The Philosophy of the World's Most Hideous Game
Consumer Softproducts' Cruelty Squad for the Bewildered Onlooker
Freedom is nothing if it is not the freedom to live at the edge of limits where all comprehension breaks down.
Georges Bataille
INTRODUCTION
You know, sometimes I envy those obtuse philistines from Plato’s allegory of the cave. It’s not because I hate gnosis or anything like that, but rather because I have to believe their social lives were mercifully straightforward. The absence of sunlight implies no need for clocks or calendars, so there’d be no birthdays to remember and no catch-up brunches at which to arrive forty-five minutes after the rest of your party. Hell, even if you couldn’t stand your roommates, it’s not like you’d be consumed by a desire to move out — in fact, I don’t suppose you’d have any concept of either “move” or “out” in the first place. There’d also be no need to juggle streaming subscriptions, because all the media you’d need gets projected right onto the cave wall in front of you! Then again, you’d give up modern comforts like television, subtle metaphors, and independent video games with strong connections to post-war social theory.
Elite veterans of Steam and/or alternative gaming YouTube may by now recognize that we’re talking about the 2021 masterpiece Cruelty Squad by Ville Kallio (as Consumer Softproducts), quite accurately described by its Steam Store page as an “immersive power fantasy simulator with tactical stealth elements set in a sewage-infused garbage world.” It’s also rather infamously inaccessible from a sensory point of view: nearly every polygon is slathered in noisy, clashing textures; its original soundtrack is composed mostly of wet, arpeggiated farts; its schizoaffective writing vacillates between critical theory and post-ironic Tech Bro slang. That might sound like an unlikely recipe for success, and most would agree — almost everyone who sees Cruelty Squad for the first time quite reasonably assumes it’s just a bizarrely elaborate shitpost.
But what kind of a game is Cruelty Squad actually? I guess I could say it’s a mission-based assassination game like Hitman with stealth mechanics and first-person shooting like Deux Ex, but that’d be like saying Call of Duty is a story-based game about the extremes of diplomacy. Basically accurate, but to summarize the experience as such would be meaninglessly reductive. Instead, let me give you my elevator pitch:
In Cruelty Squad, late capitalism has reached its zenith and contract assassinations are folded into the everyday gig economy. You play as an unnamed corporate hitman and devalued husk who performs contract hits taken from a smartphone app. You have vague dreams of one day owning property and retiring, but these are distant fantasies for all but the wealthiest and most influential figures of government and industry. Collect exotic weapons and load them with private equity. Speculate on the European organ market with biological cryptocurrencies. Swing into action on your prehensile appendix like Errol Flynn as cast by David Cronenberg.
Is all this chaos the accidental result of tossing random assets into a level editor? Possibly, but I see something far more thoughtful and deliberate. It’s my observation that, in subverting the conventions of an artistic medium, one can’t generally expect praise unless one is already a credible practitioner of those conventions in the first place. This, I suppose, is why Picasso spent so many years painting naturalistic portraiture before he went blue and started cubifying junk. And like Picasso, premonitions of Ville Kallio’s most recent output are discernible in older work of his. The stylistic tenor that characterizes comics like HYPER PRISON-INDUSTRIAL and BIO-WHALE, for example, is unmistakable in the ludography. So if the graphic fiction was dude’s Blue Period, then Cruelty Squad must be his Guernica: confusing or even repellent to the casual gawker, but a legend-making opus of creative expression to the open-minded critic.
And what better time for open-minded critique? Consumer Softproducts’ next project — an immersive sim by way of Morrowind called Psycho Patrol R — has an Early Access release set for the end of March. And to be honest, it’s giving off major game-of-the-decade contender vibes over here at Spieler HQ. In fact, the whole enterprise gives me the same nagging feeling I get after watching a David Lynch film or listening to a Bladee album: damn, if only I had some really fucked-up friends with whom I could share this. Having none, I’ll just have to take it out on The Spieler’s burgeoning audience of handsome raconteurs.1
We’ll begin with this newsletter you’re reading now, which is a gentle introduction to the form and function of Cruelty Squad as artwork. Keep in mind that I don’t know Ville Kallio and don’t claim to accurately represent his own canon, if in fact he has one in the first place. I’m just gonna tell you about what his work evokes in me, with a few gestures toward grander philosophical ideation here and there. Just so we’re clear, though: even if bro gets on socials tomorrow and says “nah man it was all just a fever-dream I had while zonked out on quaaludes and dirty mescaline,” Cruelty Squad will still be one of my all-time favorites. Expect very light spoilers this week, and heavier talk next time when I can assume you’re locked in — in that newsletter, we’ll talk about the game’s most provocative spectacles and why I think it’s all important.
