Cruelty Squad

The solo work of Finnish illustrator Villie Kallio, Cruelty Squad is a hyperviolent, garish Tom Clancy’s Rainbow 6 (well, pre-Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six: Vegas, anyway)-like with a fascination with biological grotesqueries, lovecraftian market forces, and military hardware. You are a washed-out loser who, recently laid off from the SEC, gets a call during a depression shower to work as an assassin via the gig economy at a rate of 1 grand per kill. With enough hustle and CEO mindset, you might just amass the needed 1 million dollars to buy a house and truly ascend to the ranks of the bourgeois.

What follows is a gorey, tactical romp through the surrealist hellscapes that are suburbia, office spaces, the 100-meter pit where the elites throw their annual party, a cruise ship, and other such locales. If you’ve ever bemoaned the linearity of the modern shooter level, you’ll enjoy Cruelty Squad’s spaces as they are both secret-laden and highly open-ended, boasting that late-90s PC game fascination with creating realistic spaces, including modeling, like, the bathrooms. This, combined with the wide array of additional movement options (my favorite being the grappendix, which is exactly what it sounds like), means you can approach your targets from a surreal number of angles.

These quasi-realistic layouts help maintain this world’s geometric legibility, which is helpful because they’re textured in a manner that I can only call ‘visually belligerent’. Villie Kallio also seems to delight in throwing that realism under the bus with audacious frequency, as these places are littered with impossible constructions akin to the polyhedron in Pathologic or the spaces of Antichamber - take the hidden, unexplained flesh maze between the first and second floor of the police station, for example. Or maybe most police stations have those, could explain a few things.

The one place where Villie Kallio’s ability falls flat, however, is in music. While Cruelty Squad’s visuals are the product of a professional illustrator gone rogue, the soundtrack feels more like the idle MIDI noodlings of an amateur than, say, the combative sounds of a professional-turned-iconoclast with something like Lisa: The Joyful’s 666 Kill Chop Deluxe.

The Bottom Line

Cruelty Squad is the kind of wild, high quality auteur product that makes games such a fun medium.