The term ‘Cyberpunk’ immediately conjures the image of a dystopian future where neon lights tower over the populace, the line between man and machine nearly non-existent. A highly hedonistic society, where bright, shining technological advancements hide the societal collapse and its dwindling human nature.
Despite the genre being a cautionary tale, there’s something about it that is fascinating. Reading a book like William Gibson’s Neuromancer, watching a film like Blade Runner (1982), or playing a game like Cyberpunk 2077 don’t exactly put one off from living in a future like the one depicted. There is some small part of you that will undoubtedly wish, “I would like to live in a world like that.”
That is an inherent flaw in cyberpunk media. It focuses on the ‘cool punks’ who live life on a razor-sharp stylish edge of a dystopian society, while downplaying how far removed it is from utopia. The punk side is largely left forgotten and the cyber aspect takes precedence.
The game Cruelty Squad belongs to the cyberpunk category and is perhaps the only piece of media among the genre that truly repulses the player. It breaks those rose-tinted glasses, grinds it to dust on the ground and shows the ugly side of the cyberpunk world that remains shrouded in the shadows cast by blinding neon and shining chrome.
If Hunter S. Thompson and Philip K. Dick decided to make a game together then it would be this. Cruelty Squad embodies a fever dream, and a really bad trip rolled into one neat 1000 MB package. This is truly the cyberpunk edition of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas on the corporate CEO mindset.
“Hey, it’s me. Did I wake you up from your depression nap?”
That’s the game’s opening line, said to the protagonist as he stands in his spartan bedroom featuring an old CRT TV displaying static and a mattress on the floor. He stands like a statue, his eyes covered by his fluorescent green visor, utterly unbothered by the chaos that rages outside his window.
You play as another cog in the filthy murder machine. Your previously unemployed self finds employment as a hitman, a member of the Cruelty Squad. It’s a private organization that does the bidding of larger conglomerates who just want results. But, it is, of course, difficult being an assassin in a world where your targets can cheat death by amassing a vast fortune that plays a vital role in bringing them back to life.
At first glance, the game has absolutely no cohesion to it.
At all.
Your health is a big green oozing blob, and you have 1 out of 5 mysterious creepy smiling faces which later turned out to be ammo. The controls are all over the place with the strangest key placement. The game also features one of the most interesting reload mechanics. To reload your gun to whatever number of creepy smiling faces you have at your disposal, you need to hold the right click and have to pull the mouse back.
By the time you figure out this knowhow (because there is no handholding in this game), you are shot and killed.
Your death screen reads: Divine light severed: you are a flash automaton animated by neurotransmitters.
You get back up, regenerate and come back better prepared.
There are quite a lot of customization options in this game to better outfit you for your job. Since this is a cyberpunk game, cyberware and implants are part and parcel of the deal. But unlike most cyberpunk games where your cyberware is used to enhance your skills or give you defense, in Cruelty Squad not all implants are strictly beneficial. The Nightmare Vision Goggles are probably the first thing any player would purchase considering the cheap price tag. It is only upon equipping it that you realize these goggles are not helpful in the slightest. Sometimes, these implants have their advantages but come with their downsides. It further drives home the message that not all upgrades and cyberware increase quality of life. It completely subverts the cool factor of the nature of technology in the cyberpunk world.
It feels like something is missing… prompts the game when you try to unlock a door on a mission.
The answer would be, yes, the context and the sense of belonging in this world. You constantly ask, Who are you?
Where is this?
What is this?
And finally, what am I?
Especially when you happen to glance at the viscera of an unfortunate individual who stood before your gun and the game informs you ‘pancreas acquisition complete’.
Somehow, during the course of events, without your knowledge, you are consuming the leftover flesh of your enemies to regain health.
Talk about the right kind of nourishment.
If killing corpos is proving to be difficult and your wallet seems a little dry, the game offers an alternate way to rake in the zeros — the stocks. Cruelty Squad has an in-game stock market that will enable you to go from an inexperienced greenhorn to the Wolf of Wall Street.
At first glance, Cruelty Squad looks to be a seizure-inducing acid trip with PS1 graphics, with its loud colors, strange textures and frankly terrifying-looking populace. The strange borders of the game occupy the screen, certain implants impair your ability to see, the icons are just downright weird. There’s an assault on your auditory canals as well with its bizarre sound effects and random loud noises. This is a game that wants you to be uncomfortable. It takes pride in being gross to look at and gross to listen to. This is a game that loves to make you hate it. This is a game that you will fear to love but love to fear, deeply.
But somehow, when you manage to distinguish your targets from the graphical miasma and get used to this frightening world, you begin to really enjoy Cruelty Squad. Because this game will infect your brain.
It is a very engaging first-person shooter with good level design. Your mission is to eliminate your mark, be it a competent CEO who is doing a good job or an inept CEO with a crippling Chunkopop addiction. The Cruelty Squad (the organization) asks no questions and acts as an impartial executioner. There is no right or wrong way to go about putting a bullet in your target’s skull. To say that this game gives you complete freedom to go about your job would be underselling it. Perhaps you value stealth like any good assassin — you can break open vents and get to the best vantage point via your grapple hook. Or maybe you prefer to be straightforward, go in guns blazing, shoot down the front door and leave a trail of corpses in your wake. You can even go out of bounds of the map and break the game, as long as the end result is mission accomplished.
Between the freedom of playstyle and the secret levels and hidden missions, the replayability of Cruelty Squad is high.
It truly dials up the ‘punk’ in cyberpunk to the max and does a fantastic job of portraying a decaying hyper-capitalist society as you go about your business slaughtering whoever the highest bidder asks. It is the endings of Cruelty Squad that give a lot of food for thought. What’s frightening about it is that the world of Cruelty Squad is the future we might just be heading to. For the first time, you think maybe this cyberpunk future isn’t what you want to live in.
If a game can somehow make you so confused about whether you are having a good time understanding anything that is going on in the screen in front of you, that is an accomplishment by itself. You can’t deny that you aren’t enjoying it yet, at the same time, the experience isn’t exactly pleasant. You just do what you’re told to pay the bills and perhaps, you find some happiness in this bleak existence.
Cruelty Squad is one of those kinds of games where you really shouldn’t judge a book (or game) by its cover. Peel back the layers of filth, grime and psychedelic rot, you will find something at the end that is worth the journey. It may be frightening; it may be disgusting but it is guaranteed to tingle your neurotransmitters. Cruelty Squad provides the best insight into the bleak and rotten nature of our cyberpunk future.
The experience of Cruelty Squad can best be summed up by a quote from Hunter S. Thompson in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas:
“Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run, but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant.”
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