Written by Grady Fiorio
Original Publishing Date: December 9th, 2022
Rating 5/5
Almost as good as Gorbino's Quest.
What is value? Value is assumed. The only difference between a $1 bill and a $100 is a little drawing of some old guy on the front. As a society, we have collectively agreed that there is a fixed value difference, but it's all perceived. If one day we all decided that $1 bills were going to be worth $100 and $100 bills were worth nothing, then the value proposition would change. Society determines value, not some arbitrary drawing. But what about human life? Is life determined by the same rules of the dollar? Surely, we must be different. No, we aren't. It's the fucked up reality we live in, but it's reality nonetheless. Whether you slave away at a 9 to 5, or literally slave away at an Elon Musk cobalt mine, in the eyes of those above us, our lives are a commodity, commodities to be bought, sold, and traded. Now I'm not some kind of super socialist anti-capitalist, but the piss jugs that decorate the floors of Amazon "fulfillment centers" aren't exactly giving rave reviews to the American Dream. So by this point, you're probably thinking "Jeez, this is all kind of harsh. What the hell does this have to do with a video game?". Well friend, buckle up...
Cruelty Squad is the cyberpunk, hitman, eye bleach, nightmare, video game developed by Finnish one-man band game developer Ville Kallio, aka Consumer Softproducts. The game has recently become somewhat of an underground hit. Initially gaining attention for its graphics that resemble a sandpaper eyewash, Cruelty Squad has revealed itself to the gaming community as a critical deconstruction of modern life and economics, layered under a mountain of irony and antidepressants. But enough of me flaunting my thesaurus, what is Cruelty Squad? On the surface, it's pretty simple. You're a hitman working for the Cruelty Squad, a high-end "security" service that takes assassination contracts from the highest bidder. Your handler assigns you a contract, you go in, kill the target, and get out. But sure, that's how you play Cruelty Squad, but that's not what Cruelty Squad is about. Under its LSD-infused surface, Cruelty Squad hides a much darker truth, acting more like a mirror and a dark fantasy. Cruelty Squad is about the commodification and devaluing of human life. In the world of Cruelty Squad, human life has become valueless. We are products to be bought, sold, traded, and shared. This is personified literally by the in-game human organ stock market. We don't have life expectancies, we have market caps. Even the game's nameless protagonist isn't fully alive. He's half dead, with his remaining body propped up by synthetic electronics. If the player dies in-game, the Cruelty Squad takes a cut of his paycheck to revive his lifeless corpse, so he can hunt down another dollar. Everything in the world of Cruelty Squad is a means to an end. Doesn't it just sound lovely?
"I've been getting really into 'hell'. Both as a mindset and as something to strive for, in an organizational sense." - In-game CEO
Purely as a game, Cruelty Squad is fantastic. It's tightly packed with dense levels full of secrets, a varied selection of weapons and cybernetics, alternate endings, and a set of mechanics that only get deeper the more you experiment. Each mission is brutally difficult but extremely rewarding. The game is designed to be exploited and speedrun, creating an experience that is endlessly replayable. Consumer Softproducts has also done an excellent job of intertwining the gameplay and narrative in a way that most other games fail. The game features the aforementioned organ stock market as well as body modifications that cause the player to become both increasingly more powerful, as well as grotesque. Every gameplay advantage requires you to sacrifice more of your humanity. How far are you willing to push to survive in a world that only sees you as a financial asset? The game even allows you to eat dead bodies to regain health, but in all its thematic glory, killing a person and eating them only grants you one point of health. It's an utterly useless mechanic from a gameplay perspective, but it conveys the message better than any cutscene could.
In Cruelty Squad ugliness is a virtue. The world is vile, the walls are made of flesh, the people are disfigured, they speak in gibberish, and the music thumps to human screams and rapidly changing beats. Every second is designed to be as oppressive as possible. But words alone can't describe Cruelty Squad's "style", so I've added the trailer below. Make it a game for yourself and see if you can stomach more than 30 seconds of it.
At the end of the day what makes Cruelty Squad especially unique is not its visual style, mission structure, or absurdist presentation, but rather how it is able to descend the player into madness without them even knowing. At one point I was purposely finding ways to harvest brains in the game’s most populated levels, so I could then sell them on the stock market and afford the coveted grappendix (an appendix that shoots out of your arm and acts as a grappling hook). Once bought, I could use the grappendix to take out more hits, make more money, and sell more brains. At first, I didn’t realize, but after spending what I can only describe as “definitely too much time“ trying to manipulate the organ stock market, I finally took a step back and saw how far deep in the rabbit hole I had fallen. Cruelty Squad is a game that wants you to become as absurd as its world, monetizing and optimizing every second for the most calculated speedruns and finically lucrative kills. It presents itself in the most unapproachable way possible so that you will eventually succumb to its level and exploit its mechanics, just like the people of its world. You become so numb to the ear-grating music and stomach-churning visuals because you’re grinding it out in a ruthless gig economy that doesn’t value human life. You either live in the madness or you don’t live at all. Sound familiar? In the words of Cruelty Squad, you’re in a “CEO Mindset”.
