Cruelty Squad is a masterpiece and we are all doomed
Cruelty Squad is not the game we wanted, neither the game we deserved, but rather it is the game that we are murdered by. Despite its outrageously wild and unconcerned appearance, its unconstrained use of color and seemingly crude and brazen depiction of objects, the game holds together as strong as a Boston Robotics Robot-dog (forgive me for calling it like this), only this time the dog has machine-guns as limbs, is vomiting artificial blood and bile, is unleashed, and is equipped with a privatized million-dollar AI designed to shit on your soul first and kill you next. The game’s music sounds scary and dissonant yet eerily fitting for its theme and graphics. Yes, it is very graphical and wants to rid you of your eyesight and hearing, but the truth is the more ugly the art looks, the more you want to look at it. This is different from “I cannot take my eyes away from that traffic accident”, in that its purely chaotic aesthetics is in itself a representation of what our mainstream view of beauty does not see. According to science, beautiful objects make us happy. Cruelty Squad is just that kind of art that says NO to that science.
In this game, nothing is sacred, and God is not only dead like Nietzsche declared but desecrated to the point where desecration itself becomes Holy. As the playable character, you can augment yourself with an assortment of cyberpunk-ish upgrades but almost all of them are grotesque or weird or unbearable to some degree. There is a grapple-hook (implemented in many other games in various forms) that is actually your own intestine that protrudes and extends from your abdomen. One of the acquirable armor suit looks cool and gives you massive advantage in the game but once you put it on, your screen become completely besieged and intruded by its unfortunate mask and because you are operating in 1st-person view, you cannot see shit and you die. Another one basically renders you invisible but “makes you smell like shit.” And just like in real life, you get to understand the full length of these shit augments only after purchasing them (using your hard-earned money). In GTA V, this type of satirical humor has taken precedence, though in a different, less memorable direction — one advertisement in the game you can see is about a beer brand, and the product is called “Pi$$water”, with “$” replacing “s”.
In each of the levels, there is always numerous restrooms, presumably for the drugged up business try-hards to do drugs in, because the toilets themselves are green-colored gas-releasing bio-hazard weapons that kill both the player and most NPCs with efficiency. In the game you see non-euclidean spaces, Lovecraftian monsters, Aldrich horror & Cronenberg distortion hybrid, and bio-engineered nightmares like rat injected with human DNA. You, equipped with your various equally horrifying augments and out-of-the-world guns would have to traverse this world where so many things are wrong, that you do not know what is “wrong” anymore. Like American Psycho, like GTA V, like in Idiocracy, like in 1984 and A Beautiful New World and in other postmodernist-capitalist-demoralized dystopian masterpieces, Cruelty Squad aims to hit you with that dose of sarcasm, in an exaggerated and hyperbolized manner, with a hint of nihilism and pessimism. The exaggerated manner is reflected in the gameplay mechanics, the augments, the world and the player. The nihilism? It roots in that everything is ugly and chaotic.
Yet the most important and profound thing this game does different — when compared with other ugly, grotesque, horrifying, murderous, deep and dark masterpieces — is that all above-mentioned facets are done with seriousness, satire plus a punctiliously restrained carelessness, all at the same time.
When you play, and kick the enemies in the game, and see their unconscious body bounces off the wall because of your enormous power; when you dangle on your intestine over your enemies’ head; when you discover that the green moldy pizza slices heals 5 times as much health as eating an enemy’s body; when you gib(explode) your enemy and see their head rolling down the corridor, you nevertheless still have lots after lots of fun. Before you have fun, you would have questioned the thought process behind this game’s choice of look, music, feel, etc. but as soon as you jump into this chaotic and uncontrolled world, you become an immersed and integral part of its manifestation. Then, within the scope of the game, you would still be able to question, you would still doubt, but you would never be able to escape from the the fact that you have participated in it. In other words, without becoming a complicit of all the things this game teaches you to despise, you cannot learn to despise it. Without killing, you cannot advance the game, and without advancing the game you cannot see the hard work of designers, and without seeing them, how could you fully understand the game’s message? On that notion, the approach this game takes on attacking every inhumane, backwards modern things we take for granted, is not that much different from Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket , where soldiers, on both sides, eventually realize the paradoxical nature of their ill-fated mission to represent “justice” and eradicate “evil”, by shooting and killing equally brainwashed soldiers called “enemies”.