IS BRO SERIOUS? DUCHAMP and NON-RETINAL ART
We may as well begin with Cruelty Squad’s most prominent feature: the gruesome, unrelenting ugliness in every single aspect of its presentation. I struggle to think of another game that even approaches its level of audiovisual onslaught — 420BLAZEIT 2: GAME OF THE YEAR, perhaps, although I didn’t feel like I’d learned much after finishing that demo. But while the 2000s bro-gamer aesthetic once genuinely appealed to a certain cadre of Millennial dipshits (including a teenaged me), the Consumer Softproducts aesthetic of Cruelty Squad is genuinely appealing to nobody, and that’s the point. To explain why, let me start by showing you this public-domain photograph of one of my all-time favorite sculptures:
Marcel Duchamp was a French conceptual artist and peer to Picasso and Matisse. His greatest contribution to conceptual artistry was his rejection of what he called “retinal art,” or art whose appeal is strictly grounded in a pleasing visual aesthetic. Pissed off by the spread of mass-produced garbage made for broad commercial appeal after the War, Duchamp lashed out against the world as only a French abstract artist could: he began collecting random landfill crap and positioning it into abstract configurations called “readymades,” which he’d then sign and put on display. I remember seeing his Fountain in exhibition at D.C.’s Hirshhorn museum2 as the moment when I first “got” abstract art — that is, when I earnestly internalized its capacity to interrogate my perceptions and biases.
It’s because of this capacity that trite critique of Cruelty Squad’s presentation as thoughtless or unserious makes me feel pity rather than frustration: it reflects an inelastic, hypersimplified worldview that experiences challenging artwork as deviancy, like I did before I tried taking abstract art seriously. When I say “challenging,” by the way, I don’t necessarily mean “difficult to produce,” but rather “actively challenging the viewer” as one might challenge a rival to a duel. New York’s Society of Independent Artists refused to show Fountain in exhibition, and I get it — I’d be nonplussed too if a celebrated French Dadaist showed up to my gallery with a fucking urinal slung over his shoulder. But it wasn’t the autographed pissotière itself that ruffled their petticoats. It was the fact that a celebrated French Dadaist showed up to their gallery with a fucking urinal slung over his shoulder, looked them straight in their beady little eyes, and said “do ya get it?” They didn’t get it, and that made them feel like Platonic troglodytes who write unexamined Steam reviews.
The line between abstract art and trolling can sometimes get very fine indeed. But for my money, no work can be a garden-variety act of trolling if it sincerely challenges the intellect and stimulates the emotions. So, to wrap this part up, I’d like for you to join me in considering the following screenshot of a conversation in a pizza restaurant:
My hope is that, if you look past the intentionally distracting user interface elements and noisy texturing, you’ll discern the familiar contours of a quick-service dining establishment, if not all the usual mise-en-scène. All one can really do from there is to contemplate what manner of scuffed market forces did this to the friendly neighborhood Pizza Ranch. And just like that, you’re getting Cruelty Squad! It simultaneously attacks both the senses and the ego — let’s talk about why that feels so damn good in practice.
GETTING LOST FOR FUN AND PROFIT: SHESTOV and the SHORELESS SEA
Ordinarily, I have limited patience for disorientation as a narrative device, which is probably why Quantic Dream’s oeuvre has always left me cold. Disorientation as a core gameplay mechanic is also a very tough sell for me, and so I bounced off of Dark Souls roughly the first hundred times I played it. Cruelty Squad doubles down on both kinds of disorientation, gleefully funneling the player into winding corridors and HVAC ductwork all while bombarding them with dense critico-theoretical narrative details.
Take the mall in Mission 5, for example: you recognize storefronts, restrooms, escalators, and other typical set-dressing, so it all feels intuitive at first. But then you actually enter a store and see its Escherian layout and flesh-covered walls. Most carry no merchandise, instead trafficking purely in vibes like HAPPINESS and VIRTUE. It’s like the Undead Burg from Dark Souls had it been corrupted by a Target commercial instead of an Age of Dark, right down to the serpentine level design. I generally prefer to feel like I know what I’m doing and where I’m going when I play an objective-based video game, so why the hell can’t I get enough of this? Well, whenever I find myself running up against the limitations of my reason, I like to take respite in old philosophy from the eras before Joe Average cared a damn for nerd shit like logic and rationality.
I seldom notice modern philosophers or theologians talking about Lev Shestov, which might have something to do with his scornful repudiation of modern philosophy and theology while he was writing in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Shestov, born Yehuda Lev Shvartsman, was among the first to unite theology and nihilism into a coherent anti-philosophical praxis — rather fitting for an ethnic Jew writing in pre-War Europe. For bro, concepts like religious dogma, formal logic, and the primacy of reason were tyrannical assaults on the boundless potential of human creativity. He saw evidence of this all around him in the ideological conflicts of the day — his own favs, like Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, must have appeared as oases of gnostic calm in the sea of anxiety and neurosis that was wartime Europe. From All Things Are Possible, Part 2, Aphorism 2:
“[Relinquishing logic] means living a new life, it means a permanent sacrifice of the dearest habits, tastes, attachments, without even the assurance that the sacrifice will bring any compensation… a thinking man is one who has lost his balance... Hands raking the air, feet flying, face scared and bewildered, he is a caricature of helplessness and pitiable perplexity.”