"When the beat drops I’m going to fucking kill myself." - In-game NPC at a nightclub
Cruelty Squad has a pretty clear stance on how it sees the structure of class. In our modern world, the true unifying divide of society is class. The haves and the have-nots. Those on top of you would like you to believe that race, gender, and political ideology define and separate us in ways that make us incompatible and completely incapable of cohabitating, but the truth is much different. If the people on the bottom squabble about petty differences, then we can't work together and see the prepackaged bullshit being spoon-fed directly to us 24 hours a day. The people on the bottom dig deeper and the people on the top get higher. It's the reason that things like private prisons owned by mega corporations exist, or why 24 hours news pedals extremism and discrimination. The idea that a ruling class treats all of us "little people" below as their personal toilet paper, isn't that new or revolutionary of a concept, but it doesn't make it any less true. It's like the video game pairing to Pasolini's Salo (Didn't think I could sneak in a Pasolini reference in there, did ya?). The world is more divided than it has ever been, yet it's also interesting that the wealthy have never had it so good. They keep us divided because together we are a threat, a threat for a better world, a world where the "every-man" isn't the rug that Jeff Bezos wipes his boots on.
"The strong decide the nature of sin." - Upper-Class NPC
Cruelty Squad ends just as dark as it begins. The game features three different endings. One main ending and two secret endings. Eternal Bliss, Life, and Death. Each ending is fairly ambiguous but these are my own personal interpretations. Spoilers ahead. In the Eternal Bliss ending, after traversing a maze-like level and beating a fairly standard video game boss fight, you are able to escape the hellish world of Cruelty Squad. However, you still remain haunted by the fact that to escape you had to lose your humanity in the process. Even in your escape, true happiness can never be achieved. The screen reads "The sun smiles at you with eternal malice.". In the Life ending, you don't escape, but rather kill a version of yourself and embrace the world's cruelty and financial exploitation. Simply put, if you can't beat em' join em'. The world may hate you, and your friends may be dead at your hands, but you played the game and "won". Can anyone blame you for it? We're you just playing the hand you were dealt? This is considered the game's cannon ending. The Death ending is the most ambiguous of the three endings but also feels the truest to the game's themes and concepts. Taking place in a level titled Trauma Loop, to "win" you must descend to the lowest bowels of the world. At the bottom, you are greeted by a glowing orb called The Cradle of Life. After standing beneath the orb, the final ending triggers, and the cutscenes plays. The game suddenly flashes random distorted images of the game's characters, followed by a series of long quotes about an endless loop of suffering. The player leads a group of people marching through what I can only imagine is hell. At this point, any amount of humanity left has been lost. You have fully embraced the "CEO Mindset". Life has become fully and utterly meaningless. You've been so consumed by the world and its ugliness that the idea of beauty as a concept does not exist in your mind. You are an animal, a demon, you are nothing. You are not a part of the world but the world itself. You are cruelty incarnate. Like the universe, hell is boundless and constantly expanding. By your wrath, everything and everyone will be engulfed in flames. No matter how hard we try to escape the world's cruelty, part of our soul is always lost in the process.
"They’ll get it all from you, sooner or later, 'cause they own this fucking place. It's a big club, and you ain’t in it!" - George Carlin
Now you're probably wondering why after describing the ugliest game imaginable, I rated it so high. It's because in all its vile presentation Cruelty Squad is not only extremely fun to play, but is thematically layered for a truly unique narrative-gameplay experience. It's an acquired taste but it's the same reason I enjoy other artistic oddities, like the music of Death Grips and the films off Gaspare Noe. It's a sensory overload of darkness but provides a layer of introspection that most art misses. Cruelty Squad is an ultra-nihilistic depiction of an emerging capitalistic society, and while I like to stay a little bit more optimistic, it's still important to see what our future could be if we're not careful. Hell isn't made by god but by man. We create our own suffering. Now we must bask.
“It’s rare for us to do this kind of thing for people of the working class background, but money, like love, is blind and based on transactions.” - The Handler
If I haven't completely scared you off by now, you should give the soundtrack a listen. I actually enjoy it quite a bit. My personal favorites are Combat Cocktail, Rent Due, and Neuron Activator.
Developer Consumer Softproducts
Playtime 11 Hrs
Platform PC
Release Date 2021