This game is metal as hell.

On paper this should be something you’ve already seen, but in execution it isn’t like anything you’ve seen. Blowing up zombies with dynamite, blasting cultists with a double-barrel shotgun, eating hearts to heal instead of medpacks, everything in this game feels equal parts edgy and extremely fun. The main character, Caleb, is betrayed by the god he worships and comes back to life to get his revenge and after killing him, the words spoken from his mouth are “Good, bad… I’m the guy with the gun” and in the cutscene that plays second after he blasts a poorly modeled dude (the cutscenes in this game are something) with the tommy gun one-handed and just leaves without saying a single word like he didn’t just kill a demonic god.

Even if it’s really tough, the enjoyment I get from this game is simply unmatched. The variety in the arsenal is quite interesting, instead of a pistol as a one of the first guns you get (the actual first gun you get is a pitchfork), they give you a flare gun, which is fine to take out enemies one by one, but has a secondary fire that can take out a bunch of enemies by setting them on fire at the cost of like 6 flare ammo, but the gun you’ll be using the most is the sawn-off shotgun. A really, really powerful shotgun. If there’s one word to describe the arsenal in this game, it is powerful. Not just the shotgun is powerful, but also the dynamite - blowing stuff up is powerful, and you’ll be doing that A LOT, it’s even necessary to progress in certain moments so get used to it -, and the rocket launcher sorry, the NAPALM launcher, which not only acts as a normal rocket launcher but can also put on fire nearby enemies due to splash damage, and even the tommy gun. If there’s one thing Blood has, it’s that it makes justice the word “power fantasy”.

It’s no secret that First Person Shooters have always been inspired by cinema. Duke Nukem is basically an Arnold Schwarzenegger knock-off. Blood is inspired by horror and gorefest movies. Every enemy has like two or three, probably more, different ways to die, but all of them can be blown up into pieces. Zombies’ heads fall off and you can kick them a soccer ball. While Caleb might not be the most memorable FPS character - although he's still a total badass -, Blood is a really memorable game. I would say that “it is great because it just wants you to have fun”, but basically every other game from that era just wanted you to have fun, ESPECIALLY First Person Shooters. What makes this game good is not what it wants but what it does, and what Blood does is putting a bunch of cultists and zombies gathered together in an enclosed space so you can use the alt fire of the spray can (did I mention there’s a makeshift flamethrower?) and watch all of them burn. At a time when videogames were at the center of discussion for allegedly promoting violence and satanism, Blood provides just that and goes full-on with it.

The levels look more like actual places and seem to be interconnected, at least in the first chapter, so there’s some kind of continuity to it, it feels like some kind of progress is being made. Unlike Duke Nukem 3D, in which levels consisted of a bunch of arenas that kind of resemble real life places but lack any continuity from one to another, here in the first chapter you wake up in a grave next to a chapel and the you blow up a hole in a wall that gets you to a train station in which you get on a train and the next level is in the Phantom Express and then you crash the train and now you’re at Dark Carnival, and there’s a secret level that takes you to the House of Horrors. It feels like you’re going somewhere, like progress is being made, even if the story isn't that important. This is what I like the most about the Cryptic Passage expansion, the continuity between levels. At the start of each level, most of the time, and not just on Cryptic Passage, you can turn around and see the place you just came from, and at the end of some levels you can even see the place you’re going. The level of detail in every level helps the sense of place. I mean, the devil is in the details, so…

Everything in this game screams personality. From the little nods to horror/slasher/B movies to the speed of the combat. Even if some of the later levels don’t live up to the greatness of the first episode, as well as some abrupt difficulty spikes - the balance is sometimes pretty weird, I had certain situations in which I’d round a corner to be greeted by a shotgun blast to the face I had no way of predicting. The alt fire of the dynamite makes it a timed explosive so it bounces on walls, you even have proximity and remote dynamite, but the correct way to use them is to throw them around a corner full of enemies you already know they’re there, but for that you have to see them before them see you so most of the time these options are useless and it’s best to roll with it, shotgun blast included. That is, unless the game expects me to quick-save quick-load every corner, in which scenario the tension and pace of the combat are gone -, it is still fun to blow up with dynamite everything that moves.

At the risk of sounding like an edgy teenager, I’ll say that gorefest movies or games are usually not my cup of tea when they're all about the gore and nothing else, but I can’t help it, Blood is just too goddamn fun.

Also, I forgot to mention that enemies like the zombie, the cultist, and probably some more are pixelated sprites of (or were modeled after) modified dolls/toys. Some other games did similar stuff; Human enemies in Rise of the Triad: Dark War were sprites of real people in costumes, you can find some recorded footage of the making of around the web. This kind of stuff is always super cool to see and brings an extra charm that games nowadays can't allow themselves to have.

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.