‘Cruelty Squad’ is the Shooter ’90s Parents Were Worried About

Cruelty Squad would simply be too much for the parents of the ‘90s.

In the Clinton years, Doom inspired hysteria among parents, the press, and politicians. Following hot on the heels of the “Satanic Panic” of the 1980s, Doom was a game that put demons front and center. With the spiky brown imp, the engorged, red cacodemon, and the horned pink Baron of Hell, the 1993 first-person shooter leaned into that loaded imagery and paired it with bloody violence that, thanks to id Software’s pioneering use of pseudo-3D graphics, looked more realistic than ever before. After the Columbine school shooting, perpetrated by two avid Doom fans, critics looking to pin the blame on games could even claim that Doom had a body count.

Despite the pearl-clutching that surrounded Doom for much of the first decade after its release, the game’s morality is fairly conservative. Our hero, the Doom Slayer, is a Marine. He is the United States military, personified as one hypercompetent man, and that one-man military is the only thing standing between our planet and certain destruction. And, as Doom level designer Sandy Petersen, a devout Mormon, reportedly told id co-founder John Romero: “I have no problems with the demons in the game… They’re the bad guys.” Doom rejected devil worship in favor of bloody demon slaughter. The violence, presented, as it was, in a new medium, freaked people out. Not so much the values, which were decidedly old-fashioned.

The same can’t be said for Cruelty Squad, a new throwback shooter currently in early access from Consumer Softproducts. Though the game’s low-poly graphical presentation borrows heavily from the shooters of the ‘90s, its aesthetic, mechanics, and values push back against the status quo.

As soon as you begin the first real level, “Pharmakokinetics,” it’s clear that Cruelty Squad is purposefully off-putting. The graphics are intensely colorful and almost headache-inducingly bright. When you jump, the character’s grunt is a strep throat cough. The Hitman-style objectives mean that you’re expected to kill your targets, obviously, but you aren’t punished for killing civilians. In fact, you earn extra cash for each body you shoot into watermelon gibbs on the floor. Once they’re dead, you can also earn health back by chowing down on your enemies’ corpses. Your character is fragile, so these warm bodies are essentially miniature health packs. And, given that it’s easy to select a corpse when you meant to scoop up a weapon, you will do a lot of cannibalism across a playthrough of Cruelty Squad, by necessity and/or by mistake.

But, all of this ugliness feels purposeful. Cruelty Squad casts you as a violent corporate fixer. After being discharged from the SEC Death Squad, your character is recruited to join the Cruelty Squad; also a death squad, this one for the private sector. On orders from a mouth-breathing handler, your hitman is sent out to kill corporate rivals for the financial good of your company. The message here is not that you, by virtue of being the playable protagonist, are good, in any way. Instead, Cruelty Squad uses the mechanics of the first-person shooter — slaughter indiscriminately — to recreate a hallucinatory disgusting diorama of what our current, barely regulated corporate hellscape does to the people within it and under its heel.

Unlike in Umurangi Generation, another recent anti-capitalist gem, Cruelty Squad doesn’t cast you as a mere observer. Instead, your fixer is a violent participant, formed by the hellish world they occupy. You do horrendous things. You are a war criminal, by any conceivable metric. But, as a result, Cruelty Squad is deeply honest about the state of our world and the inherent politics of the first-person shooter. Every first-person shooter, by necessity, has an “us” and a “them.” By making its protagonist a tool of corporate oppression, Cruelty Squad gets to the heart of the relationship between the powerful, singular, player-controlled “us” and the “them,” whoever they may be, who must be killed.

Though, by that metric, Cruelty Squad is mostly a story of “us” versus “us.” The game’s missions take place in cruise ships and Big Pharma headquarters and towering office buildings. There’s an early level in a neighborhood populated with fortress-like houses with ample security forces. Almost invariably, the hits that your handler doles out have you putting a bullet in the cranium of a rival corporate cretin. You are not a force for good. Despite your targets being elites, your violence is not populist. You are using the master’s expensive, deadly tools to simultaneously dismantle and repair wings of the master’s house. 

Cruelty Squad won’t worry parents in the same way that Doom did because Cruelty Squad is an Early Access Steam game in a niche faux-retro genre that a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of the game-playing population will ever play or even hear about. Barring a minor miracle, it will never be the biggest thing in games. But, anyone who plays it will discover an anti-establishment, anti-capitalist shooter amid the terrific level design and nauseatingly bright colors.

Cruelty Squad is out now on Steam Early Access.

source https://bloody-disgusting.com/video-games/3652204/cruelty-squad-shooter-90s-parents-worried/