Brain In A Jar: The Revolution Of Unplayability

The obtusion of Cruelty Squad forces players to confront the alienating horror of life as a tool of capital

by Julia Norza

You don’t notice the first time Cruelty Squad lowers your difficulty. After a rickety cutscene introduces your bed-unframed Uber Pinkerton avatar, you receive instructions in a text color indistinct from the malformed menu background, then launch yourself, likely by accident, into the first level.

A first-person view of a gun with its corresponding crosshairs quickly tricks you into trusting the trappings of a traditional shooter. Your default gun, however, is made for stealth. You do not know this. You walk through the biggest door and eat half a dozen bullets. At the edges of your perception, gibbed civilians shower the tile. You hit R. You do not reload.

DIVINE LIGHT SEVERED

Nothing about this message per se indicates lowered difficulty. It is rather the terrible realization that you’ll be rerunning this frantic grotesquerie until your meat gives way, crushing yet dull like a rusty axe to the eschatology: you were never meant to live like this.

YOU ARE A FLESH AUTOMATON

ANIMATED BY NEUROTRANSMITTERS

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Anticapitalism sells. This isn’t comedy, but rather the great gaping drain around which the market circles. Not one year ago, Cyberpunk 2077 delivered a three-hundred-million-dollar, three-hundred-fifty-exploited-gamedevs story about fighting corporations. Bioweapons developer Umbrella Co. is the antagonistic center of the Resident Evil games and films, both of which regularly turn out audience numbers in the millions. Vault-Tec’s fictional promotional style leads Fallout’s nonfictional promotional material, synecdoche for the kind of game that comes with GOTY stickers already on the box. Captain America: The Winter Soldier (emphasis Captain, America, Soldier) carries a scabrous veneer of drone disarmament; Chuck E. Cheese’s Music Is Surprisingly Anti-Capitalist.

Anticapitalism sells because it’s comforting. One hardly needs to read theory: look out the window and watch the supply chain struggle, work 8 daily hours in plague hotspots. Science fiction’s semi-real (thus science) flights of fancy are co-opted by writer’s rooms looking to simplify corporatocracy. The industry playbook responds to this setup with meaning-agnostic haptic feedback. Left CTRL crouches, right click aims; enemy power evolves stepwise to your skill tree; the breadth of information available through your heads-up display makes you an omniscient juggernaut. 

The price of admission for an anticapitalist narrative is the consumer’s own desperation. Corporate giants, having been paid aforehand, can deliver these formulaic pretenses of #resistance. It’s badass when the player character slices three Weyland guards with a single beam katana stroke. Badass, and nothing else.

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Learning to enjoy Cruelty Squad is akin to learning to accept your day job, reinventing familiar (to longtime gamers) motions to adapt to the specificities of micromanagement. Turns out, you reload by holding the right mouse button and dragging the cursor off the screen. This movement will be intimate only to those that grew up playing light gun games in now-defunct arcades–even then, light gun games are fun, forgiving romps, while Cruelty Squad demands punishing accuracy, forcing the player to recalibrate their aim every time they reload.

Assuming you can even tell where to aim. The main menu alone is so disorienting, it took me three restarts to notice the title screen is backgrounded by a model of a man missing half his skull. From there, it’s level after level of human face tiling and harsh shadows. Rather than a radar system, an animation of a spasming eye indicates when opponents have detected you: this graphic is opaque and has no qualms in covering up enemies.

It’s possible to become an adept employee of the Squad. What’s impossible is to grow comfortable with it.

It’s possible, by force of repetition, to become an adept employee of the Squad. What’s impossible is to grow comfortable with it. This is a world that confronts at every turn, whose eventual “boons” recontextualize everything thus far as an exercise in sadism. I experienced palpable relief the first time I restored my holy connection at a luminous shrine, which changed my game border from mutated flesh back to a clean mechanical outline.

Then, of course, I died, and so did my Divine Light. A few deaths later I’d returned to the lowest difficulty, and finally had the chance to process its implications. No longer charged $500 per bodily reconstruction, I’d become a test subject for my parent company, a cannibal pariah vituperated for accepting handouts. Oh, and they’d ripped my face off.

POWER IN MISERY

TRAVERSING

THE GRID OF DEATH

The classic ‘90s shooter’s highest difficulties were named something to the effect of F*cking (sic) Bring It!!, and the lowest, like, I Have Failed Manhood. Rather than masculinity, in a universe where death is transactional, what I am being shamed for is underachieving. If I’m not succeeding, I’m not giving it my damnedest. No slacker was ever a CEO. And a CEO is the most badass thing to be.

