divine light severed

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the opening cutscene to 2021 video game "cruelty squad" is one of the most uniquely interesting things i've come across in recent times. i think about it a lot

your entirely empty place, save a mattress on the floor, a wooden chair and a tv that doesn't seem to work. your acquaintance calling you and reminding you of your stint in the "SEC death unit" before proposing a new employment opportunity requiring a daily 15 minutes on "the conditioning app" to prevent "freakouts". wordlessly staring out of your purple-tinted apartment block windows into the distance past some high rises while a mass shooting is taking place in the yard below. i was almost offended at how effortlessly it piqued my curiosity. i wanted to know more about everything i was seeing and hearing immediately

to me, cruelty squad belongs to the genre of games that establish universes so intriguing that i want to read an endless amount of wiki articles on literally anything and everything contained in them. there's not many of those games, but when you do stumble upon one, it feels magical, burning away the built-up cynicism towards gaming that comes with naturally ageing out of the hobby and generally having experienced seemingly all of the video game archetypes developers could possibly dream of dreaming up. this is more than a game, it's an object of obsession

in essence, your soul is transferred into the body of a 30-year old government agency washout turned corporate grunt tasked with eliminating high-profile executives and other such critical personnel of other companies or institutions for market domination purposes or less noble causes such as revenge and self-deification. at this point in time, i've put around 17 hours into the game. i've become decently rich, bought everything money can buy, moved into a countryside home that cost me a million bucks i paid for with one single fish, unlocked the entire available arsenal minus one, completed all the secret levels, got all three endings and collected every single one of the 38 achievements, the latter requiring you to wear an expensive suit and complete all levels without taking a single point of damage. true ceo mindset. at the end of all of it, i can't help but ask the ultimate question that kept popping back into my head since hour one: is cruelty squad an immersive sim? the short answer is no. at least i don't think so. and if it is one, then it's bad at being one

a brief disclaimer: i've found it incredibly difficult to casually write about cruelty squad. this is my third go at it, having scrapped my previous 1000-word attempts. this is mainly due to a vague feeling of doing the game a disservice by leaving out literally any specific part of it. every moving thing practically demands attention since all of them are interesting to encounter and write about. however, if i actually dedicated a paragraph to everything i find noteworthy about the game, then this post would take days to write and hours to read. if you've never played cruelty squad, i highly recommend doing so instead of reading any of this, seriously. but if you must, here's the long answer

at its core, cruelty squad is a highly stylized, philosophically infused arcade platform shooter with quake-style movement, complete with bunny-hopping mechanics, and hitman-esque mission structure, augmented by an imsim-inspired bio-implant system and "realistic gunplay", by which i mean that guns have recoil and humanoid enemies typically die when shot in the head once. the basic gameplay loop looks like this: you get briefed on one or multiple targets by your handler, select two weapons to take with you, slot in up to four implants and depart for the mission area to kill whatever needs killed. while there is technically the option to avoid direct confrontation and stealth your way through levels by crawling through endlessly long vents and scaling buildings, the enemies' magnet AI and general static-ness makes this a dull and frustrating process. they don't move much or follow patrol routes or really do anything other than wait for you to pop your head out. from what i remember, there are also only three specifically non-lethal pieces of equipment you can resort to: an animal control tranquilizer pistol, a baton and a sleeping gas grenade that slots into your arm for some reason and requires you to leave behind the most useful implant, the appendix grappling hook, significantly hampering your ability to use verticality to your advantage. it's almost like the developer winks at you when suggesting that you can sneak past security before then giving you an insane arsenal of interesting guns to turn them into mincemeat with instead. it's all a facade. the game is just too fast-paced, making stealth seem out of place in the first place, and there is exactly no point to non-lethality. no reward, no interesting tactics to employ, no consequences. canonically, you are a gig economy assassin employed to murder at least one person per mission, so murder you must. might as well try out the war crime gamma ray cloud rifle and melt everything in the house. you could get an S-rank for completing the mission faster that way and rake in more cash. i'm just saying

