Cruelty Squad’s Corporate Slurpcore Biopunk Nightmare Hellworld

How A Videogame's Satirical Cyberpunk Hellscape Speaks to our Generation

Eric Yang

Graphic by Melody Qian

We live in a world made of garbage. AI Slop videos, advertisements for shitty disposable products, and recycled media franchises dominate my feeds as I scroll, wasting away. Escaping through meditation apps and ‘cozy’ media only yields more garbage, as advertisers try to steal your data and sell you trite stories. It’s infuriating that no major artistic movement has seriously satirized our current situation. Take the cyberpunk genre, which imagines dystopias beneath glistening neon skyscrapers populated with fashionable cyborgs. The genre, as it appears in many contemporary video games and general cyberpunk media, presents an anti-capitalist message, but the world within is far too enticing to be anti-anything—I almost want to be there and see the sights.

Cruelty Squad rejects this aesthetic, instead embracing the endless trash and slop to present an uncompromising vision of the future. Designed by Finnish game developer Ville Kallio in 2021, Cruelty Squad is a first person shooter described as “An immersive power fantasy simulator with tactical stealth elements set in a sewage-infused garbage world.” You play as an emotionally dead mercenary working for the titular Cruelty Squad, tasked with assassinating key targets. As insane as this sounds, nothing written can truly do justice to the experience of actually playing the game. Drenched in nihilism, gore, and corporate decay, the game suggests a world where capitalism is God.

Cruelty Squad goes against every conception of user-friendly design, overwhelming players with its audiovisual cacophony. You are surrounded by a nightmare of clashing colors, grotesque faces, and low-quality textures. The fleshy user interface obscures the screen with unnecessary details, playing sounds of burps and grunts as you navigate the pause menu. Boot up the first level, you’ll be thrown straight into this delirium.

As your eyes adjust to the insanity, you’ll be quickly gunned down as you try to barge in through the front door. Seconds later, your brain explodes as you are presented with this message:

“DIVINE LIGHT SEVERED”

“YOU ARE A FLESH AUTOMATION ANIMATED BY NEUROTRANSMITTERS”

What the fuck? Divine light severed? What the hell does any of this mean? Play more, and the pieces begin to fit into place as you discover a reality not too dissimilar to our own. Pull back the chrome and corporate alegria and you’ll find that the game’s fleshy and ugly aesthetic delivers an image of our society unveiled—a necrotic beast of primordial violence, utterly devoid of life yet always demanding to feed and grow.

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Even in the opening cutscene, Cruelty Squad lays it on thick. We see our nude protagonist showering before answering a call from his former boss, who asks, “Did I wake you up from your depression nap?” The boss laments our protagonist’s discharge from the “SEC death unit,” telling him “There’s not much a fucked up detached loser like you can do.” As the boss offers him a job, the camera focuses on our protagonist watching an assailant massacring civilians wearing his usual uncaring expression. It’s a shocking and transgressive opening, painting the player as a pathetic and psychopathic gun-for-hire. And yet, it feels eerily familiar amidst our atmosphere of profound desensitization.

Many games toy with the idea of player disempowerment, a philosophy championed by Japanese game developer Hidetaka Miyzaki’s Dark Souls franchise. But by starting off with this one-two punch, it’s clear Cruelty Squad goes beyond user-disempowering design and into the territory of Anti-User design. When Kallio, the creator, was asked about Cruelty Squad in an interview with digital art publication LVL3, he claimed that “It’s a sadistic game born almost entirely out of spite,” and that “the only person being punished is the player.” Unlike its contemporaries, Cruelty Squad is willing to confuse and alienate the player to a comical degree. Playing the game, you often feel like a worker in the gig economy. One moment, your company has put a hit out on you, then the very next morning, your boss dares to apologize for the inconvenience as he assigns you another mission.

Cruelty Squad is driven by the various assassination missions you complete for your handlers. Each level is a parody of the 21st century, featuring levels that take place in the monuments of capitalism: the gated community, the shopping mall, and the towering skyscrapers. But each location’s corporate gleam is unmasked. The gated community and shopping mall are built atop catacombs filled with the undead. Guttural moans echo through the paved roads and pristine buildings. The skyscrapers are full of corporate CEOs wearing rictus grins as they drive their employees ever deeper into an abyss of endless crunch.

Full article art.
MELODY QIAN / COLLEGETOWN

In these levels, Kallio’s unique aesthetic is inescapable—the walls, the earth, and even the weapons seem to be made of living tissue. You fight enemies of neon complexions wearing bizarre futuristic armor, their bodies either mutilated with cybernetic implants or sporting expressions of gleeful hatred. It reminds you that underneath the shiny plastic and soft edges, human blood, sweat, and tears make our world function. During the LVL3 interview, Kallio said “As for military or state violence, I feel like that’s the purest crystallization of a type of legalized murderlust. It’s so completely farcical in the way the stated purposes (defense, security, etc.) differ from the actual outcomes. It’s a libidinal death cult with a serious bureaucratic veneer... like an ever-present background radiation of evil.”

