Review: Cruelty Squad 

joker voice: we live in a cruelty squad

Other games: violence is bad, so here do some violence. This game: Sell organs; stonks.

"I really look up to people who are good at violence" is such a great quote.

I’ve been getting really into “hell”. Both as a mindset and as something to strive for, in an organizational sense.

Me and a buddy got this game together when it was first out in early access. The sharing of our findings and just overall bewildered reaction to the putridness of it all was second to none with any other game we co-experienced. He passed away recently, but cruelty squad left an indelible imprint of how much games like this can create such a visceral memory of good times. Truly a one of a kind gem.

One of my favorite things i discovered in cruelty squad is that, in the suburban house level, you can put the exploded remains of your enemies on a grill and cook them into a surprisingly nourishing health-up. Go cannibalism!

This game is the visual representation of my mind when i enter the "automatic employee for minimun wage manual labour job" mode When you don't have time for anything, just work, and work and work and every problem with your life and with the world is in the back of your mind, always there

It's rare to find a piece of art that gets it's message across so eloquently and subtly while being comically blunt

Games like this illustrate, perhaps the most effectively, that the only real difference between our concept of rock-bottom dystopian futurism and our current social, legal, and economic systems is the aesthetic. A coat of paint.

I love Cruelty Squad to bits, but I never knew Consumer Softproducts was just one nihilistic artist that had never made a game before This is a masterpiece and that new information makes it 10x more impressive to me

I'd call the aesthetic heavyhanded if it wasn't so effective. It has what I feel a lot of the guilt-trip-laden messages in AAA games are missing- most of us are numb to the cognitive dissonance of killing in a video game because you can always pin your actions on some greater good, character motivations or even just the game developers, but deliberately devaluing and commodifying the lives you take isn't something you can easily shrug off.

This is the Gorbinos' Quest of real life!

Cruelty squad is like what a young teen sees when staring at society. Incomprehensible, yet somehow completely coherent, and disgustingly ugly. The game captures that feeling so well.

The soundtrack is actually great, honestly. Its also in the vein of some underground experimental music. I especially love the Office level track, its gorgeous.

Some games are good, or even great, but conventional enough that you only need to watch one review to know whether you want to buy them or not and there's not much point in watching multiple reviews. Then there's games that are extremely appealing to a niche so you want to watch several reviews to find out which reviewers like it and which don't. Then there's games like Cruelty Squad where the first review you watched convinced you to buy the game but you still keep watching reviews of it because it's so offbeat that all the reviews also end up being offbeat and entertaining.

I respect the game's message and intent and am super happy it's getting a lot of love from the creatives I love... but in no way can I ever play it myself for multiple reasons.

This whole game is a love letter to the concept of pure hatred for the world you live in, it's wonderful.

Having 6 ebay employees and executives stalk and harass owners of a blog about loopholes in ebay policies has ironically, probably got the blog a lot of exposure. If executives are willing to go that far to try and stop the website then it must be really good. What a weird world to live in.

Ah yes Neil. The Philosopher that brought us Neilism.

Hearing "it's like Hitman mixed with Quake" is the best schizophrenic description for this game.

What are we, some kind of cruelty squad?

There's a genre of music known as utopian virtual, a descendant of vaporwave noted for its use of tacky 90s synth sounds often used in stuff like corporate training products to give those sounds a beautiful new context. Frankly, when listening to this game's music, my first thought is "dystopian virtual"

So, is this a Doomer shooter instead of a Boomer shooter?

where most games tell you violence is bad to your face, Cruelty Squad leans in uncomfortably close and says "Come on, shoot those people, do it. Do it, it'll be fun" in the same tone your boss at wal-mart uses to tell you to bring shopping carts in from the parking lot

Glad you went into the art style AS an art style instead of just calling it intentionally ugly. I cant imagine how that guy feels developing over the years only to undercut with "haha ugly game"

in the paradise (suburban neighborhood) level there's a full recreation of the compound osama bin laden was found in, just pointing that out edit: (also at 12:32 you say there's a canibalism button and while there is it's only for the lowest difficulty that you can only reach when you die a couple times)

An interesting thing to me is that the arsenal of this game seems to be mostly made up of prototype guns which were tested, but never made it to standard issue. The AN-94, G11, IWS 2000, ACR, MCR… All designed to become weapons of the future for armies all over the world, but abandoned because they were too unreliable, too complex or - usually - too expensive to put into mass-production. I feel like this fits the aesthetic of Cruelty Squad quite well - you shoot industrial competitors and dissidents with guns rejected by militaries because they didn’t fit their capitalistic requirements.