the world you traverse is not one contiguous plane, it's segmented into levels that are separated from one another by a mission select screen and loading times. in these levels, you will find both civilians and hostile forces roaming the available space, along with the mission target(s) you're tasked with liquidating. hostile npcs such as the police or security personnel or really anyone who wields a gun will shoot on sight, regardless of their purpose or what you're doing at the time, like you've preemptively been charged with and sentenced to death for a crime you're required to commit. in the mission "paradise" where you're dropped into a quaint gated community to eliminate some biocomputing execs, you will first walk past a bunch of non-mission-critical buildings that practically beg you to explore. upon vibing your way into the local pizza place, however, you get shot in the head four times by its security guard, activating the post-death chip in your brain that makes you explode. it's impossible for the player to peacefully co-exist with the game world because cruelty squad is either suffering from a somewhat severe identity crisis or incohesive design choices that make this impractical. to immerse myself in a world, i must be able to participate in said world in seemingly mundane ways that together constitute the basis of roleplaying. in cyberpunk, i can travel to my apartment, put on a vinyl, pour some tea and just hang out in my expensive living room. this makes me feel immersed. wandering through completely empty blocky houses of strangers who are allergic to the concept of furnishing, only to be shot at by someone i don't know without explanation, makes me feel like i'm playing a doom 1 mod. on the topic of exploration: you really can only find either money, weapons or implants scattered around the world. some doors that only open on certain difficulties may also hide secret levels, but that's really it. no cool in-game books to read, nothing to flesh out the world a bit more, just more people who shoot at you and gear

another aspect of an immersive sim i personally value highly is the ability to have conversations with npcs and learning interesting and/or actionable things about them or the world around us. a boring example of this would be slipping a doorman at a nightclub a couple hundred bucks to learn something about the architecture to work out potential weakspots. the people you come across in cruelty squad are husks of digital humans. they are fungible in that they mostly repeat the same two voice lines and stand around doing nothing whatsoever. at least their lines vary by level, and there are some exceptions to this soullessness. at cruelty squad headquarters, you can meet a few friendly colleagues who embrace you as one of their own, which is one of the few wholesome moments in the game. it's also highly reminiscent of deus ex and actually entirely pointless since you don't return to hq after level completion for a debrief, you return to the mission select screen. you have to unselect the automatically selected follow-up level to the previous one and purposely spawn into hq to have these conversations. and even if you do that, the environment doesn't develop as your arc does. people won't have any new interesting things to say

engaging with cruelty squad was a profoundly confusing thing. at some point throughout my journey, i started questioning whether i truly had a solid grasp on what constituted an immersive sim and, if this really was one, whether i even liked their defining characteristics that still somewhat elude me in the first place. i have played and completed deus ex 1 and system shock 2, probably the powerhouses of this strange sub-genre, many moons ago (i picked the dark age ending and the navy career respectively by the way), so i at least know what i liked and disliked about those experiences, and therefore feel like cruelty squad is missing a lot of the magic that i came to associate with the words "immersive sim". it's a much more competent shooter than either of the aforementioned games but much less of a "simulation" that really makes me feel immersed in the world

the wikipedia entry for the genre quotes a mostly uninteresting pc gamer interview in which warren spector says that in a game of that genre "nothing stands between you and the belief that you're in an alternate world", and i don't think that cruelty squad quite manages this for me

also, in the same pc gamer interview, warren offers this insight:

That's another one of the defining characteristics of an immersive sim. You don't judge the player. You don't tell the player how to play your game. It's their game.