But Cruelty Squad isn’t all gloom and doom. One of the aspects I enjoy most about the game is the black comedy of NPC dialogue scattered throughout the levels. One of your target’s walls is literally made of collectible Funko Pops toys, the modern symbol of endless merchandising and plastic waste. As you point a gun at his skull, he asks "Do you have a favorite? Me? It's hard to choose. They're all my children." During the mall mission, you’re sent to kill a “progressive” governor who goes on about his "Revolutionary 1% tax on corporate profits." Talk to the patrons of a nightclub, and they’ll exclaim, “When the beat drops, I’m gonna kill myself.” Lines like “I’m really getting into the idea of Hell. Both as a mindset and as something to strive for in an organizational sense” could be plucked straight from a CEO’s twitter feed. This isn’t some masterfully written timeless comedy. Rather, it's the opposite, a perfect collection of words meaningful only to someone living in the 21st century, arranged meticulously to sound as lazy as possible.

Through the game’s dialogue, a story is slowly woven, both darkly hilarious and disturbingly close to home. It becomes clear that Cruelty Squad isn’t just depicting a world overtaken by capitalism—it's a world where capitalism is an axiom of reality, an all-consuming force covered up by neon vomit. Death is eliminated, allowing for infinite growth, yet life has only become more miserable to live. The police have become a cult of order. Suicide missions to Venus are made for the sake of “corporate sacrifice,” and three godly beings known as the “Triagons” speak of how life was borne from “The Divine Transaction.” A picture forms of a dead culture that seeks to grow and consume even as it rots from within. It’s a reality I touch everyday—whether through daily tech newsletters, the endless streams of LinkedIn feeds, or in the perpetual slew of TikTok grindset videos. In the penultimate mission of the game, one of your targets has this to say: “Business isn't just numbers on a screen. It's blood and guts. It's primal violence.” No matter how capitalism tries to distance itself from the organic and alienate us, the inescapable truth is that we are part of its gears. Beneath the AI, the automation, the corporate fonts, is flesh, blood, and bone.

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Despite its delirious aesthetic and spiteful user design, I want to make it clear that there is fun to be found here. Guns feel great to fire, and once you’ve gotten some money you can unlock some pretty fun upgrades. Modify your appendix into a “grappendix,” and you can swing around levels like spiderman, among the other ungodly bio-modifications. More gruesome players can make some extra cash by collecting organs from fallen foes and trading them on the commodities market. The abyss stares back in shock. It’s here where Cruelty Squad plays its final card: By taking the form of a game, it can deliver something no other piece of media can. After all, how else could the audience understand capitalism's power to transform the world unless they became immersed in that world? How else can the audience see through the lens of a violent monster if they were not one themselves?

Cruelty Squad is a game that speaks to me on a spiritual level, no, a generational level. Many works encapsulate what’s wrong with our current situation: extreme wealth accumulation, stagnant wages, and our increasingly alienated society. But no other work captures Gen Z’s unique perspective in such visceral detail. Cruelty Squad is what I would declare a generational piece. Instead of a period piece, which seeks to romanticize and recreate a historical period from an outsider perspective, the generational piece seeks to transport the audience into its contemporary situation. Just like reality, it is utterly uncompromising and uncaring in how it delivers its message. One issue with being linked to a certain generation is that the cultural context required to enjoy a work will slowly vanish over time. Cruelty Squad may suffer such a fate-it's inextricably tied to the impasse we are currently at. It may soon be blase compared to future games that mimic it, and there may come a day when the insanity of Cruelty Squad becomes enviable.

In channeling our contemporary angst through not just the textual level, but visual and narrative level, Cruelty Squad feels like a game that finally gets it. It gets what it means to live day to day as someone in a grinding, meandering situation. It gets what I feel as I scroll with dread through my Linkedin feed, seeing mind-numbing advice spouted again and again. It gets the frustration, the anger, and paradoxical apathy I feel watching politicians and billionaires get away with their horrific transgressions. It gets the uncanny feeling of being at corporate events—flesh and blood caking my soles as I walk with a smile on my face in order to make it ahead.

You can buy Cruelty Squad now at a 70% discount should you desire to experience the madness firsthand.

Eric Yang is a senior at Cornell University studying mathematics and game design. In his free time, he enjoys torturing himself by playing ridiculous video games and attempting to write fanfiction.

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