This looks like if LSD dream emulator was a shooter

I think simplifying the message to just a Hotline Miami like critique of video game violence is doing it too little credit and simplifies it. In my view once you really get into the lore and themes of the game and its later routes you start to notice themes about how life without death devalues life. Cruelty Squad takes place in a universe where dying literally just costs you 500 dollars to be reconstructed and nobody ever really dies permanently with only a couple of notable exceptions because they can just go and get reconstructed for 500 bucks and this is especially the case for the rich. No wonder human life is worth so little when its basically been boiled down to a minor economic setback akin to getting a fucking speeding ticket in this world. Hard to feel bad for killing somebody when you can just come back and see them the next day like nothing happened. It makes even killing rich assholes who have it coming feel futile and irrelevant since you know they are just going to pop out again in a reconstruction machine. With that established now think about people like Peter Thiel who are talking about how they want to make themselves immortal and conquer death and do insane shit like injecting themselves with the blood of the young so they can live forever and these themes start to really resonant. That and the clear influences of people like Georges Bataille in the mythology of the cruelty squad worlds creation myth and I would say Cruelty Squad is the very first PRO-DEATH video game. (In a good life affirming way I mean) To put it another way Cruelty Squad seems to be saying that in a world without any death trying to live a meaningful life is basically impossible and makes the tragedy of human life being taken meaningless. It draws connections between the billionaire pursuance of immortality and capitalisms pursuit of infinite growth with no end. Like honestly the ultimate message of the game really reminds of the main message of the Anime Texhnolyze if you guys have ever watched that. They share some very similar themes anyway in my estimation.

Great video, great game. Hard disagree about the soundtrack- I find myself straight-up listening to the office and apartment tracks from the OST. There is a nice range of "crazy" and "desolate" that fits each level's tone

Hi! Love the video, your analysis of CS was completely on point. I'm a freelance composer/producer and wanted to add something about the music of this game. It's the same thing as the visual art, there is a distinct use of dissonance and chords that do not sound good together in these horrifically brash midi tones, once again a deliberate breaking of conventions and rules, but what REALLY strikes me is that it isn't completely random. The song that plays in the casino is so dour and depressing and really represents what that place means. The sparseness of the title theme is fitting for the art displayed on screen, a man dead in a car, a meaningless act of violence. And some of the more distorted and energetic songs go hard, like the ones that play in the nightclub and the pharmacy. But yeah, loved the video!

Worth noting that Ville Kaillo is also a comics artist! That’s primarily how I know their name & work, and i think provides a more direct lineage to 70s alt comics, via stuff like Leon & Stefan Sadler. P-FE/FRAF published by kuš definitely feels close to this game

To be fair, the music in cruelty squad seems like it's purposely made to sound like shit in some cases like in the casino and paradise. The music in pharma and office (combat cocktail and pyrexia respectively) fucking slaps and certainly doesn't seem like it was made by a complete amateur.

Honestly the soundtrack is one of the things I love about Cruelty Squad, it kind of reminds me of LISA's OST in strokes here and there. At the same time, I'm also just someone who loves garish music in general, so

Spot on with the comparison to 20th c. counterculture cartoons: the cursor looks like the severed hand of Rat Fink.

The first ever strand type shooter

Y'know, I can forgive you saying "Comparishun" and "Rayshuns" and "Sid Meers", but "Neil-lism" is where I draw the line, George!

Nice to see super bunnyhop being true to his name jumping his way through a game.

Check out the Death Ending if you want a full taste of the lore. This game really is made by a nihilist artist, it shows in every part. I love this game so much.

This is one of those few games where being colorblind is probably beneficial.

GOTY for me, even got going into modding-I bought it immediately after seeing the aesthetics, was pleasantly suprised by how solid a game it actually was

I wonder if they'll make games parodying the entire mechanism, psychology and "subculture" surrounding mobile and gacha games in the future lol

You can cook the gibbed body parts with the bbq/flamethrower and it gives you more health when you eat it. God I love this game.

Whenever you brought up our current corporate dystopia I just whispered „Jesus fucking Christ“ while absent-mindedly doing the dishes. My girlfriend has been looking at me as if I‘m crazy, but it‘s the world that‘s crazy.

Now that's pure Bunnyhop right here. Actually waiting when the hype dies down to provide a truly thorough look at the game, instead of rather uninteresting first impressions. (Which are pretty much the same for everyone in a game like CruS). Even Civvie11's video was rather disappointing, but with your video, I actually learned quite a few things, and massive props for delving into Ville's work to give better context of the game.

The Duke 3D comparison is exactly what I've been thinking playing this

My favourite part of the game is that deus ex feeling of getting new items and applying them to obstacles in the world to reach new places, except every item you get is incredibly powerful and absoultely going to kill you in some unforseable way and every challenge leads deeper down the coprate greed fueled rabbit hole.

>world engulfed in the fullest extent of nihilism because no one can die and "life" has no meaning >post scarcity world, but people are so materialistic that they're trying to get ahead anyway >bosses include the gnostic demiurge and the "cradle of life" "this is about capitalism" This is what people mean when they talk about small souled bugmen

Can’t believe you didn’t call out the most insane reload mechanic in any pc game in decades

Man this was a well done video that made me feel like that there is a ton more in cruelty squad. Great job

I look forward to people playing this game and completely missing the message the game is trying to tell you

This game is that Machine Girl album cover brought to life

I didn't know this was from a Finnish developer, but looking back on it, it makes perfect sense to me as melancholic Finn myself.. Vittusaatana

Such a good video, I don’t know why but it never crossed my mind that you’d review this game, but it makes perfect sense. A perspective like yours is precisely what the discourse around this game needed.