i found this very funny, considering that one of the first interactions i very distinctly remember from deus ex 1 is being scolded for killing a soldier instead of babying him to sleep. maybe it's all just words and hallucinations, and nothing means anything anyway, making this post entirely pointless, as it should be

regardless of whether cruelty squad is an immersive sim or not, i really like it. its horrifying visuals are uniquely charming, the experimental soundtrack a rhythmic barrage of strange noises that put you in the mood for either murder, reflection or both. when your handler tells you about dosing you with a "combat cocktail" on your first mission, you really do feel like it once the chaotic music kicks in. the song "divinity of the office", my personal favorite that i indulge in on walks through the city, vaguely reminded me of some machine girl tracks off of the wlfgrl tape i listened to on bandcamp back in 2014. the level design is very varied and mostly cool, the lore offers plenty of depth and ideas to latch onto, and while basic, the gameplay is ultimately fun, especially once you've unlocked "hope eradicated" difficulty and have to be more careful with your engages due to new enemies having spawned into the level. the addition of punishment mode in which enemies deal quadruple damage and chaos mode where randomly selected npcs, either civilian or hostile, get imbued with new powers even further increases difficulty and provides a challenge for the people who like to re-run a level over and over again until they have perfected their approach down to the minute details. i'm not one of those people, but i respect it. i found the cutscenes to be weirdly fascinating due to the air of mystery they create, like when you complete the first ending and your character walks through a grassy plain while the text on the screen tells you that you lack knowledge, will be trapped forever and that the sun shines upon you with malice. the very last paragraph displayed on the screen after reaching the cradle of life and getting the third ending is a quote from a book by georges bataille. i really like it when artists give you a glimpse into their creation process and by extention their minds by referencing other stuff you can get lost in if you'd like. and, of course, it needs to be acknowledged that cruelty squad is the product of one person. it's a genuine achievement that this game exists in the state it exists in, and in a funny twist of irony, the capitalism critique has probably made its creator a millionaire. the ability to create something that speaks to its consumer and draws them in in the uncompromising way cruelty squad drew me in is truly one of the wonders of mankind, and i love that i was around to experience it

just one last question. you thought you could call this an immersive sim and not include a hacking minigame? get real, kid

this is an addendum unrelated to the question of whether or not cruelty squad is an immersive sim. i couldn't manage to really neatly slot this into the post, so i'll add it here as an unrelated thought since i found the topic interesting

a central theme of the game is how capitalism, driven to its natural extreme, is bad - so far, so revolutionary. one of the ways it explores this theme is by introducing the concept of body reconstruction. whenever you die, the company you work for, conveniently also called cruelty squad, will charge you $500 and bring you back to life via a reconstruction device. true death is a luxury for the independently wealthy. if you're a cog in a machine, you will be brought back to life, so that you can keep working for all eternity

maybe i significantly misunderstood a part of the lore, but if death has been defeated first by technology and then capital, what weight does your work i.e. a series of strategic assassinations hold? your extremely wealthy targets will pay 500 bucks for a reconstruction cycle and go about their lives. this canonically explains why you can replay missions and find everyone you previously murdered intact, but it doesn't explain why g-tech stock plummets after their founders have been eliminated. wouldn't they just be reconstructed to once again steer the ship? i don't know

major story spoilers approaching. you've been warned. in the third ending that requires you to beat all secret levels, your character makes a philosophical discovery and, due to his realization, terminates "the worldlife". this can be interpreted however you want, but due to the imagery of you and many other people that have suddenly joined you out of nowhere slowly marching towards DEATH in the distance, the most plausible interpretation i came across was that humanity under your divine leadership is choosing to walk hand-in-hand into extinction, no rustin cohle, rejecting the idea of reconstruction and making death and by extension life meaningful again by sacrificing themselves. what sounds significant in the scope of the game's universe doesn't end up having any impact, though. you can still replay levels and kill people that then respawn upon you restarting the level. granted, it needs to be this way for the game to remain an actually playable game, but that design choice defeats the point of this philosophy. the menu offers a "reset progress" button. if the player with his godlike powers after terminating all life wants to return to this state of meaninglessness, he should hit that button and start from scratch, starting the trauma loop anew. that is, of course, if this interpretation is correct. in any case, cruelty squad's philosophical themes seem to lack any sort of real weight reflected in its gameplay. they are like playthings for the developer and agents of intrigue for the playerbase, but not much more than that, and that's somewhat disappointing. oh well

I’m a negative of a person. All I want is blackness, blackness and silence - Sylvia Plath