THOUGHTLINE MIAMI

CRUELTY SQUAD, the reanimated corpse of a great immersive sim

Just looking at Cruelty Squad can make you queasy, but it passes the most essential immersive sim tests with bright, nauseating colors. I used classic vent routes to stealthily assassinate a bouncy castle made of flesh one playthrough, switching to a rocket launcher, and using my guts as a grappling hook for a more direct approach the next. I stacked barrels to climb over entire buildings, and picked off targets with sniper shots from across the map.

Cruelty Squad is Deus Ex if it were made today, the natural product of furious people exhausted by wealth inequality, police militarization, and the stubborn structures that keep humanity rolling towards total annihilation of the soul.

But Cruelty Squad wants to have fun before the end. It’s a stealth action game that props up the joy of feeling like I outsmarted the designers through wild experimentation, a cathartic exercise in taking out the worst people alive, and one of the most brilliantly absurd games I’ve played.

You’re a depressed assassin for hire in the bad future. Pick out some guns and tools, then explore a level, finding the best routes for a clean kill.

Kills grant you cash for body mods, from basic stuff like armor to juiced up legs that give you a higher jump. And whatever guns you find and finish the mission with are added to your arsenal, now available to take into any mission. It’s a super rewarding track that lets you explore playstyles while casting replays of previous levels in a new light.

Memorizing their layouts is a joy. I’m happy dying on repeat to find the perfect sniper nest or infiltration route. The influx of new tools, be it a DNA-scrambling pistol or nightmare goggles, keeps things fresh.

Death kicks you back to the start of a mission, but Cruelty Squad never loses momentum. You can harvest organs from corpses and catch fish to sell on the stock market, keeping the cash flowing and the new body mods coming. There’s even a gun with damage that scales to how much you have in holdings.

Cruelty Squad’s spaces are easy to lose time in. I explored the same suburban neighborhood five times before I found the city below. I stumbled into a few hidden levels, each more surreal than the last. Cruelty Squad’s levels are so varied that it even turns into a full-on horror game at times.

The art is a grotesque wonder, a vision of a world under intense stress. Faces shift beneath the polygons, the skies bleed, and the soundtrack underlines the dread like a Game Boy melting into scorching blacktop. Cruelty Squad is one of the most upsetting games ever, and I adore its total dedication to alienation.

CRUEL INTENTIONS

Cruelty Squad’s 20-plus weapons are fairly restrained. They have realistic handling, with significant recoil and spray that loses accuracy if you’re peeking around corners, sustaining fire, or aiming from the hip. I’m partial to the New Safety M62 revolver, which has a lovely delay and subtle tilt animation to simulate the slow pull of a trigger.

Bizarrely, to reload, you hold right-click and whip the mouse back. It feels great with time though, like shifting gears in a murderous man car. Reloading and retraining your aim before a guard turns and notices his dead pal behind him is a thrill.

That initial control shock also masks simple enemy AI. They just shoot on sight and pursue. A quick burst of concentrated fire can end you though, so clever AI isn’t really the point. The point is sneaking into the center of a hornet’s nest to kill a sentient bouncy castle or a gross mayor, for example.

Once you know the layout, getting the better of the baddies is a little too simple. That’s OK: Cruelty Squad transcends small problems with wild level design, the breadth of tools it gives me to explore them, and the perfect tension between fun and disgust it maintains throughout.

Cruelty Squad’s world is sick, and all by terrible, beautiful design. What’s left is the skeleton of our favorite pastime: a computer game. And holy cow, it’s a good one.

You’re a depressed assassin for hire in the bad future