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Video games are friends of abstraction. Icons, numbers, bars and meters are necessary to represent game states, and game states in turn can only represent reality states, never incarnate them. As the cultural share of video games has grown, so has the common parlance around these abstractions. Health, for example, can be a meter or a number, and depletion/zero is the Game Over state, which can represent anything from knockout to being riddled with bullets.

One persistent, self-automating abstraction is the experience/skill point, or XP in any game forum. Etymologically, XP represents the player avatar becoming more proficient at a given skill; systematically, it’s a universal method of rewarding the player, regardless of narrative context. An experience point, for example, can make you a faster runner. Fair. In a game like Assassin’s Creed Valhalla (main baddie: Abstergo Industries), XP can upgrade your crossbow bolts without ever needing to purchase better crossbow bolts. What’s more anticapitalist than not analyzing material conditions?

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Cruelty Squad is an enemy of abstraction. The “hardcore gig economy of corporate liquidations” pays about $1000 a kill; half as much can be found lying about a pharmaceutical suit’s desk on the first mission. You can go about the entire game penniless, maybe affording two expensive upgrades by the time the game ends.

Or you can invest in the stock market, its readout available even in the middle of missions, a hole in the visceral backdrop covering your throbbing Life counter. If you have a sharp eye, you’ll notice corpses drop marketable organs. Adventurous players might unlock the fishing rod, which replaces one of your weapon slots and requires that you clear out all enemies in a spot before sitting down for a session of sewer fishing.

Between the intestinal soundtrack and the fear of enemies, even fishing is stressful, perhaps a direct response to the popularity of fishing minigames in sprawling open-world millionaire games. Rather than following the fashion of fishing as a chill side game, Cruelty Squad’s repetitive yet reflex-demanding fishing takes place in the exact eye-searing bowel-architecture dominant across the “main” shooting game.

You sell fish on the stock market. They sell well. Not for a second are you allowed to relax without capitulating to the need to produce.

Cruelty Squad’s Steam page describes it as an “immersive power fantasy simulator”. Indeed, it appeals to the most readily available individualist power fantasies: making more money than God, and doing high-octane violence to the powerful. Neither of these fantasies are presented with an iota of embellishment. Making money is boring, repetitive, unfulfilling and inscrutable, a process that responds to nothing but money’s own whims. So long as you act alone, money is the only way to hurt the powerful.

Hoarding power-capital and becoming the CEO of Life turns you into a one-man filth symphony: your biological waste-powered double jump sounds like a toilet, a rudimentary model of your intestines functions as “grappendix”, people flee from your biological armor’s obtrusive visage. These are the decayed limits of the bootstraps fantasies capitalism sells. As developer Ville Kallio explains: “Power in Cruelty Squad is… sacrificing your friends so you can develop your CEO mindset.”

What of the options? Cruelty Squad scorns the Back to the Future economic inflation joke in favor of a distressingly real market. A house costs one god damn million dollars, and it’s a level, too; a township of nouveau-riche means targets. You are too spent to imagine disbursing a million dollars on anything other than doing a better job. Cruelty Squad’s true final level is named Trauma Loop.

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In spirit, if not inspiration, Cruelty Squad reminds me of Vlambeer’s apocalyptic shooter Nuclear Throne, a game I’ve followed since its release on Steam’s early access market in 2013. Each shot in Nuclear Throne elicits a dizzying screenshake; one of the easiest ways to die is accidental suicide via a joke weapon available from the first level. It’s not a coincidence that the final boss is a police captain. Nuclear Throne is a close cousin of Hotline Miami, whose violent neon strobe had consequences for a decade’s worth of popular “throwback” aesthetic chic (including its own sequel), but that, at its core, remains a bleeding narrative about a psychotic man manipulated by American ethnonationalism.

Like these games, Cruelty Squad uses ludonarrative violence to reevaluate your price of entry. It is visually strenuous and auditorily disgusting. It jerks you mercilessly between adrenaline overdose and bleary trendline analysis. It flies against muscle memory, expectations of safe haven, and the instinctive human desire to not look at guts. It’s refreshing, the way visiting a water reclamation plant is refreshing: it’s seeing the raw heart of the material. Against an effluvial downstream of games equipping anticapitalism as optics, it demands to know if you are as downbeat as its protagonist, as willing to accept the gross vapidity of corporate ludonarrative. If there is satisfaction to be found, it can only be unearthed after purging every last infected globule of capitalist reward. Maybe there, in the organic remains, we can find something pure and ours.

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