That phrase, “a caricature of helplessness and pitiable perplexity…” Surely I’m not the only one for whom that strikes awfully close to home? Damn near everyone who isn’t on their right-libertarian Tech Bro shit looks to be stumbling around in a confused trance lately. Almost all are coping with defeat nowadays, whether it be from electoralism, from the labor market, or simply from paying eight dollars for a dozen grimy bird-flu eggs. Cruelty Squad invites us into a world where all meaning is derived from monetary value, and its inhabitants are all organic cogs in the occult machinery of global commerce. Innocent bystanders tend to ignore gunfire and killing in their vicinity, or else react with detached irony as one might rationalize a shitty retail job. This is simply the world as they know it — almost nobody makes any effort to resist their nightmarish oppressions, instead passively taking each sequence of grotesque misfortune in stride. It’s as if Eraserhead had a video game adaptation with a much more varied color palette.
The most useful insight I glean from the intersection of Shestov and Consumer Softproducts is this: any universal system of logic comprehensible by the human mind is necessarily incomplete, because the human mind simply can’t comprehend the vastness, complexity, or outright strangeness of discernible reality. This conclusion, if you buy it, is of course unavoidably at odds with many of the institutions to which us post-Yalta Westerners have grown accustomed: free-market economics; popular democracy; science-based rationality; and all of the other pillars upon which we ground our understanding of modern reality. Cruelty Squad — like Shestov — reminds us that if we’re unphilosophical about our dealings with these systems, then we’ll find ourselves dazed and helpless when their many contradictions and hypocrisies spill over into crisis.
This all grounds my personal understanding of why Cruelty Squad is so aggressively and overwhelmingly hideous to perceive. Ville Kallio could’ve designed a much more grounded and realistic setting and still have lashed out against global capitalism — that’s basically what Deus Ex did, and that game is still Top 5 of All Time for most people I know. But to me, the grand statement of the Consumer Softproducts aesthetic is that a setting can be discordant and fantastical while still feeling familiar, and the deliberate manipulation of this familiarity to produce cognitive dissonance and even moments of existential horror is why Cruelty Squad absolutely needs to look and sound the way it does. Once you acclimate to its sharp edges, the game should not feel overwhelming to play3. But it comes close, and occasionally straddles the line. This is where the experience is at its best, so embrace the discomfort and allow it to ferry your mind out onto what Shestov rather poetically called the “shoreless sea of imagination.” You might like where you find yourself.
CONCLUSION (for now)
As much as I’d love to turn the safeties off and tell you about the out-of-pocket Nick Land cameo in Mission 6, I’m going to call it a newsletter for now so that the heavy subjects get their due and so that you can rush off and play Cruelty Squad before I spoil a bunch of the coolest parts. I relish every opportunity to get someone to experience this game relatively blind like I first did so, if you haven’t played it and this piece has gotten you even remotely intrigued, consider it my glowing recommendation.
Next time, we’ll graduate from Abstract Finnish Game Design 101 and talk about what I believe Cruelty Squad actually wants to tell us. It’ll be nice to establish a baseline interpretation of the Consumer Softproducts metaphilosophy before Psycho Patrol R comes out because, for all the bilious contempt its predecessor had for 2021’s sociopolitics, this new one’s had the past four years to marinate in even more hyperreal dysfunction. I hope you’ll join us for the next installment when we’ll contemplate Cruelty Squad’s position on the Hunger for Solidity, the Origin of Death, and — how could we possibly forget? — L’Anus Solaire. Subscribe Now and join us Illuminated Ones in the glorious light of unsoundness.
Cruelty Squad is available on Steam and, at time of publication, is on sale for 70% off its $20 retail price.
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Technically speaking, I saw one of sixteen known replicas that Duchamp personally commissioned after the original was lost. It was made to his approval, though, and it’s a commercially manufactured urinal in any case, so I still like to think of it as a genuine article if not the one.
Unless, of course, you’re photosensitive or prone to motion sickness. I’d recommend playing in a small window with low mouse sensitivity for a start. There are no straight-up flashing lights that I can recall, but the highly sensitive should play it safe and stick to high-quality reportage on the experience, e.g., this newsletter.
This game's inspirations and philosophies are hitting hard. That said, I can tell I don’t have the patience to actually play it.
I do however have the patience to eagerly await the next write-up on it.