermine the former in advance of the latter. It's very telling that some peoples ideas of the best way of connecting to a cultural frame or reinforcing their own is through doting on and trying to kiss women. Even Don Juan didn't go that far.

A lot of the pace of the game itself and decisions you make feel underwritten. This really feels like a 1st draft that wasn't properly proofread. At some point if you decide to order pizza with Kara, she states that she only prefers grilled chicken on pizza and can't stand pepperoni, indicating that the pizza you would order would have grilled chicken on it. However when it shows up she boldly announces that she went on a whim and tried for half cheese half pepperoni instead. This is far from the only writing goofup, there's one where Kara says you can sit down wherever you'd like and then you just continuing standing there and ask if you can sit down somewhere like 10 minutes later. It's hard to come up with some sort of textual justification for this, I think this is just the result of being underwritten as a lot of this genre tends to be and trying to offer you as many tensions as possible only to relieve them through player choice. It's fine, my character can express autonomy sometimes. I think that it's only a bug to critical readers though, the whole point is to captivate readership of people who wouldn't think twice so how poorly written most of these sort of dating storygames tend to be might be part of the point. These are so easy to make that quality doesn't matter much at all.

The game also registers to me as a little creepy I think. You can demand certain actions out of her like to clean her room or kiss you. And she does turn you down sometimes, but the actual framing itself of the act as an overt demand makes me really uncomfortable. This is another aspect with which it becomes part of a mechanical limitation of the RENPY software itself, you could offer a variety of longer choices where your character would say more things so you can fully follow if its a choice you want to make, but the limitation of the renpy dialogue box popups mean that any choice longer than a sentence would spam the screen with an overwhelming amount of words from which you'd only be able to choose one making such a venture unwieldy. Compare this to Twine, where the options are all filled as text at the bottom of the screen and the distinction is as different as night and day. Renpy Visual Novels I would argue just don't functionally work for the aspects of dating. Not to mention that the initial date is set up by her cousin who 'sees her more as a sister'. I don't know, it's a piece of fiction so I can't think of a more leering and opportunistic starting point for the story.

Finally is the object of the text herself, Kara, a genuinely pathetic E-Girl who seems to be shy but indicates no issues ever speaking to you. An internet otaku and gun nut with some clear indications of autistic neurodivergence. This is all solid stuff for a character study, issues is most of her identity seems to come out of a pride for having a NEET lifestyle (which doesn't even map onto the mild shame most NEETs actually have) and her overt elitism over her own hobbies. She calls working people 'wagies', she obsesses over the distinction between weebs and otaku so she can write off shonen anime only to give basic unprofound plot synopsis of the slice of life stuff she watches. She reminds me of a defanged version of Tomoko from Watamote. Except unlike how anthematic Kara is, Tomoko's story is one of constant struggle. Everything here is almost too smooth. It feels like the fact she doesn't need to even try and learn about you but simply exist in front of you to be getting in the way of her own motivations to learn to date. Being barely presentable to another human is just another hobby, it's not a sign of improvement at all no matter how much she insists to you towards the end is it. Beyond that I find her general elitism and obsessive use of l33tspeak to be ineffective in imbuing charm, authenticity, or a strong connection to the main character.

I also had some pretty severe issues with the lack of openess about the characters gender presentation. There's several obvious clues to the fact Kara is supposed to be trans, the Blajah and shirt in particular being 2 of the largest cultural indicators. But neither the character nor the creator wants to confirm the gender of the character as trans or cis. Which would be fine, except most people are going to just assume the character is a cis woman. It's hard not to explain this in a way that doesn't come off as gatekeeping but Blahaj posting is a largely established trans icon. Recently there's been a lot of cloutchasing ciswomen who take the iconography of trans women and play into them with an included 'transition timeline' joke as well. Kara has her own ambiguous version of this tweeted by the dev. Even assuming the best intent here, that this is a stealth trans character written for the purposes of normalizing trans women. I feel like by writing the story through such a leering mode, and by not having any overt mention of the transness of the character it only further divorces away from the potential awareness and respect cis people would have. Furthermore most trans people have lived a life of tribulation and necessary perseverance, like protrayed by Celeste. So even if the author did reveal the character was trans, it would not be a wholely useful reference point for understanding the trans experience. The fact this is instead the text plays into the reterritorialization of trans interests and subcultures as cis makes me pretty upset, so I thought I should at least do my do diligence in expressing that. The fact of the matter is some people are going to read this and be confounded I'd even call Blahaj such a clear indication of being trans, which shows the degree to which our icon and symbols are already being pillaged from us by people who don't care about us at all.

It's generic RENPY dating trash, but I figured that while the oven is hot I should pick a relatively popular one for expressing my grievances. The mixed to positive reception this game received while remembering how much overt mockery Milk Outside did is starting to piss me off, so I guess I'll just end it here to prevent myself from going on some sort of tirade.