Lmao that bhop technique is super bungus my guy.

conceptually I appreciate cruelty squad, but I couldn't get through half an hour of it. it is an extremely uncomfortable experience and it's a marvel.

Im just so happy a 3D Godot engine game was successful

Exactly the kind of game I'm glad exists but will probably never play. Excellent video!

This is probably the most comprehensive description of the themes and influences of CS I've seen so far

I genuinely enjoyed the music in this game (as in, the experience of it, not the way it sounds). It constantly surprised me, creeped me out, disgusted me or made laugh (the toilet? music of the swamp was a highlight)

This is probably the best review of Cruelty Squad I’ve seen so far. The game is truly a marvel AND in addition to dverything you’ve said here I want to point out to people who’s still on the fence: the combat is really good. The guns are nice, it’s satisfying to kill enemies and scavenging for new guns was a big part of the appeal on my first playthrough. And this game has some GUNS.

That music just sounds like Bottles from Banjo Kazooie talking.

this review was peak george. I need more georg

videos from this channel reappearing in my recommendations again after over a year makes me realise that i enjoy them and should probably subscribe.

Cruelty squad is a great example of video games being art

You BETTER not be talking mess about Bog Business. That track is gold!

Bro, the soundtrack is amazing

The music is amazing in this game!

George is the cruelty squad of games journalism

Uncomfortable? It's an arcade Rainbow Six, extremely fun to play. One of those games that reminds you why you like video games in the first place.

After your video on Umurangi Generation and now this I have decided to exclusively buy and play games recommended by you, don't abuse this power Mr Bunnyhop.

Love how your videos just keep getting weirder in the best way possible. This video was painful to watch, it felt great.

I appreciate the history/context you provided. That’s one of my favorite aspects of your channel.

I think the best thing about the game is that it's both a great art piece and a great video game at the same time, without one half ever detracting from the other. It's so boldly, satirically and unpretentiously punk (neo punk? 21st century punk? is that a thing anyone says?), yet once you get into the game it's also a really solid tactical shooter with really clever and varied level design and creative mechanics. The coating of "deep fried ironic meme" paint has the same effect in that it both meshes naturally with the cynical near-future cyberpunk dystopian themes, and at the same time complements the gameplay in making areas, enemies, items and effects both unique and distinct. A note about the music: the first level actually has dynamic combat music, which I thought was a really nice touch. Personally I love the whole soundtrack (even in the swamp level, because it's so unexpected and unsettling), but it'd be really interesting to know if there were ideas and plans for even more dynamic music for different areas and scenarios at some point in development.

I just want to point out that the weapon models look like a "Best of 'Forgotten Weapons'" playlist. I mean, the H&K G11, the Steyr ACR (I think), the MG42...

The reason human life is so invaluable is bc there is technology that has made humans immortal. FYI also u can only eat dead bodies after dying enough times in a given level to get on to "Power In Misery" difficulty (signified by the fleshy border). Power In Misery in-universe is explained by you being forced to get a surgery that makes you regenerate endlessly after you die, meaning that you no longer have to pay $500 when you die. Also fun tip u can grind mall madness with a rocket launcher on punishment mode while dumping all of ur money into kidneys for quick money. I'm sorry I have a lot to say abt this game

I guess you're super at bunnyhopping.

Oh you know a game is good when one of the steam reviews is the Unabomber manifesto

14:28 Gunther Herrman would be jealous

Link's heart containers are now seen in a new light.

I disagree about the music, but maybe it's just my massive nostalgia for early DOS games clouding my judgement. the way the music sounds "unfinished" kinda reminds me of how sim city 2000 sounded as a kid, playing on a soundcard that couldn't handle it.

Cruelty Squad's music is great, cmon Combat Cocktail alone is a banger and a half

Make no mistake: the music is masterful.

I forgot you existed because youtube finally decided to recommend me a video from you after years. What a great website

this looks like a game made by dril. edit: nevemind, it as already addressed

This feels like the game that would come out if I wished for my dream game on a monkey's paw

Is it just me or ia that "blood scratch" writing at around like 1:50 actually just the Friends logo font?

This man invented the slimecore music genre he’s a musical genius

my eyes are bleeding. definitely a cruel experience.

You haven't played enough Cruelty Squad if you haven't been brainwashed into thinking at least a few tracks are fire.

ima be honest the music is perfect

This is the only way to start a review about cruelty squad

I can't believe you just glanced over the gorilla texture. It's the best part!

The intro to the while completely fucked made me laugh what a segway. I am fascinated by how something as lame as spiders and books carries alot of weight when you have power, power you might even feel or know the gravity of but execute anyway without comprehension of the reality. This game was GOTY

I love the music to be honest, feels like white noise and it kinda just helps i swear. Only one that got grating was office.

Wait wait. Ubisoft executives give you surprise weed snacks for free? I take back all the bad things I said about them I want to work there now

9:28 Bottles telling Banjo how to do the stock market mini game.

So what are we? Some kinda Cruelty Squad?

14:58 he's not shitting himself. you're literally missing the Text. he has Gunk Boosters installed in his feet, it isn't complicated

Wait... This is just warframe corpus repo simulation.