In American Psycho, you would start to question if everything is starting to become exaggerated; in reading Fahrenheit 451, you have prescience because it is a book. But, by controlling your character in a game, your attempt to analyze and comprehend the massive irony, satire and sad reality are in turn shaped by your own action. Also, by designing human to look like non-human, making walls to look like… not walls, the idea that this world should somehow resemble our own world, will forever be locked in a ship in a stormy sea, identifiable only sometimes. The fact that the developers made gravity, pills, blood, guns, day-night cycle, flashlight and darkness, offices and social hierarchies exist, is considerately an crucial yet silent part of why this game is great, because they still holds our expectation down to earth somewhat. Without them, the overwhelming volume of crazy elements would helicopter the game up too high into pure fantasy, taking away its social-commentary edge. And just because of this, we are doomed. I cannot find anything better than the game itself when illustrating this doomed-ness: you can buy an house for a large sum of cash in the late stage of the game. On the surface that house looks so peaceful — sits by a lake, is large, with a garage — but you go in and find that its empty, gray, sad, and find out in the lake are three ancient ball-shaped semi-god shooting deadly laser beams at you, and across the lake are twenty nearly-invincible golem coming to smash you, and the village nearby hates “augmented, psyched-out freaks like you”. You just know, you are not welcome here either, and this house — this dream of tranquility built on blood money doing dirty jobs for corporate shills becomes part of the collective satire, yet again.
What is considered by me to be not an ordinary cherry but a gold-plated titanium cherry on top of this game is the fact that, there is a full-body, real-world-ridiculing stock market implemented. You can use money found or earned in the game to buy various companies’ shares, or simply fishes, or human organs if you like, underline “human organs”. Human brains are called “raw material for the AI industry”, while “kidney” is completely superfluous due to genetic engineering that eradicated alcohol’s side effects like hangover. When human beings are regarded as raw materials or products for the industry, what else is sacred? God? Bible? Ideologies? Love? Nope, those are already monetized, not only in Cruelty Squad but in real life. I dare say that those things are even more so exploited and leveraged in real life, than in the game.
The reason why I said we are doomed, is that if Cruelty Squad is seen as not a fantasy, but an exaggerated take on our society, it only shows how much our society brinks on the limit of exploiting the chaotic and dark side of human. The thematic elements in this game include but are not limited to: Corporate schemes, money-laundering, start-ups with back-alley deals, crazy weapons, crazy drugs, druggies, bio-engineering without consequence, human-experiment, monetization of death… these are all things that we think are crazy. But these things, like any artistic ideas and inspirations, are based on real life. In the dark ages before Renaissance, human also questioned if we were doomed. But, they came to the conclusion because of observation on poverty, plague, astrological events and things we readily disregard as trivial today. When Don Quixote took satire on kings and knighthood, he thought the existing kings and knighthood code were bad and inhumane; when we take a satirical approach towards Cruelty Squad, doesn’t that mean we think the existing capitalism, secret bio-engineering and other sins are bad? Only that kings and knighthood would never, ever be able to destroy the world with irreversible damage.
What contrasts greatly with this heavy thematic implication is the action of the people behind this game: low-effort trailer, close-to-none marketing & advertising, random game updates without explanation; and total disregard of the game’s popularity (this absence is of course, deliberately designed). It is almost as if the game devs are saying that, the game itself is the truthful representation, with no need for explanation — almost like how Hemingway treats his own novels.
And at last, I think it is not fair to drag you through my long sermon without giving the game a fair review. If I have to treat Cruelty Squad as just a 1st-person shooter game, instead of a scrutinizing and rather thought-provoking 21st-century version of The Communist Manifesto , I think it is (still) very much great. Dropping all that thematic elements and subjective interpretation, I think the gameplay mechanics, especially the augments, guns and levels, work together really, really seamlessly well to immerse player in this surreal world. In my opinion, I think it is the best shooter since Call of Duty 6 single-player campaign. How can you not love it, when the game is this solid at its core and this surreal and outlandish on the outside. 10/10, a strange masterpiece and immediately a cult classic for people to remember for a long time.
