Cruelty Squad (Game)

***Cruelty Squad*** is a tactical first-person shooter developed and published by Consumer Softproducts, a Finnish indie studio managed by artist Ville Kallio, on the Steam distribution platform. It was released into Early Access on Steam on January 4th, 2021. It later fully released on June 15th of the same year.

## Premise

The futuristic world of *Cruelty Squad* is a gaudy, psychedelic nightmare of bio-augmentation and capitalism. Death isn't the end, as the fleshy denizens can simply opt to pay to have their bodies reconstructed from within the "Death Matrix" should they find themselves splattered. That is, as long as they have the cash. In this dystopian cyberpunk world, megacorporations have a disproportionate amount of power over the police and the government. The ability to be raised from the dead thanks to technological advancements makes a large portion of humanity eternal and lowers the perceived worth of life. The prevalence of random killings and the presence of armed security in almost every major city. Invasive biological implants and enhanced organs are utilized by security forces and assassins to aid in combat, and human organs are traded on the stock market.

As the game opens, The Handler calls The Protagonist after the latter has lost his most recent job to let him know about a new employment opportunity with the titular Cruelty Squad, a wetwork security firm operating under the auspices of a sizable multinational, does corporate contract killings in part. He suggests that The Protagonist will be a good fit, but warns that they must take on a more "corporate mindset" for it to work. Will you make the Corporate Arch Demoness proud or succumb to *bitter tears of failure*?

What follows is a series of Missions given by The Handler to The Protagonist to fulfill. Throughout the game, the Protagonist was tasked to kill a variety of people, including anti-corporate politicians, cultists, police officers, rogue employees, and CEOs of rival corporations. Meanwhile The Protagonist steadily gains capital, augments his own body, and loses himself in an upward spiral of violence, finances, fish, and control.

## Gameplay

*See Game Mechanics*

*Cruelty Squad* features a heavily stylized first-person gameplay style. The player's view is locked to the player character's vision, movement is performed using mostly standard FPS controls, and the primary focus of the gameplay is on utilizing firearms in combat and puzzles. Every mission assigns one or many targets for the player to eliminate before they may exit and complete the level. However, all of these ideas are skewed and made intentionally awkward; for example, reloading a weapon is not a single button press but instead requires holding a button down, dragging the gun off-screen to reload, and then pulling it back up. Learning these idiosyncrasies is key to mastering the game.

More broadly, *Cruelty Squad* can be considered an immersive sim complete with open-ended map design that encourages exploration, multiple in-universe minigames, stealth options, minimalist dialogue, item collection, and esoteric secrets. Every mission has multiple viable approaches and routes. To gain a tactical advantage, the player must carefully plan out their equipment loadout, as well as selecting between non-lethal and lethal options. The player can choose to spend a mission fishing, speedily hunting targets, playing with slot machines, chatting with Civilians, harvesting organs, or any other task that comes to mind. The game also includes a wide range of bizarre and unconventional weapons, including the flechette shotgun, silenced 10mm pistol, radiation emitter, tranquilizer dart gun, DNA scrambler, corrosive gas launcher, and many others. While there is no penalty for killing civilians during a mission, silent and non-lethal solutions are also possible outside of the necessary killing of targets. Outside of and during missions, the player can trade human organs and fish on a dynamic stock market for money, or explore their headquarters.

Even more broadly, *Cruelty Squad* is a game which embraces zany game-breaking as a mode of progression. As the main game ends, finding secrets and engaging with the bizarre parameters of the game's universe exposes the game's inner content, opening it fully to the player. It is in the context of exploiting every aspect of the game that many of the character dialogues and each of the endings seem most connected to player's actions.